Interviewers commonly ask candidates about the negative experiences they’ve had to assess how they handle challenging situations. For instance, if you’re preparing for an upcoming interview, an employer might ask you, “What has been your biggest disappointment professionally?” to understand your approach to adversity. It may be helpful for you to review how to answer this type of question effectively so you can have a successful interview. In this article, we explain why employers ask this question and outline a guide to answering it, including three example responses.
Select something significant in your professional life where someone or something fell short of expectations and what you did to handle it, along with any professional learning you may have acquired in how you would approach the situation in the future.
what is your biggest disappointment ?
What the Interviewer Really Wants to Know
Interviewers ask this kind of question to understand how you perceive adversity. The way in which you moved through a tough personal situation points to your approach in professional situations as well. Employers want their team to see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. Convince them you possess that mentality through this answer, and you will have won this round.
For example, all businesses experience ebbs and flows, and there is often a great deal of uncertainty – that is just how the business world works. If you are someone who has persevered in the most challenging and uncertain of times, then you have what it takes to help a business do the same.
The interviewer will also note how comfortable you appear answering open-ended questions. This will speak to your ability to think quickly on your feet, as well as indicating your readiness to conduct important conversations at work.
Tips for Giving the Best Answer
Transition to professional from personal. This is a personal question by nature, so your answer can also be. Just remember to connect it back to the job itself. You could pivot to mentioning some key professional skills that would help you to add value if you were hired for your target job.
Choose situations which can be viewed as successes. You can respond directly to this type of question by mentioning a disappointment where you fell short of a very high expectation that you set for yourself. By doing so, you establish that you are a driven employee who strives for a high level of achievement.
Be honest. You may feel afraid to share your answer out of fear of judgment, but this question is meant to open the door to vulnerability. We all have experienced disappointment. If youre authentic about yours, it will create an answer far better than one that is made up or emotionally superficial.
Share how you overcame the obstacle. No matter what your answer, be sure to explain how you recovered from (or how you would recover from) your disappointment. Try to emphasize how your ability to recover displays a particular quality that is important for the job. For example, if you say you were unable to afford college right after high school, explain how you worked hard over the next year to save up money. It will demonstrate your perseverance and dedication to your goals.
Examples of the Best Answers
My biggest disappointment is that I wasn’t able to follow my dream of being a professional dancer. I was injured as a teenager during a performance and was never able to move quite as fluidly again. Even though I was disappointed at the time, I realize now that if I had taken that direction, I would not have achieved my advanced degrees and developed a career that I love.
Why It Works: This answer shows your ability to be vulnerable and thus can help to create a strong rapport with the interviewer. It also alludes to your creativity, an attribute that is valuable in many fields. And importantly, the answer concludes on a positive note.
I set a goal to be on the deans list every semester in college and was very disappointed when I missed the mark during the first semester of my junior year. I was working 25 hours a week and took 21 credits that semester. I reduced my work hours to 15 and took 18 credits the next semester and achieved highest honors.
At the time, not being able to go straight to college out of high school was the greatest disappointment. However, the two years I spent working helped me to focus on what I wanted to study and ultimately made my college experience more fulfilling. Having a little extra time to figure things out allowed me to prepare to decide what I wanted to study for my chosen career.
Why It Works: The answer shows that you have a good perspective on life’s hurdles and saw this one as an opportunity to discover the things you really like, as opposed to going straight to school with little to no direction, like most high school graduates. This growth mindset is invaluable in the workplace.
I was very disappointed when I was hired for a top retailers training program and was placed in the store management track, when I had my heart set on the buyer track. As it ends up, my strengths in employee engagement, inventory planning, and sales have enabled me to progress rapidly to my assistant store manager position, so the disappointment was a blessing in disguise.
Why It Works: In addition to conveying who you are as a professional, it shows that you adapt to change well. In an ever-changing business world, being flexible and seeing the positives when things don’t go to plan makes the difference between collapsing and thriving when problems arise.
How to Answer “What Has Disappointed You about a Previous Job?”
Respond to the question, “What disappointed you about your last job” by highlighting issues related to your career advancement goals. You could also talk about an interaction with a coworker, customer, or manager that made you feel unsatisfied and how you handled the situation to create a positive outcome.
What Not to Say
Avoid saying negative things about your former employers and coworkers when answering this question. If you focus on blaming others, the interviewer may think you are unwilling to accept responsibility for your role in the situation. They may also see these responses as an example of how you would talk about their company if you end up leaving it.
Job Interview Questions and Answers: “What has disappointed you about your past jobs?”
When an employer says, “Tell me something about your previous jobs that disappointed you,” their goal is to gauge how you handle difficult situations while on the job. They are also trying to determine whether you are a good fit for their company by examining your work style and career ambitions.
End on a positive note and remain authentic throughout
Make sure to remain authentic throughout your response so the interviewer perceives your honesty and ability to be vulnerable. From here, try to end your answer on a positive note. You can express how youre grateful for the experience you had or discuss what youve accomplished since then to show youre both purposeful and forward-thinking in your career.
Why employers ask “What has been your biggest disappointment professionally?”
Employers ask this question to gain an understanding of how you handle challenging situations as a professional. From the information you provide in your answer, an employer may be able to assess what type of approach you normally take when faced with adversity. From here, they can evaluate whether you have the ability to overcome obstacles and use disappointing situations as an opportunity to grow, which is typically a desirable trait for a candidate to have.
Emphasize your willingness to grow by explaining what you learned
As you discuss what you did to overcome your disappointment, try to emphasize your growth-oriented mindset. You can even discuss what lesson you learned about yourself as a professional through the experience. Expressing a willingness to learn from your experience may reflect positively on you as a candidate and demonstrate how you might approach adversity as an employee.
How to answer “What has been your biggest disappointment professionally?”
Answering this question can be challenging, as it requires you to reflect upon your past disappointments as a professional and discuss them in a positive light. There are a few steps you can take to ensure you navigate this question with tact and form an effective answer. Heres a step-by-step guide to follow to prepare your response:
Question 36 of 40 for our Pfizer Mock Interview
Pfizer was written by Kevin Downey and updated on January 27th, 2022. Learn more here.
This will evaluate how you handle disappointment and what you learn from it. It will also assess how you take ownership for your own actions, inactions, limitations, self-awareness, as well as your attitude towards life.
Try to offer examples where the circumstances of the disappointment were beyond your control. Apply the STAR method here. Present the situation or task, the action you took, and the result.
It is easy to fall into the emotion of an event when revisiting it. Try to resist this impulse when relaying it. Keep your tone positive and dont present yourself as a victim. The only emotional tell you want to reveal is the confidence you have that this event will not repeat itself because of what youve learned from it.
“We had a research team dedicated to X, Y, and Z. In my role, I had four working under me, examining A, B, and C. We felt like we were making leaps and strides, but we didnt know our findings were based on a flawed data set that another department didnt properly review. We started hitting roadblocks, and no matter how we examined A, B, and C, we kept having to go back to the drawing board. Our halt in progress held up the whole team. We felt an extraordinary amount of pressure for days until we found the problem. Having run over budget, they shut the research project down, and that was pretty disappointing.”
“Theyd just finished building out our department for a project. Wed assembled a great team, recruiting individuals passionate about what we were doing. Our mood was electric. We all showed up for our first day and the phones were already ringing. But the call coming through informed us wed lost our funding, and they shelved the project. It was a hard day, breaking the news to our team that way.”
The best approach to answering this question: Spend time thinking about what are truly your greatest failures in your career and your life. That does not mean you will reveal the greatest one to the interviewer, but do take time to review in advance. If there is a failure that is too personal (a common wrong response is to talk about a failed marriage that ended in divorce), avoid it in the interview. But think about your failures in advance so that you can identify one that: a) is not too personal; b) you can openly discuss how and why it happened without reflecting negatively on you as a candidate; c) you have remedied from occurring again in the future. The best examples are failure in your career or career preparation, such as your education. If you have a life story that ties back directly to your career, it can be used, just make sure it is not too personal.
An example of how to best answer this question: [after 3-5 second pause thinking about your response] “As I look back on my career, probably my biggest failure or regret has been that I didnt prepare myself better in my education. I took a lot of coursework in college which really didnt contribute to my career, when I could have and should have been taking additional courses in my major. I knew this was a shortcoming early in my career when I was faced with work circumstances for which I simply had not fully prepared academically. I eventually remedied this by going back to complete my MBA. However, I know that the first three years of my career after college would have been much more productive if I had spent more time during my undergrad career focused on upper level courses in my major rather than taking electives.”
Remember to answer each interview question behaviorally, whether it is a behavioral question or not. The easiest way to do this is to use an example from your background and experience. Then use the S-T-A-R approach to make the answer a STAR: talk about a Situation or Task (S-T), the Action you took (A) and the Results achieved (R). This is what makes your interview answer uniquely yours and will make your answer a star!
Why the interviewer is asking this question: The interviewer is putting you on the spot to identify a failure in your career or life. This is similar to the “What is your greatest weakness?” question, but it focuses on the results and outcomes rather than a behavioral trait. It is one of the most difficult interview questions to answer and isnt asked very often, so most candidates are not prepared for it properly. Often, candidates answer this question with their pre-planned “greatest weakness” answer, but thats not the question and a practiced interviewer will come back to the question and ask specifically about the results. Overall, the interviewer is trying to identify whether you are self-aware, so first and foremost is whether you have the ability to identify a failure or shortcoming in your career and/or life. The second aspect is whether you have taken the necessary steps to avoid this type of failure in the future. We all make mistakes. Yet few actually learn from their mistakes to avoid repeating them in the future. Thats what the interviewer is seeking.
An example of how you should not answer this question: “Probably my biggest failure in life has been my first and second marriage and the resulting divorces. While Ive had a successful career, my personal life hasnt been as successful. I made bad choices in selecting a spouse that came back to haunt me in both cases. Both of my spouses were pretty crazy, wow, could I tell you some stories. But Im over that now and ready to move on.”
Dodging the question altogether is not really an option either. This approach involves talking about how you always learn from disappointment and change your behaviour accordingly. All very laudable, but it does need an example if it is to be credible. You risk the interviewer repeating the question to allow you to have another attempt, or you might accumulate a negative comment on the interviewerâs mark sheet. Definitely worth avoiding!
This is not the time to bring up a genuine disaster. I certainly wouldnât recommend talking about one of lifeâs great griefs like the loss of someone you loved. While I might have been âdisappointedâ that my mother did not live to see me build a successful career, I would not want to put myself in the position of talking about this at interview. The emotions involved go far beyond any disappointment and you risk putting the interviewer in an embarrassing position or, worse, upsetting yourself and losing focus.
This is yet another question you might encounter at interview. It is normally framed like a competency question and can be a bit tricky. The interviewer is trying to get an idea of how you handle adversity; the trouble is that you might not have had any significant adversity to deal with, or at least none that you want to share at interview! So how are you going to answer?
You could also talk about the time you bowed to a majority decision which was at odds with what you wanted. You need to take care here too. If you ended up in this position your powers of persuasion obviously didnât work! Do you need to be particularly persuasive for your preferred job? Itâs also quite difficult to talk about what you learnt without potentially sounding petulant. How is this comment going to go down?
Another option might be the disappointing decision you took for the greater good, but youâll have to be careful. It could be useful, for example, to talk about how you gave up an extra-curricular activity to focus on your work and about the disappointment this caused you. You wonât want to be implying though that you donât do anything but work!
FAQ
What is your biggest disappointment answer?
- Think about the negative professional experiences you’ve had. …
- Discuss an example situation and focus on how you overcame it. …
- Emphasize your willingness to grow by explaining what you learned. …
- End on a positive note and remain authentic throughout.
What are examples of disappointments?
How do you deal with disappointment interview question?
What were your major disappointment in your job?
