The classic behavioral interview question that follows an atypical model for answering.
Tell me about a time you received negative feedback from your manager.
That's the question for today. I'm Jeff. Altman, The Big Game Hunter
and let me walk you through the answer, okay?
This is a behavioral interview question and depending upon your level of
seniority, I'm going to suggest one of two
frameworks for constructing the answer.. The first one is STAR. Everyone's heard
that one before. Situation or task, action, result.
The result includes a metric of money saved, money earned
percentage improvement. SOAR is the other one. This is for a manager level and
above-- situation, objective, action, result.
Normally, I would suggest constructing your answer in a way that
fits into one of these two frameworks but,
here, i'm going to do something a little bit different. And I want you to go
sincere with them and, you know, act as though you're going back to that time
in your memory and go, "yeah, there was a time a while back. I'm
not used to receiving negative feedback from anyone. I
normally do great work and for some reason, this project did not
hit my boss well. So the first thing I did was to listen
listen to what they told me as to what their issues were.
i followed up with one question right away which was,
"was there anything that they noticed that signaled
their displeasure or their dissatisfaction earlier
where this could have been addressed.. Because if
you knew it and you didn't come to me, I wish you would have told me
sooner is the theme of this part of the question. It's nothing defensive.
It is just making sure they didn't wait to drop this bomb on you.
So, you tell them what happened. What this situation was. You confirm that
they didn't go into this with the idea of dropping a bomb on your
head and what they were looking for was to tell you what their problem was
and then from there, this is about resilience-- how you bounce back from a
situation like this. You know, I heard the feedback, I made
sure that I backtracked on this project to ensure
that it was done better than what their
expectations were and i incorporated this feedback into my
thinking going forward. Notice, that's the result. There's no real
metric there. but what you're doing is demonstrating
you heard them and you took action and you're laying
out a simple story. You don't want to say, "oh! It cost the firm millions of
dollars." No, a simple situation where your
manager was dissatisfied with something, you wanted
to make sure there was nothing that they could have told you about earlier to
head this off. Once you've confirmed that, you heard
them. You incorporated their input, fixed what
the issues were beyond what their expectations were,
and have acted accordingly since. I hope you found this helpful. I'm Jeff Altman.
My website is TheBigGameHunter.us. Go there and
go exploring. I have a lot in the blog that can help
you. Also want to say if you're interested in my coaching you, you can
schedule time for a free discovery call there.
If you have questions for me, you can schedule either the opportunity to have
a three to five-minute video in return, or 15 minutes of my time to
answer your questions. Lastly, I'm just going to mention I've
got a course on udemy called The Ultimate Job Interview Framework that's
going to help you prepare for interviews extremely well. It's available for Kindle
and as a paperback on Amazon, as well. The material
is really good. If you go to my LinkedIn profile,
you'll see people love the way i teach interviewing.
Hope you have a terrific day and be great!
Hmm, as in “we dropped the contract with your agency and we’re walking 30 people out the door now. Your laptop and badge please”?
Yeah, that’s happened to me a few times