Q. What was your greatest disappointment?

For this question, we asked our friendly careers guru and acclaimed career advisor Claire Leslie for her insights, based on her experiences helping thousands of students prepare for competency and strengths-based interviews. Over to you Claire...

This type of question can give the interviewer 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 in an interview! So how are you going to answer?

What not to do

You don’t want to sound arrogant. Don’t go for the wide-eyed look, accompanying an incredulous denial that you have ever been disappointed. This is unlikely to endear you to an interviewer, who probably has encountered one or two setbacks in his or her life. This is also not the time to bring up a genuine disaster. I certainly wouldn’t recommend talking about one of life’s great griefs like the loss of someone you loved. 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. 

On the other hand, you should avoid the utterly trivial. “I was disappointed when I burnt my dinner because I was looking forward to eating it” risks a laugh which could just be at you rather than with you! Use this approach only if you can’t think of anything else and even then, only to buy yourself a bit more time. Start the laugh yourself. That way you can be sure that you’re all laughing together, and you might come across as the sort of person the interviewer would like to have in the office.

Dodging the question altogether is not really an option. The interviewer wants to know that you always learn from disappointment and change your behaviour accordingly. You might accumulate a negative comment on the interviewer’s mark sheet if you fail to answer the question properly – definitely worth avoiding! Moreover, some interviewers simply will not let you move onto the next question until you have given an answer. 

How can you find the happy compromise?

Start by thinking of an example which will allow you to showcase your resilience and your ability to overcome a problem. The exam which didn’t go according to plan might work. You have probably already had to disclose your marks on an application form, so you won’t be telling your prospective interviewer anything new. Did your disappointment make you reassess your work ethic, or take advice on how to improve? 

Another option might be the disappointing decision you took for the greater good, but you’ll have to be careful. It could be useful, for example, to talk about how you gave up an extracurricular activity to focus on your work and about the disappointment this caused you. You won’t however want to imply that you do nothing but work! You could also talk about the time you bowed to a majority decision which was at odds with what you wanted, although you need to take care here too. If you ended up in this position, your powers of persuasion obviously didn’t work (which might be an issue if you need to be particularly persuasive as part of the role for which you are applying). 

It’s also quite difficult to talk about what you learnt without potentially sounding petulant. How is the following comment going to go down: “I did what everyone else wanted against my better judgement and it turned out badly. It proved that I was right all along”? If you are going to use this example, you’d be better saying: “I went along with the majority and although I was initially disappointed, it turned out fine. I learnt that it is sometimes important to be prepared to concede a point and that there can be advantages to doing this. It can give you a wholly new perspective on something”. Whatever you decide on this question, it definitely falls into the category of one you’ll want to ponder in advance of the interview.