The interviewer asks you, “Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized.” You do not become emotional and play the blame-game. This question falls under the list of critical interview questions and one needs to prepare for it.
TRAP: This is a tough question because it’s the interviewer’s way to get you to admit to a weakness. You can’t dodge it by pretending you’ve never been criticized. Everybody has been. Yet, it can be quite damaging to start admitting potential faults and failures immediately as it can damage your reliability in front of the interviewer.
This question is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction. Do you know how to answer critical thinking questions?
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ACCEPTABLE ANSWER: Begin by emphasizing the extremely positive feedback you’ve gotten throughout your career and that your performance reviews have been uniformly excellent (if it’s true).
Of course, no one is perfect and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve your performance. Then, give an example of a not-too-damaging learning experience from early in your career and relate the ways this lesson has since helped you. This demonstrates that you learned from the experience and the lesson learned now guides you in taking decisions and making choices logically and rationally.
If you are pressed for a criticism from a recent position, choose something fairly trivial that in no way is essential to your successful performance. Add that you’ve learned from this too and over the past several years/months, it’s no longer an area of concern because you now make it a regular practice to be cautious about it.
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Another way to answer this question would be to describe your intention to broaden your master of an area of growing importance in your field. For example, this might be a computer program you’ve been meaning to sit down and learn, a new management technique you’ve read about, or perhaps attending a seminar on some cutting-edge branch of your profession.
Again, the key is to focus on something not essential to your brilliant performance but which adds yet another dimension to your already impressive knowledge base.
“Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized” is one of the most critical interview questions. You cannot ignore it.
How would you describe a situation when your work was criticized and how you responded? We’d love to know how you would tackle critical interview questions and answers. Do comment.
