Name: Why are you Best for this job? | How to Answer Job Interview Questions | Mock Interviews
Uploaded: 2019-12-31T10:39:59.000Z
Duration: 20 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Have you ever really made a mess of  something at work?

To-infinitive

A potential employer might ask about this in an interview to hear about how you handled it,

to understand more about you as an employee.

Today we'll study how to talk about mistakes at work in a way that can still impress your employer.

We're going to study four job interviews, a teacher, a doctor, a social worker, and a marketing expert.

We'll study how they answer common  interview questions

to figure out how you can form your own  compelling answers.

At the end, there will be a lesson for my non-native English speaking students

on some of the idioms that came up in answers.

The prompts we'll study today are:  tell me about a mistake you made at work and how you handled it,

talk about a time you exhibited leadership  in your current position,

and tell us why you're the right person for this job.

Everyone makes mistakes from time to time,

and you can still really impress your interviewer when talking about something you messed up.

Let's hear how Adrienne, who works in marketing in the performing arts, handled this prompt.

A couple years ago, I was working on an email blast for a major initiative at my company

and this was one of those emails with an incredibly large list. We had about

thirty to forty thousand people receiving this email.

And even though we had a team of people checking and rechecking to make sure that everything was accurate,

once we hit send, and it was already out,

we received a message back from one of the people who received it that the link was incorrect.

And that is just the worst thing as someone sending out emails as a marketer, just to know that

you've messaged all these people to try to get them to do something, and the link is not the right link.

So immediately, I went and I spoke with my boss about it and we had a conversation about what was most

practical, as the next step to try to resolve this,

and we agreed that we should send out a follow-up email to people

to just let them know oops we we apologize that we sent the incorrect link, here's the correct link,

and thank you so much for your understanding.

And it worked out. It's funny how I sort of had forgotten about that until this question.

But it felt like such a big deal at the time.

So now, I'm a lot more meticulous with checking links

even when I know an entire team of other people have already tested and approved all of the details.

This is great.  She gives one really specific example, and talks about how she resolved it.

She went straight to her supervisor and  they discussed it together.

Let's also talk about what she doesn't do: she doesn't blame someone else for this.

It could be tempting to say something like

“the person who was supposed to check all the links didn't do her job”.

But remember, part of what someone is looking for here is how you talk about your mistake.

Blaming others or speaking ill of others will likely reflect poorly on you.

She then goes on to talk about having  learned a lesson from it:

she says she's now even more meticulous about checking the links in emails.

Let's hear how Jeff, a doctor, answered this question.

So one of the mistakes that I made at work was not

getting an important certification that I needed to do my job in at the appropriate time.

Part of the reason behind that was that I was so busy doing many, many other things

that I didn't give it the priority that it needed.

It was an obvious important thing to finish in order to complete the work,

or to do the work that I that I have to do on a daily basis.

The way I rectified that was to realize that you can't just wait until the very end to kind of get things done.

You need to put steps in a process and  finish those steps

as sort of mini goals in order to reach the final goal.

I also developed a priority list for my work, kind of listing from one to ten,

the things that I really need to focus on every day, every week, every month in order to get things done.

I'm impressed with the system Jeff put in place to make sure a mistake like this doesn't happen again.

His system is detailed, and he described that detail.

Make sure you talk about what you've changed since making that mistake.

That can really impress a potential employer.

Let's listen to how he answered the question.

So as a social worker, I think one of the things that's the hardest about my job is knowing when to say 'no'

and how to do that in a professional manner.

Recently, I was working with a family, who elderly couple,

the the husband was bed bound with severe memory deficits, and the elderly wife was his only caretaker.

it was very touching and heartbreaking to see that she was doing her best to take care of him,

but really wasn't successful, and wasn't able to do it well.

She did not feel that way, she felt like she was doing what she needed to do for her husband,

and she wanted to keep him in home as long as possible.

And I tried to meet her where she was and

to be there and be as supportive as possible in finding any kind of

outside services that would help her take care of her husband.

Ultimately, all of the things that I found didn't work for her, for one reason or another,

and later, another social worker who became involved,

reported the case to adult protective services,

which then initiated a court proceeding that then forced her to get him moved to an assisted living facility.

This seems kind of like a kind of a harsh thing to do but in hindsight,

it's what needed to happen, and it probably should have happened earlier,

than me trying to help her find solutions that that worked for her, because

it became clear that the longer that we work together, that she was.

There was no solution that worked for her. And she felt very trapped but just couldn't agree to anything.

So the courts coming in to help solve this was really the only way to go and I,

I think I should have recognized that earlier.

Here, as he talks about a mistake he made, Dan also really lets me know about one of his strengths.

He really wanted to work with this woman, to meet her where she was, and he tried everything he could to do so.

He was very empathetic, and as social worker, that's an important trait to have.

In the end, the situation had to be handled differently.

But I appreciate that what led to this mistake was Dan's big-heartedness.

As you think of past mistakes at work, try to think of ones that lead to specific,

Try to think of mistakes that came from something like

rather than being checked out or not engaged in what was happening at work.

Another common interview question is leadership.

Tell me about a time you exercised leadership, or showed leadership, at your job.

Let's listen to how Adrienne, Dan, and Jeff answered this question.

In my last position, an area of leadership  for me was when we

moved the entire organization over to a  new online ticketing system.

And so this is a major undertaking that intersects with colleagues in a lot of different departments,

who have a lot of different conflicting priorities.

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Why are you Best for this job? | How to Answer Job Interview Questions | Mock Interviews

specific

critical

strategy

initiative