If you set out professional aims for yourself and fail, it is easy to be discouraged, blame others, or generally give up. But interviewers love those that are capable to adapt to these setbacks. Peoples who set professional aims and adapt to acquire them show they are not afraid of hard work and have a lot of resilience.

Interview queries about professional goal setting come up in several management or leadership job interviews and are a great chance to wow an interviewer.

Interview Queries About Setting Professional Goals

Behavioral Interview Question: Tell me about a professional goal that you set that you didn’t reach. How did it make you feel? What did you do?

There are 2 significant things to think about when answering this kind of question.

1. The first is to select a professional goal that doesn’t make you look bad. In the instance below, you will see that we managed to still integrate positive information about the applicant.
2. You must follow up your failure to reach the aim with a new aim or a follow up of some kind. This indicates that you never really give up.

Tips to Answer

“Sales are about numbers and those numbers are sometimes impacted by the companies you work with. When I was working at a small sales company in the SMB market, there were very few large scale sales contracts. Often we were contracted to make phone calls and manage sales pipelines for very small businesses. These involved psychologists, web designers, and mom-and-pop type grocery stores. But one of my aims was to help one company – and only one company – achieve $5,000,000 in sales.

I came close. I assisted a local pest control company grow to be a 2.3 million dollar company and expand into neighboring cities, but I just was not able to reach the dedicated sales goal. Our company was not designed for that market. As a result, I tried to reframe the goal into total yearly sales, and focus instead on what were both possible at that specific workplace. I managed to exceed sales goals for two years in a row after that, and was very proud of what I accomplished.”

It is hard to turn a negative into a positive. But if you can do it, and show that you are someone that can overcome adversity and yet reach amazing career goals, you are going to find yourself in a much better role to get the job.