When interviewers enquire, `"What is your biggest achievement?`"

Shricareer Tue, 11/29/2022 - 13:50

The interviewers have set a few commonly used interview questions to ask the job seekers. One such question is, "What are your greatest achievements?”. Asking the candidates about their past successes and accomplishments is a common technique to learn more about them. You can convince the interviewer that you are a good fit for the job by providing thoughtful answers to questions of this type. In this article, we examine how to reply to the interview question, “What is your greatest success,” explain why interviewers pose it, demonstrate how to do so, and offer model responses you can modify to come up with your own response.

Why Do Interviewers Ask “What Is Your Greatest Achievement?

Interviewers often ask this question to the candidates to know about their candidate’s capabilities and what values they bring to the company. However, there are other plenty of other reasons why interviewers ask you this question. These reasons are listed below.

• To judge your capabilities to know whether you stand out from other candidates or not.
• To better understand what you value and the reasons behind those values.
• To determine if a candidate is ambitious enough to set greater standards for themselves and to assess their soft skills.

Hiring managers frequently look for specific traits and skills in their employees. Employers can determine whether your work ethic and skills meet their requirements by asking what your best accomplishment is. It displays if you fit well with their corporate culture. Employers are able to comprehend how you operate and what success means to you. Most importantly, the answer to this question reveals some aspects of your personality and your attitude toward life.

How to reply with the perfect answer

1. Go through the job description

Before thinking about your accomplishments, read the job description carefully. Doing this will help you to understand what the company is looking for. Let’s consider an instance, where the recruiters have mentioned that they are looking for a candidate who can work well under pressure. So, in this situation, you can think about situations in previous organizations or in your college where you consistently delivered excellent results under tight deadlines. Extract the right keywords from the job description that the hiring manager has emphasized. You can use these keywords to frame your answer.

2. Research the company

Prepare a bit for the interview. Researching is also a vital part of the preparation for the interview. Researching the company will help you to understand the organization better which includes browsing through the company website, reading up on any news stories you can find, and looking at their social media platforms. This will give you an idea about which one of your achievements you should mention in your interviews.



3. List all your achievements.

The majority of workers with a few years of experience have multiple noteworthy career accomplishments. By compiling a list of all your achievements, you may decide which one of your accomplishments is the best among all. Pick out the accomplishments that the company has honored or valued. You can also highlight the duties you fulfilled in support of the company’s overall success.

From this list, choose three or four accomplishments that best describe your work. If you are a new student, you are welcome to highlight any of your academic achievements. You might also think about including three or more achievements in your list. Occasionally recruiters will inquire about your further accomplishments.

4. Select an achievement

After listing all your achievements, decide which one of the accomplishments you should mention in your interview. You can go through the job description and the company’s website to decide which one of the achievements you should mention in your answer. So better if you think about achievements that can translate into a benefit for the business or organization you're interviewing for.

While selecting an achievement, you could consider a few things in mind:

1. How profitable can you be to the company?
2. How well did you contribute to company goals in your previous company?
3. How well do you communicate or deal with clients?


5. Frame your answer

After you are done with selecting your accomplishments you can start preparing your narrative for the interview. Think about the situation that you were in. What action did you take to solve the problem? And then talk about what steps you took to solve the problem.

6. Demonstrate your specific skills or qualities

It is a good chance to demonstrate why you are the best applicant by relating your experience to the requirements of the position. Look for the experiences you’ve had that demonstrate these soft skills or people skills if the job description calls for excellent communication, someone who is driven, or someone who works well in a team. To demonstrate your qualifications to the recruiting manager, try to be particular in your response.

Tips to answer this question using the STAR method

Once you have narrowed down your list of accomplishments, you can begin crafting your interview narrative. You might use the STAR method to accomplish this. Situation, task, approach, and results are abbreviated as STAR. Outlining the circumstances in which you achieved your greatest success is the first step. For instance, it can be a situation when your staff has to troubleshoot a third-party product. The exact task or role you performed can then be discussed. For instance, you might have worked in a role where you communicated troubleshooting instructions to customers.

After that explain how you approached the circumstances you are describing and what you did, whether it was within your job or not. In this situation, you can talk about how you extend your working hours to work alongside the 24*7 support team and occasionally address client emails. The outcomes are the focus of the last stage. You might discuss how your strategy assisted in keeping the client and how highly they regarded the company’s customer service abilities. You can also discuss any individual honors you have won for your work.

Mistakes You Should Avoid Saying

Irrelevant Personal Accomplishments

 You must be knowing that you need to keep your answers professional. So, if you mention irrelevant personal achievements in an interview is a surefire way to get yourself out of the running. You can mention your personal accomplishments at any other time. So, when you are trying this hard to get selected for your dream job, it’s better not to mention any personal or irrelevant information in your answer that doesn’t add value to you.

Lies and indistinct answers

Lying in an interview can be a blunder. Recruiters pay close attention to the body language of job seekers and often spot lies when they come. If in some situations you lied and the recruiter couldn’t know the lie during the interview, they might find the truth when they will contact your references, or when they assign the task and you failed to accomplish the work. And when they find your chances of getting hired plummet. Or even if you were selected, there are chances that you might get fired. So, it is better to keep things honest.

Rambling

Answering a long-winded action and unclear answer might disappoint the recruiter and they might think that you came unprepared. Using the STAR method to create a clear and impressive answer by mentioning the key points is an easy way to avoid this problem. Also, the interviewers might think you can stay organized in your thoughts and speak clearly under pressure.

Indecisiveness

Before answering, if you have a lot of achievements then decide which one of your accomplishments you should mention. Interviewers won’t like to hear about a long list of possible achievements because you cannot decide which one to discuss. Better to frame your answer before the interview to avoid this indecisiveness.

Don’t be humorous.

Being funny in a job interview can be a blunder, especially when the interviewer asks you a serious question. For example: “I often reach the office late, but one day I somehow managed to get office on time. Just kidding. Anyways my greatest achievement is….,”

Degrading others to make yourself look better

Avoid mentioning others’ mistakes in your answers. Trying to impress recruiters with your achievements by degrading others might disappoint them. So even if your accomplishments required you to correct someone else’s mistake, don’t mention them in front of your interviewer.

Examples.

Answering this question as a fresher:

“During my graduation time, I was working on a team project and was the leader of the project. Everyone was very much excited about it and we all were working our best to complete the project on time and deliver it as soon as possible. But unfortunately, one of our team member’s health conditions deteriorated so, he has to quit. And to fill his void, I took initiative and managed the work as a team leader, and assigned the tasks for each individual in the team, and with all our efforts the project was successful.”

Answering this question as a recent graduate:

“While working in my first company, I was really overwhelmed after designing a “Chatbot” for customers. This chatbox really helped the company’s website to gain more traffic and has met an increase of 9% in revenue. So, the senior management of the company was happy with the profits, and I also got a promotion. Being a fresher, I considered as one of my greatest achievements.”

Answering this question as an experienced candidate:

“As I mentioned earlier, I was working as an editor at my previous company. When I joined the company, I noticed that the employees working on my team often missed deadlines to send off the articles for the magazine to print. So, I once considered this problem, and in a group meeting and discussed this problem with my teammates. After getting to know everyone's issues about submitting articles late, I resolved their issue and then drew up a proper schedule with deadlines and every detail required and shared it with all. 

After this, for the first time in a year, we managed to close the editorial processes on time without any hassle. Doing this, increasing the revenue of the company, which impressed other senior employees in the company. This is one of the incidents which I considered one of my greatest achievements.”

Similar questions related to “What are your greatest achievements?

1. What work accomplishment are you most proud of?
2. What would you say are your greatest accomplishments?
3. Is there an important goal that you achieved? Can you elaborate on it?
4. Explain any of your greatest professional achievements?
5. What work accomplishments come first in your mind when we ask about your greatest accomplishments?