Tell me about a time you failed

• Your honesty. Consultants get things wrong regularly, and their team needs them to say so early. A candidate who cannot name a real failure suggests someone who will hide mistakes.
• Your share of responsibility. The interviewer listens for whether you say "I" at the point where things go wrong, or whether the failure suddenly belongs to the group, the professor or the circumstances.
• How you reacted in the moment. What you did in the hours and days that followed says more about you than the original mistake.
• The lesson, and above all its proof. Saying you learned to communicate better is not enough: you need a later situation where you acted differently.

1. 1

   Pick a failure that is one

   A missed target, a project that did not deliver, a decision you regret. It should have had real consequences without being so serious that it casts doubt on your judgment. Leave out failures of pure bad luck, where there is nothing for you to learn.
2. 2

   Set the scene in two sentences

   The interviewer needs the stakes and your role, nothing more. The interesting part starts when you make the wrong call.
3. 3

   Name your mistake precisely

   Say what you did or failed to do, and why it seemed reasonable at the time. This is the passage candidates rush, and it is the one that makes the story believable.
4. 4

   Spend half the time on what came next

   How you reacted, what you repaired, then a more recent situation where you applied the lesson. End on that proof.

"The failure that taught me the most was a fundraising drive I ran for my student society, which reached barely half its target. I was in charge of partnerships, and I had decided to put all our effort into three large companies, because any one of them could have covered the budget alone. It seemed more efficient than approaching thirty small organisations.

My mistake was that I never set a date at which we would change plan. Two of the three declined five weeks before the event, and by then it was too late to fall back properly. I told the committee that same day, we scaled the format down, and I spent the following weeks calling local shops myself. Since then, whenever I make a bet like that..."

This example is made up: it shows the tone and the construction, not a script to memorise. Your answer has to come from your own experience or from the data the interviewer gives you.

• The fake failure: a grade slightly below your target, or perfectionism dressed up as a flaw. The interviewer hears it several times a day and immediately asks for a real one.
• Shifting the blame, even subtly. You can describe a hard context, but the story has to be about what you could have done differently.
• Stopping at the failure. Without the reaction and the lesson, all that is left is bad news about you.
• Choosing a failure that is too private or unrelated to work, which makes the interviewer uncomfortable and tells them nothing about how you operate.