Have you messed up anything?

When I interview lateral / experienced candidates, one of the questions I invariably ask is – Have you made any mistake or have you messed up anything for which you’ve got a feedback from your supervisor or client?. In this posting, I am going to write about how candidates respond to this question and I will share my interview experience on this.

There was a software engineer who said he never messed up anything. When I asked him, does it mean that the codes are never tested? The answer was no. Then I asked him to talk about what kind of feedbacks he used to get from his testing team and his supervisor. Believe me... it was a long list of what he needed to improve.

In general, I find that candidates are more than willing to talk about their achievements or initiatives that they have taken, but not their mess-ups or mistakes.  When I ask this question, candidates become apprehensive and sometimes feel insecure. I think they must feel that it can go against them in the hiring decision.

When this question is asked, everyone knows that no one is error-proof and people would have certainly made mistakes and messed up certain things.

What is the purpose of this question- Have you messed up anything?

More than the mistake, what one would want to know and the real purpose is to find out

# How you approached, analyzed and solved that problem, (your problem solving, Analytical and crisis management skills),

# What you have learnt from that ( your learnings)

# Have you ensured that you are not repeating your mistake, and finally

# How open are you to talk about your mistakes

Example - Some time ago, one of the HR candidates that I interviewed talked about the mess-up she made. When she was to send some of the employees CTC data to her boss, by mistake, she sent it to someone else. She did not realize it until that mail was replied by the person to whom she sent it. Fortunately, this person happened to be an internal person in a responsible position, not an external person or a competitor.  However the data was compromised to some extent. 

She was open enough to talk about her mess-up.  She also said that this mistake would not have happened if she was not in a hurry to ensure that the correct email id was typed. On top of everything, she said, had she secured it with a password, the information would have still been safe.  She said, she never sends any data without protecting it with a password and the password is shared over the phone separately.

If you say that you’ve not messed up anything, it could only mean that you are not confident enough or you don’t have enough challenges in your current role.  Both will not go in your favor in hiring decision.

So when this question is asked, be prepared to talk about what you messed up, how you solved it and your learning out it.

So what have you messed up? Let us talk about it..

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