Home » Forums » Careers » Interviews

Most significant accomplishment

Submitted by calouden on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 22:57.
in

Here's one for the community. I was recently interviewed by 5 different people (45 minutes each) for a position. I was asked the "What is your most significant acomplishment?" question by all but one of the interviewers. Would you use the same accomplishment for every interviewer or change it up each time?

I actually answered the same way, did not get offered the position, and the feedback that the recruiter gave me was "the interviewers were hoping to hear about more accomplishements." When I asked the recruiter to elaborate, he said that he would "recommend in future interviews to use different 'most significant' accomplishments for each interviewer because when the team met to discuss their interviews with me, they all were hoping to have a laundry list of accomplishments to compare, and instead they all heard the same story. The recruiter also said that he thought my example was very good but they wanted more examples.

This was an interview for a Marketing Manager role at a company with over $3 billion in sales annually.

Thoughts?

"Is there a specific salary you are looking for?" Bad Answer? ›
thaGUma's picture
Submitted by thaGUma on Fri, 07/30/2010 - 14:22.

hindsight is a wonderful thing

Chalk one to experience. Five people at different times will come together to discuss the candidates. Each person will have a view on each candidate. Even a great accomplishment will get weakened when four of them say ‘yep, I got that too’. There is nothing more to add breadth – so they consider perhaps that was it … looking for a reason to say no. Chris.

 

mattias's picture
Submitted by mattias on Thu, 01/06/2011 - 23:57.

I just wanna thank Calouden

I just wanna thank Calouden for sharing. Definitly something to look out for in the future.

ChrisH's picture
Submitted by ChrisH on Tue, 02/07/2012 - 02:31.

Thanks for sharing.   We

Thanks for sharing.   We can all learn from your experience.

 

manxomfoe's picture
Submitted by manxomfoe on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 03:08.

trap?

That smacks of some sort of trap.  Why would your "most significant accomplishment" change from one meeting to the next?  Not that each person in your series meant it that way, but I do hope they learned from their end of the experience.  It certainly doesn't seem like they got the evaluation they wanted.  

I've had interviews where the interviewer clearly wanted multiple examples, and asked for them directly. I'd finish one and they'd ask, "do you have another example?"   After you list  2-3 it's probably good to try redirect and ask what they're getting at, especially if they're being mechanical about it (as opposed to conversational).

So yes, I'd feel confident using the same "most relevant and significant accomplishment" story if that's authentically what the best pitch is for the position.  Maybe I'd end up in the same trap :)  The learning is that even if you talk about the same accomplishment, you'd do worse than to expand on the details in different directions when talking with each of the different interviewers.  You could even take up the MT advice of tuning your answers to the DISC type of your audience.  How cool would that be?!

 

mahorstman's picture
Submitted by mahorstman on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 03:54.

this is not a TRAP.

You did the right thing.  If you were interviewing for just one position, by definition when they ask you for your MOST significant position, you can't change that answer.

So, it's not a trap.  It's just more people being lousy interview evaluators.  Sorry their lack of effectiveness affected you.

Somebody ought to do something about this.

Hmmmm.

Mark