Vital Positive and Negative Interview Preparation Guide

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Listed below are several strategies to help you effectively answer negative interview questions:
☛ Keep a positive attitude and respond to the question constructively
☛ Explain your answer in a way that portrays a positive result
☛ Focus on behaviors rather than personality traits when responding to weaknesses
☛ Refrain from repeating the negative word, such as weakness, back to the recruiter
☛ Speak with respect while talking about past employers
☛ Avoid sounding angry, defensive or hostile in your response
☛ Take a moment to think; do not lie or make up a fake situation
☛ Demonstrate awareness of the negative situation and show you are working to improve or minimize the issue
☛ Take responsibility for a mistake, as employers are looking for accountability
☛ Use the STAR method (situation, task, action, and result) to be efficient and accurate with your responses

Follow these steps to answer interview questions about negative information:
☛ Search for lists of interview questions online and look for questions like these, especially any that seem to invite you to advertise negative aspects of yourself.
☛ Prepare several ideas ahead of time.
☛ Choose subjects, skills, or events to discuss that are not central to the job.
☛ Use a sandwich technique to present the negative information.
☛ State a positive
☛ State the negative simply and factually.
☛ State another positive.
☛ State yet another positive, if you can.

Use a sandwich technique to present the negative information. Start with something positive (and related), state the negative information succinctly without dwelling on it, and then end with another positive.

In an ideal world. I would like to avoid any bureaucracy or red tape which can delay decisions. Like anyone, I am always keen for good progress to be made at all times and everything to run smoothly.

I like to think I am an effective and efficient worker who gets through a full workload each week. However, there are times when I need to work late and weekends and this is fine. This is often due to uneven demands on my time. I will put whatever effort it takes to complete my role.

Start with, Actually there are a lot of good things to say about my ex-employer, however, if I need to highlight one area.
I used to get a bit annoyed when I noticed inefficiencies in the processing workflows and controls. A number of times I made suggestions as to improvements that could be made which would have saved money, but the ideas were effectively ignored.

State another positive. The best positive you could possibly state is how you dealt with the problem or difficulty, what you learned from the experience, or how you worked to improve matters.

State yet another positive, if you can. Describe how your efforts resulted in money saved, better communication, or some other solution to the problem, end on that note. This is similar to the "SAR" (situation, action, result) or "PSR" (problem, solution, result) technique used in behavioral interviewing.

State the negative simply and factually. Don't dwell on it, blame anybody, or overstate the problem.

State a positive. This could be a skill that you're good at or something you liked about a company, person, or job.

Prepare several ideas ahead of time. You can have the ideas in mind without coming across as having rehearsed a speech. Know what you will discuss and how.

Choose subjects, skills, or events to discuss that are not central to the job. That is, if the job uses your computer skills heavily, don't choose your computer skills as the weakness you talk about. Choose subjects that are relevant but less important.

Search for lists of interview questions online and look for questions like these, especially any that seem to invite you to advertise negative aspects of yourself. Be prepared, too, for questions like "Why did you leave?", especially if there is negative information as part of the answer.

When I first began working at the company, I was the youngest member of the staff. There was an older woman who really "knew the ropes" and when I first got there she barely acknowledged my presence. I discovered that she thought I was too young to successfully fulfill my duties. I did my job and took every opportunity to make a good impression. I was a very diligent worker and behaved in a highly professional manner at all times. After about two weeks she came up to me and told me how impressed she was with me. She apologized for ignoring me and took me under her wing sharing what she knew with me.

I work in an academic department at WMU, and every year the department hosts a large event for both students and employers. Employers come to speak to students about the industry they work in and what positions are open in their companies. It was my responsibility to bring several items from campus to the location of the event, and one of those items was the registration packets for employers. The packets included their nametags, schedules, parking passes, and more. It wasn't until employers arrived that I realized I forget them, so it was really hectic. I drove back to campus, got the packets, and found every employer who arrived before the packets were there and gave them their packets. I apologized to them for the inconvenience and to my boss as well. Now, I write a list of everything I need to bring to a meeting or an event, so I don't forget anything. I cross reference my list with what I gathered to double-check my work.

As a Resident Advisor, there was another RA who often came to me to discuss her complaints and she shared quite a bit of information about activities she'd engaged in that violated the rules. Although I did not mind being a resource for her, I knew I could not compromise my integrity or her residents' safety. I talked to her about the situation and told her that I would have to tell my supervisor, even though I knew she would be upset. She eventually understood my responsibility and why I had to come forward with information. She knew that what she had done was against the rules, but never realized before I talked to her that she had jeopardized her residents' safety.

I did not pass my first business stats test, which made me very unhappy. I was not going to let the first test set the trend for the rest of the semester. So, I arranged to meet with a tutor once a week in the Academic Resource Center on campus and I started studying somewhere other than my dorm room. My grades soon improved, and I went on to redeem myself on the next test.

All negative questions are going to be about less than ideal moments and situations. Especially when you're asked about working with a difficult client, boss or teammate, be really careful about how you answer. Showing professionalism and maturity in this type of answer will be key. You always want to be diplomatic because hey, dealing with difficult people is something that will come up in any job and you need to know how to work through that without letting them get to you.

An area in which I can improve is delegation. My natural leadership abilities often find me as the "lead" on a group project in classes, and I tend to assign people tasks and help to keep everyone on task. However, I tend to take it upon myself to do too many small pieces that should be split up among my classmates. Once I realized I was doing more work than the other people in my group, I reevaluated what I was doing. I quickly realized that if I distributed the tasks more equally, I could manage the project much more efficiently and actually accomplish more.

All negative experiences can be useful as long as you are able to learn from them. Instead of freaking out about a mistake you have made or something you are not as good at, learn from them. If you can show your interview what you took away from a less than ideal situation it shows them that you have the maturity and insight to learn and evolve. That is a really important quality.

In terms of mistakes, give one that did not have a huge negative impact. The best examples are mistakes that are easily resolved. An example might be "I was working on a project late at night and there were a few typos. I was able to catch them when I looked at the project the next morning and I was able to fix it in time. However, now I always make sure check my work in the moment before I submit it no matter how late it is."

The worst thing you can do is give an answer or try to pretend these questions do not apply to you. The worst offender is any "weakness" that is really a strength (i.e. "I work too hard") or saying you have never made a mistake (not likely). The reason your interviewer is even asking these questions is to make sure you can own up to your mistakes and learn from them. If you say you have never made a single mistake (which I think is impossible) that will indicate to your interviewer that you can't recognize when you have.

Here are 4 tips to deal with negative interview questions:
☛ Do not pretend you are perfect
☛ Do not give examples that are directly related to core aspects of the job.
☛ Show how you have learned or grown from your mistakes or weaker areas
☛ Show professionalism and maturity

Can be defined in many ways:
1) A reply that indicates the withholding of assent : refusal
2) Archaic : a right of veto.
3) Obsolete : an adverse vote : veto.
4) A proposition which denies or contradicts another; especially : the one of a pair of propositions in which negation is expressed.

Can be defined in many ways:
1) The positive degree of comparison in a language.
2) A positive form of an adjective or adverb.
3) Something of which an affirmation can be made reality.