What Is Your Greatest Accomplishment

What Is Your Greatest Accomplishment
What Is Your Greatest Accomplishment – YouTube Video

‘What is your greatest accomplishment’ is one of the best questions you can be asked in your next interview because it’s really just a chance for you to brag about something great that you did. There’s not much risk in screwing this one up, other than the fact that you might be missing out on a lot of free points if you don’t take full advantage of this interview question.

The best answer to this interview question will incorporate characteristics such as overcoming a struggle, improving existing processes, mastering a valuable skill, and saving time, money, and energy for your company.

Choosing The Right Accomplishment

The interview points that you’ll get from this question are only going to be as good as the accomplishment story you choose. Picking the correct accomplishment story is the first challenge you’ll face before formatting your full response. When picking your story, you’re going to want to focus on two different things: the type of accomplishment story, and the characteristics of that story you want to highlight. We’ll cover the benefits of the different types of stories that you can choose, but regardless of which type you go with, you’re going to want to be sure that it incorporates some of the primary characteristics of a good accomplishment story.

Characteristics of a good accomplishment story:

  • You overcame a struggle.
  • You became a better person
  • You gained new skills
  • You solved an issue for yourself or others
  • You saved the company time, energy, and/or money
  • You prevented an issue from occurring again in the future
  • You showcased a valuable skill
  • You improved existing processes
  • You achieved a great reward
  • You discovered an appreciation for something

Types Of Accomplishment Stories

You might be wondering what kind of story should you should pick for this interview question. Does it need to be breaking the sales record at work or can you talk about the time you won first place at a trade show? Both of these stories could integrate the characteristics mentioned above, but they’re very different stories nonetheless; I categorize these into ‘personal accomplishment’ stories and ‘professional accomplishment’ stories.

Sometimes they’ll clarify one or the other when they ask this interview question, but a lot of times it’ll be open-ended. Even if it’s open-ended though, they might be expecting a professional accomplishment. If you can’t read the room, it’s fine to straight up ask if they’re looking for a personal or professional accomplishment. A professional accomplishment is probably the safest approach, but there are pro’s and con’s to each of these types of stories.

Choice #1: Personal Accomplishment

Let’s first take a look at a personal accomplishment. There’s clearly value in your story of overcoming a personal struggle that led to a great accomplishment. This can be a fantastic way to display your personal strengths and character. You’ll also probably be a bit more memorable with a personal story. This might even help you relate to the interviewer and stand out as a compelling applicant amongst a sea of suites. Obviously, if they explicitly ask for a professional accomplishment, then this type of response is a no-go, but if you have a relevant personal accomplishment story, and the interviewers give you the opening to use it, there are some great benefits.

Pro’s of choosing a personal accomplishment

  • Personal stories can be extremely relatable for the interviewer(s)
  • You generally have more options to pick from
  • They can show strengths/skills that you’re unable to with other interview questions

Con’s of choosing a personal accomplishment

  • Personal stories directly show workplace proficiency
  • They’re usually less technical in nature
  • It might not be what the interviewer is looking for

Choice #2: Professional Accomplishment

The safer of the two responses is to simply pick a professional accomplishment. A great professional accomplishment should still include some form of struggle. Accomplishments without struggle seem less important, so be sure to include that this accomplishment wasn’t just handed to you, but that you had to work for it. Whether we’re talking about a professional or personal experience, however, the name of the game here is ‘relevance’.

Think of this interview question as “Show me how you’ve accomplished great things in a similar job area so that I can envision you doing the same thing in this new role.” With that in mind, even a heartwarming story of overcoming tragedy or crushing the sales record at your last job won’t cut it if you’re applying for a leadership position that has nothing to do with sales.

Tailor your accomplishment story to as similar a role as the one you’re going for. If you’re going for a manager position, talk about your leadership accomplishments and how you mentored an individual who went on to start their own company and you’re super proud of them. If you’re going for an IT tech lead, talk about how you reduced your team’s defect count by 50% by optimizing coding best practices amongst your last team.

Most job roles require some form of soft skills that can benefit from a good personal accomplishment story, but the same rules apply. You still need to tie it to the position you’re applying to, you just might have to get a little more creative about it. Just because the question may seem open-ended or appears to be giving you the green light to talk about anything you want, just keep in mind that every interview question is good for something. You want to use each question as an opportunity to round out your interviewers impression of what you’d be like as a member of their team. For example, if before this question you were asked “why are you qualified” and you nailed the response, you might want to take this opportunity to showcase your strength of character or leadership rather than simply running up the count on your technical skills.

Pro’s of choosing a professional accomplishment

  • Can pick experiences most similar to the job you’re applying to
  • Can highlight more technical skills
  • Safest answer

Con’s of choosing a professional accomplishment

  • none

Forming Your Interview Response

Most behavioral questions tend to follow the same answer format. Questions like Tell me about a time you:

These are all best answered utilizing the S.T.A.R interview response format (check my YouTube video on the S.T.A.R interview response format if you’re unsure what I’m talking about).

Tell me about your greatest accomplishment is no exception. Although it doesn’t follow the same phrase “tell me about a time”, it still benefits from utilizing the S.T.A.R format. Each of the nine characteristics of a good accomplishment is going to be able to fit well into one of the four portions of your S.T.A.R response.

Remember, you don’t need to use all of the characteristics. Try to pick one or two characteristics that aren’t in any of your other interview responses; you don’t want to view your responses in isolation. Consider how this response fits in with the overall narrative that you’re weaving throughout your entire interview. Utilizing this holistic approach to your interview preparation is a skill that will take you from being a qualified candidate to an outstanding candidate.

Situation:

The best accomplishment is one that overcomes a challenge or struggle. Use the Situation to set up your challenge story. This is going to set the context for why your accomplishment was so meaningful. As long as you can contextualize the rest of your accomplishment story, that’s all you’re going to need for this aspect of the response. Don’t make the mistake of rambling too much, focus on the accomplishment itself.

Task:

The Task here is overcoming the challenge. You don’t need to talk about your plan for doing so (that’s what the action step is for). If your struggle is a project being behind schedule and over budget, your task is completing that project as quickly as possible. If your struggle is an interpersonal conflict, then your task is resolving that conflict. You want to be fairly concise with your task, don’t let it bleed too much into your actions. The reason for this is that you really want to show the interviewer that you had an outcome that you could visualize and that you took action to achieve that outcome. Without a clear outcome that you were working towards, it can seem like you just took actions that had some sort of reaction. What you want is for your actions to have an exact reaction that you planned out ahead of time.

Action:

Your Action step is going to be the concrete steps you took to achieve the outcome laid out in your task. At this point in the story, the interviewer should be rooting for you as an underdog. You’ve set the stage for a struggle that you need to overcome, and you’ve lit up the finish line with your task, now it’s telling the story of how you faced your challenge head-on and conquered it to achieve your stated outcome.

In addition to your specific actions, you can add a bit of commentary as to why you performed each of those actions. Understanding how you think and solve problems is one of the keys to answering this question well. Sure, your achieving something great is a good bragging moment, but in order for the interviewers to imagine you achieving something similar again and again at your new company, they need to be convinced that the skills and insight that lead to this accomplishment will carry over to the challenges and struggles that you are likely to face in your new role.

Result:

Finally, your Result is going to encapsulate the reason why this accomplishment was, in fact, an important accomplishment. Who did you help? What processes did you improve? What skill did you master? This is where you’ll bring everything together and explain to the interviewer why this accomplishment is so impressive, and how you’re likely to achieve similar things if you were to be hired. The biggest mistake you can make is simply telling the interviewers what you did, without fully qualifying the end result with its significance.

Sample Answer

Situation A few years ago I was in a position at work where I was in charge of performing exit surveys for individuals who were leaving our company, voluntary or otherwise. As you can imagine I got a wide range of feedback when I was conducting these interviews.

Task: At the heart of these interviews though I was really trying to understand the pain points employees faced and see if there was anything we could do to keep our employees happy and productive before getting to the point where they were leaving the company.

Action: After months of these interviews I realized that most of those leaving lacked guidance when they first arrived at the company, and that lack of guidance simply compounded over time. I took that realization and worked with our training partner to create a much more elaborate and engaging onboarding meeting that was able to give new employees much more clarity and guidance as to what was expected of them. 

Result: Creating this new onboarding meeting was so rewarding in itself because I received great feedback from new employees and their managers about how helpful it was. In addition to that feedback, I also received an award and was recognized personally by the CEO for my contribution to the company.

Key Takeaways (TLDR)

The interview question ‘What is your greatest accomplishment’ is a fantastic opportunity to highlight a significant event in your career that showcases one or many valuable skills and achievements. There are several ways that you can craft your interview response, but crafting a S.T.A.R is going to be the favored format by the interviewer, and give you a clear and concise path to forming the most beneficial response.

Ensure you choose the correct success story by utilizing one or several of the characteristics.

Characteristics of a good accomplishment story:

  • You overcame a struggle.
  • You became a better person
  • You gained new skills
  • You solved an issue for yourself or others
  • You saved the company time, energy, and/or money
  • You prevented an issue from occurring again in the future
  • You showcased a valuable skill
  • You improved existing processes
  • You achieved a great reward
  • You discovered an appreciation for something

Select a personal or professional success story that highlights one or more of these characteristics. Determine which type of accomplishment story you’ll use based on the pro’s and con’s of each:

Pro’s / Con’s Of Choosing Personal Accomplishment

Pro’s

  • More options to pick from
  • Can be very relatable
  • Show strengths/skills that you can’t with other questions

Con’s

  • Doesn’t directly show workplace proficiency
  • Usually less technical in nature
  • Might not be what the interviewer is looking for

Pro’s / Con’s Of Choosing Professional Accomplishment

Pro’s

  • Can pick experiences most similar to the job you’re applying to
  • Can highlight more technical skills
  • Safest answer

Con’s

  • None

James

James is an Air Force veteran and software developer. He's passionate about personal development and sharing that knowledge with those who want to learn. He loves to mentor students to land their dream job, and excel once they’ve got it.

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