It could be from a previous job, volunteer position, or another event. Preparing an answer. My experience taught me time management, habits and prioritization. Additionally, ask friends, family, and former coworkers for their opinion. Learning the best way to answer What is your biggest accomplishment? or What is your best professional achievement ? job interview question is a great way to show an interviewer and prospective team members more information about you and your capabilities. Building Relationships. When I got to my previous company as a human resources manager, employees spent so much time on lunch breaks, which would interfere with the working hours and the teams output. Ideally, the greatest accomplishment you answer with should be from the last two to three years. I wanted to ensure our prospects and leads would feel understood, knowing our sales team cared about their success. If youre a mid-level professional, you should have several accomplishments to choose from. All rights reserved. Additional interview resources. Practice your example answers before your interview. 4. Are accomplishments in general out of the ordinary for you? Recently graduated college with not much work experience to speak of? Second, this is a classic behavioral interview question, so a strong answer starts with a strong success story. Result: Sales of the drink doubled and the store owner promoted me to assistant manager, where I boosted sales another 15%. I shortened the time for onboarding by 50% and once our sales reps were out in the field, they started making sales on day one, which was unheard of before. By taking initiative, I earned myself a senior developer position and a company car to help me navigate from home to work. ACTION: I took a second job to help with the extra bills, maximized my time so I could continue with a rigorous college curriculum, and leveraged help from neighbors and friends. The restaurant was completely packed 90%+ of the time, and we barely had any breathing room., Task We had to be very efficient at work to make sure that we wouldnt get overwhelmed., Action - The most important part of making this work was being proactive. Your answer could look something like the following: Situation - I think my greatest accomplishment was during my last job as an HR administrator. We got together during his break period once a week to read Lord of the Rings and make drawings for each chapter. This way, a recruiter will see how your soft skills can work successfully in their organization. The accomplishment that Im most proud of is how rapidly I was promoted to the team lead position for our sales team. Give an answer demonstrating your abilities as the best candidate for the job. Choose your greatest achievement that is relevant to the position. Describe how your interest in medicine drove you to become a doctor. If youre having trouble choosing just one example for your greatest accomplishment, keep the following things in mind: Stick to work examples. Why Are You The Best Person For This Job? In addition to showcasing their strengths, a job seeker should be effective in mirroring a companys core values and fitting in with the company culture in their answer to this behavioral interview question. It tells about your potential as an employee and how much of a valuable asset you can be to the company. As an experienced professional, you have a wealth of professional achievements on your resume. My first job out of school was as a customer care agent at a fast-paced tech company. Results - In the end, we managed to decrease the average monthly ticket count by around 25%. It is also important that you give context and highlight how your skills added value to the situation. Your choice should also be appropriate and relevant to the responsibilities of the job your are interviewing for. Get ideas from our in-house career coaches. Contemporary templates perfect for new job seekers or anyone looking for a fresh start. The greatest achievement question can be stressful for students and new graduates. In a nutshell, you want to stick to a single example if you can unless they ask you for more and you want to make sure that this example represents the best work youve done in the past while simultaneously being an interesting story. So if you feel like you dont have any good answers to this question because you havent been working long enough, youre going to have to get a little creative. One final note from Idealist is to keep track of your achievements as they happen at work. Applying for work where you might need to wear a suit? At MatchBuilt, we believe in empowering individuals to pursue their passions and reach their career goals, regardless of industry experience or formal education. Try to stick with professional career or job-related strong answers. However, you could refer to school, volunteering or even your hobbies, so long as you demonstrate transferable skills and prove you are the best person for the job. Job seekers are often haunted by lies, so its best to avoid them altogether. It's something you're proud of and shows what you're capable of. My parents could not afford the tuition fees initially for me to attend college, but I knew I wanted to further my education no matter the circumstances. Graduating from high school. A lot of it was fast-paced too, and at first, I wasnt even sure if I was doing things right., Task - I felt out of place and I had to think fast if I wanted to move up in the company. Working with a good team means open communication, high trust . Like the examples above, this story focuses on what the candidate did to create real results. Its relevant to a fresh graduate who might not have a lot of. Result. SITUATION: My biggest achievement was buildingafter a devastating loss. Let's begin! How to answer "What is your greatest accomplishment?" Automation (e.g. This question is a behavioral interview question. The interviewer knows the candidate is motivated, independent, and possesses relevant career skills. What is the best way to answer What is your greatest achievement?. The task that was required to be . My family doesnt have the means to contribute to my siblings and my education, so I secured scholarship funds based on my grades and community service. Unfortunately, he had been leading a client project that was due in a week and no one else was as familiar with the client or could code at his level. Even though . List your accomplishments. It could be something personal, such as completing a difficult project or achieving a personal goal, or something professional, such as receiving a promotion or winning an award. When an interviewer asks you about your greatest accomplishment, one of the things they are trying to understand is what motivates you into action. I set the goal of reducing turnover by half and cutting cost-to-fill by 10%. The company promoted me from a mid-level position and tasked me with improving retention and recruitment. Your qualifications: Some accomplishments help employers establish . What was the outcome of your action? Example answer for returning to the workforce. There is no standard answer to the question, What is Your Biggest Achievement? similar to discussing your greatest strengths because people come from different backgrounds and have different levels and ideas of success. How To Respond To A Recruiter Email (With Examples), How To Answer Why Are You Interested In This Position? (With Examples): Job Interview Question, Topics: Get The Job, Guides, Interview Questions. Learn more: How to Prepare for a Behavioral Interview. Your commitment to work: The greatest achievement question helps employers determine your work ethic and commitment to growing in your profession. SITUATION: My greatest achievement was paying for college myself. Not only that, but it had a knock-on effect of increasing user engagement with our social media platforms by 70% in just a month. As a sales manager, I saw my coworkers struggle to find information about leads and accounts, sometimes at the cost of a new client. Sample Answer 2 - Continuous Learning Professional Achievement. WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT? This can often be tied together with the situation in one or two sentences. When answered properly, youll be able to share what you value most, your level of ambition and drive, your views on success, and whether you have the soft skills they are looking for. I noticed that we hadnt secured any new donors for a while. Set your story up with a brief description of the situation that led to your accomplishment. To answer just about any behavioral job interview question right, we recommend using the STAR method. In only four months, we were achieving 50-80% above our chosen goals. Training for and completing a marathon. I wanted to improve, and a lot of the other employees were often too busy to help me out. Short on time or simply dont like writing? I finished my course and went on to learn more programming languages, and I am now about to graduate as a software engineer. Professional templates for applicants in formal industries. It mentions transferrable skills focus and time management and subtly mentions that they could keep up when others couldnt. While finding an accomplishment thats relevant to what the company is looking for is an important first step, how you structure your story is also something you should consider. Since I had led similar projects before, I offered to help get it finished. This example is from a student who graduated at the top of their class: My greatest achievement was becoming valedictorian of my senior class at [University]. The best way to answer this job interview question is by incorporating a great achievement that includes a work ethic that mirrors the companys culture. Reflect on your time in education, extra-curricular activities and hobbies to identify something you accomplished that made you feel proud. Out of the 4 months I spent there, 3 of them were a total nightmare. When describing the outcome, if possible, mention numbers and quantifiable facts. ACTION: I started by talking to my neighbor who could speak a bit of English, and then my interest grew to me signing up for a French class and dedicating hours a day to learning the new language. Buying your first car. From sharpening resumes and elevating LinkedIn profiles to providing interview preparation and career advancement strategies, our blog is a wealth of knowledge, drawing from our extensive experience working with hundreds of clients and positively impacting the lives of thousands of job seekers. There are other interview questions about conflict and challenges, but your answer for this question should be overwhelmingly positive. RESULTS: As a result, our food tastes better, and positive online reviews increased threefold. I finally went with the [XYZ] CRM system and worked with the IT team to implement it. You're simultaneously making the program easier to understand while also removing a lot of potential sources for bugs (research tells us that the number of bugs in a program is proportional to the number of lines i. I wanted to increase productivity and efficiency, and in the end, save time spent on looking for documents., Action - I decided to take initiative and implement a new team HR document management software. I also accepted a work-study position as a laboratory assistant to gain relevant work experience. When talking about your greatest accomplishment, keep the following things in mind: Mention how good the accomplishment was for you, but focus on the value added to your employer. Human resource experts and researches have come up with a STAR method to give an answer that is satisfactory. While academics is the basic scale of measuring success for students, what they do and learn beyond their textbooks also plays a vital role in forming their personal attributes. Last year, I had a student who was struggling with dyslexia. And if not, what made it an outlier? I came up with a new marketing strategy involving social media campaigns that increased our sales by 155%. The finance team of my organization was struggling with a project involving our . '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.