Job Interview Question: Tell Us About How You Handled A High Pressure / High Stress Situation
31 December 2006This is a question (really, a class of questions) that are often asked of people who are applying for jobs that sometimes have extreme pressures put on the employee. People interviewing you for management jobs will often ask some variant of this, and it’s also common for jobs with lots of tight deadlines. Many interviewers ask for specific examples, but another variant that is sometimes recommended to interviewers is something more open-ended along the lines of “How do you handle stressful situations?” What’s the best way to answer it?
1) Make a list of high pressure situations you’ve been in before you start interviewing. This is another one where you’re going to have to think through your job history beforehand, because it’s hard to answer the question well without a little forethought. Trying to do it off the cuff won’t work well. You should be thinking about a few kinds of situations to list: when have you had major problems at work that you’ve had to deal with? When have you had very tough deadlines? When have you had confrontations with other people (employees, customers, bosses)? These are the general sorts of thing that should be going on your list. Unless you haven’t been on the job too long, stick to situations from work. If you’re fresh out of school, then something from your classes might work as an example.
2) Cross out the ones that make you look bad. “I forgot to order paper for the copy machine, and so we couldn’t file those important papers on time, and my boss screamed at me and nearly fired me. But I breathed in a bag for awhile and slept it off - the stress wasn’t that big a deal.” Your answer should not be anything like that - the interviewer doesn’t care about how it affected you personally. They care about how it affected your work. You also don’t want to tell them about a situation where you’re responsible for the goof. Ideally, the problem will either be no one’s fault or someone else’s.
3) Pick an example where you did something productive despite the stress. If you had a really tight deadline that threatened to derail your project, and you worked overtime for a week to get it out in time, that’s a good example. If you were being screamed at by an irrational customer, and managed to keep your cool and keep him satisfied in the end, that’s a good example. There has to be some active step that you took to solve the problem in your story.
4) Don’t focus excessively on the “pressure” part of the question. There should be some pressures on you in your example. But the main priority is to show that you responded well in a previous situation, not that you’ve been subjected to the most mind-blowingly stressful situation imaginable. That means you should focus less on the worst situations you’ve been in from your list and more on the ones that have turned out well despite problems along the way.
If they just ask you some variation like “how do you handle stressful situations,” you should really be answering it the same way. It’s hard to give a good generic answer to that. Saying “I keep my cool and I’m levelheaded” isn’t going to make you stand out. A story about how you handled a previous situation will be unique and will get the point across better anyway. So just say something like “Well, I can give you an example…” and give the same answer you’d give to the question asking you to name a specific situation.
Discuss this in the Free the Drones forums.
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