When an employer asks you this question, they want to know how you deal with challenges and roadblocks and – potentially even how you deal with failure. Why? Because challenges are guaranteed to crop up in every role – and the employer wants to make sure you’re not going to crumble and struggle to cope when they do.
Think carefully about the challenges you’ve encountered in your career and what the outcome of these challenges have been. In this instance, it’s OK to mention a challenge which resulted in failure – as long as you can say what you’ve learnt from it and how you’ve used that knowledge to affect the success of a future campaign.
For example, you could talk about a site you’ve worked on that was hit with a Google Penguin update – and how you had to work hard to clean up the site’s link profile in order to recover rankings and Google’s trust. In this case, you could say that you learnt that Google’s constantly changing its algorithms, you learnt what makes a good/bad link and the importance of sticking with a project from start to finish and you learnt the importance of keeping a clean backlink profile.
Think carefully about the challenges you’ve encountered in your career and what the outcome of these challenges have been. In this instance, it’s OK to mention a challenge which resulted in failure – as long as you can say what you’ve learnt from it and how you’ve used that knowledge to affect the success of a future campaign.
For example, you could talk about a site you’ve worked on that was hit with a Google Penguin update – and how you had to work hard to clean up the site’s link profile in order to recover rankings and Google’s trust. In this case, you could say that you learnt that Google’s constantly changing its algorithms, you learnt what makes a good/bad link and the importance of sticking with a project from start to finish and you learnt the importance of keeping a clean backlink profile.
