How To Answer The Job Interview Question, “What Are Your Achievements?”

Achievements can be termed as life’s milestones that encourage us to keep on challenging our potentials to the maximum limits. Without a vision to better ourselves, life would ultimately be meaningless and boring.

Taking an example from one of Albert Einstein’s quotes,” Life is just like a game, first you have to learn the rules of the game and then play it better than anyone else”.

Albert Einstein was an absolute genius in comparing life to games considering the fact that this is how games actually work in real life! To anyone who has ever played any game, when you are new to it ( noob ), you make all the mistakes that can be made.

But through learning from such mistakes and persistence, you gradually get to know your way around the game and within no time, your level increases from a noob, to an amateur, to a professional, to a veteran all the while racking in the various achievements available in the game.

This is also true in real life, whereby through hard work and resilience, we shall succeed at whatever it is we do and when we succeed, we will count that as an achievement to be shared by all through celebration. Yay!

However, not all achievements are meant to be shared.

Depending on the situation, it is best to keep some achievements under wraps. One such context is when you are in an interview room and the interviewer throws the “What Are Your Achievements?” question at you.

This is probably the best time to keep quiet about how you can lick your elbows or how you can spend the whole day without going to the bathroom.

In short, all your personal achievements are as useless as trying to sing in a vacuum, whenever you are before a job interviewing panel.

To successfully respond to such a question, you need to confine yourself within these 3 simple rules.

1. Do not focus on personal achievements eg completing your Masters, attaining a first class etc

2. Your response should focus on your work experience whereby you went above and beyond your regular job description to attain a particular feat.

2. Give quantifiable statements i.e provide figures and percentages or use terms like increased, reduced etc

SAMPLE RESPONSE

One of my achievements while I was in the Customer Service department, I would encounter many customers who inquired very much about our products but since the company had yet to invest in a reliable website to showcase its products, it meant that it lost a lot of potential customers.

During my free time, I would create simple leaflets highlighting our products using Microsoft Word. I would then print them out and issue them to any customer who made enquiries either physically to our offices or attach them in emails I replied to clients.

In the first month of its introduction, sales target for the month had increases by 2% thanks to exposure and referrals initiated by the leaflets.