How to talk about your biggest achievements in an interview?

There are chances that you may come across this most common interview question about your recent and big achievements. It’s not as tough to answer this as you may think. In fact, it can be fun to share about our strengths and achievements. Also, consider it as an opportunity to talk about your most important skills.

Before you start thinking about a good answer to this behavioral question, understand the interviewer’s intention and purpose of asking this. It is being asked to understand how you stand apart from the crowd. And you must convince the interviewer about your abilities that make you the best candidate for this job.

This article highlights the way you should create your answer and also offers some sample answers to help you get started.

Prepare a list of your achievements

      Here you can add about the things, including:

• Recently won accolades at the college/workplace
• Recognition gained from a co-worker or a senior or client
• Academic excellence
• Faculty’s recommendation
• Volunteering experience
• Accomplishments during the internship
• Earning a degree/certifications

Pick and choose the achievements worth mentioning

Don’t pick up small things and quote them as big achievements. They must be worthy enough of being quoted in a formal setting as an interview. Quantify each achievement that you have added in your list. Use parameters as if they helped you increase your productivity, taught you something new, added a new learning to your portfolio, had any measurable impact, or resulted into any significant benefit for the related or targeted people

Select those which can be related to the profile you’ve applied for.

Next, select the ones that you can relate to the profile you have applied for. For this, understand the job description thoroughly. Analyze it as well as the other information that you can find about the employer and think through the relevancy of these accomplishments. You can apply a rule of thumb here which is called as STAR Format. It stands for ‘the Situation you faced, the Task required, the Action you performed, and the successful Result you got’ to describe your accomplishments.

Here are some sample answers to the interview question ‘What are your biggest achievements’ that can help you prepare well.

Sample Answer #1

“I have 2 years of work experience as a Sales Assistant at XYZ. During my tenure, I was given an additional responsibility of client servicing at the same time. I took it as a challenge and proven myself. I was able to go above and not only achieved my sales targets, I also received a lot of appreciation mails from my clients. This all led to making me win the award of the best employee of the quarter. My hard work and dedicated towards my work helped me crack this.”

Sample Answer #2

“My greatest achievement actually took place during my college days. During the 3^rd year, I was asked to lead a cultural event for my college. It required dealing with 40-50 fellow students at a time, managing them, understanding everyone’s opinion and feedback, and finally presenting a great show. I focused on everyone’s performance and invested my time and efforts to bring the best out of each one of them. This was highly tedious and challenging, however, I did my best and ours turned out to be the biggest hit. In a way, the experience not only helped me learn leadership skills, but it also let me be a great team player. I’m very proud of this and I strongly feel that my learnings will definitely offer me an advantage in my career.”

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Remember, the answer to this interview question about your big achievements will offer an insight into your personality. Your answer to this interview question will offer an insight into your personality. Therefore be careful to not to come up with anything random or brag. Be as honest as possible. Also focus on your skills and the way you achieved, instead of just emphasizing too much on yourself. Understand the difference between being unique and doing something unique and big.