i failed an interview and was informed i was not to progress to second round

i cheekily asked for a feedback and to my surprised, they provided.

they said that they feel that i have not been through enough challenge to have the seniority required for the job

which reminds me... almost every interview they will always ask me to name a challenge that i face at work and how i overcome it

and i always give a very generic/boring thing i did at work.

now i found out how important that question is, the interviewer actually is using that question as a proxy to probe if you are been through enough to be considered a "senior"

so word of advice, if you are ever asked this question , make sure you brag about all the super difficult stuff you did

This post has been edited by FLampard: Mar 3 2023, 02:06 PM

At work not so much, but what about hobby project? Do they look at hobby project?

just make up some bullshit, say your company's server collapsed and you SSH into the server and fix it aka restart server.

TBH it is all in the wording. I shared a dumb joke few days ago. But that joke captured the "essence" of the point.
There are things you may have encountered at your job, but make sure you know how to present it.
marketing people know this point all too well. Of course, your point has to be something good lah.

here 's that dumb joke, btw.

Even that won't save you if you've never actually done anything really difficult. What may seem difficult to you, might actually be trivial... or you end up embellishing it so much that you come off as a BSer instead.

To guide you to a better answer, I normally ask "Can you tell me of your proudest moment in your career". This helps the candidate focus on an achievement worthy event, which is normally by default challenging.

So even if you're faced with the generic challenge faced question, just think of my question and give that answer.

Its an easy question to ask and hard question to answer.

Someone might think that you need to make up some important task for the answer.

Depends on how many interviewer they have. I'm sure one of them will be the hard core technical people or your future team leader.

You can tell your side of the story on how you save the day. But he/she will evaluate your skill and see how detail you can remember what you did to perform that. Make up story seems beatiful, but it wont touch the ground.

Just answer what you did and elaborate how you get it done. No matter how small it is, if you did it, you will remember each steps of it.