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When you’re booking interviews with IT staffing companies and technical recruiters, there are certain questions you’re probably preparing for and practicing your answers.  If they’re supportive, you may even be working a bit with your IT recruiters and IT staffing agencies to get ready for these IT jobs interviews.  Here’s one question you should definitely prepare for: Tell me about a time you failed or made a mistake at work.

To answer this question in a way that’s advantageous to you and reflects well on you IT recruiting agencies and IT staffing firms, start by making sure you identify a few situations you can talk about.  Check with your IT recruiting companies to make sure these aren’t the kinds of mistakes that would be a big deal in the roles you’re interviewing for.  Particularly when it comes to IT, you don’t want to make yourself look like you’re missing a skill that is needed to support your users, clients, or company’s hardware.

Next, find a way to talk about the mistake in a concise, quick way.  This is the part you want to mention as briefly as possible.  Don’t stop at this point, though.  You want to have most of this answer be about what you learned from the mistake and, if you got to, how you fixed it.  IT recruiting firms place IT professionals who make mistakes all the time.  They’re employable because they learn from these mistakes and can fix them (or mitigate their damage).