Answering the job interview question: “Describe a recent leadership experience.”

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Whether you are applying for a leadership role or not, you want to be prepared to share a story or two that shows your leadership skills and potential. But not all leadership stories are created equal. Let’s help you pick, refine, and tell an excellent leadership story that will help set you apart and land you an awesome job.

Variations of this question

“Tell me about a time you led a group of people to success.” · “Describe a leadership experience.” · “Tell me of a time when you showed leadership skills.” · “Tell me about a time when you led a difficult project.”

What the hiring manager is looking for

Hiring managers are looking to hire people who can proactively rally others together to solve hard problems since often times the only way to accomplish tasks is by communicating and working with several stakeholders. If this is not a leadership position they may still ask it because they want to hire people who they could promote and give more responsibility to in the future.

What your goal should be

Your goal is to share a story when you were able to solve a hard problem by preferably leading a group of people to work together. Ideally, your story will be a professional work example, but if you don’t have enough experience, pick something from your school or community involvement.

Preparing for this question

Start by reading the job description and listing out the top responsibilities and expectations for the job. Then, think about some of the best leadership experiences you have had that might match the qualities you found in the job description. If your leadership story doesn’t match well with the job requirements, pick a story where you proactively stepped up to solve a problem, communicated with many stakeholders, and worked together on a successful solution.

Answer Structure

Your answer should be no longer than 3 minutes and should contain the following elements:

1. Start by stating a one-sentence summary of the example you are about to share. This should take 10 seconds.
   
   Example: “In my current role I lead a team to implement a new feature that ended up saving our company several hundred thousand dollars a year.”
2. Then, tell the story using the S-T-A-R interview response method, by explaining the Situation, Task, Action and Result of your story. This step should take no longer than 2 minutes.
   
   Example:
   Situation- “Last year, after working on a feature and doing some testing on our app, I discovered customers were mostly using their credit card to pay their balance, which was costing the company a ton of money since credit card transaction fees are much more expensive than bank transaction fees.” (~15 seconds)
   Task- “I felt like there would be an easy way to change our customer’s behavior and convince them to start using their bank account instead, which would save us the high cost of running credit cards. So, I set out to look for a solution.” (~15 seconds)
   Action- “The first thing I noticed was that our UI was defaulting to the credit card option regardless of the customer’s default payment method or the option they chose the last time they made a payment. I knew by having it default to the bank account or at least the customer’s default payment method, this could be an easy way to change behavior and save our company some money. So, I pitched this idea with our team’s Product Manager and UX designer. They agreed with my findings and we worked on designing a solution together. Once the design was ready, the product manager wanted to put it off a few sprints to continue working on a bigger initiative, but I convinced him to do it much sooner, explaining it would only take me a couple of hours and that I would work on it on my personal time so it wouldn’t impact the larger initiative we were working on.” (~60–90 seconds)
   Result- “It turned out that after I implemented the solution, the percent of people using their credit card to make payments for our service dropped by 30%, which ended up saving the company $230k the first year! We now estimate it will save the company close to half a million next year. We are also coming up with new ways to lower that number even more using incentives.” (~30 seconds)

Extra tips

• Remember great leaders solve problems by persuading, negotiating, innovating, collaborating, and inspiring. Try to tell a story that portrays those types of attributes.
• Don’t speak negatively about your peers, even if they were the cause of a problem you were trying to solve. It makes you sound defensive, arrogant, and not a team player.
• Check out our related articles: Using the S-T-A-R Interview Response Method and Answering the job interview question: “Why should we hire you?”

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