Was I too honest in job interview?

[lemons82]

I had an internal job interview on Friday. I shared a story about a time when I made a quite a bad mistake at work and I took proactive steps to fix it. I’ve been worrying ever since that I should have kept quiet as the interview was with a senior manager who wasn’t aware of this mistake and now they are 😔 Any advice?

Where does it stipulate this is a site for women?

I don't, but this is Mumsnet so it's a reasonable assumption. Assuming her manager is male is not.

Yawn with this. It was started as a site for mums, called Mumsnet. Yes, men do post on here but it vastly predominantly still women. Last figures were about 95-98% women.

Honestly, it depends on what the mistake was.

Honestly we can’t guess this if you can’t op. You need to wait and see.

Indeed but get on your high horse
but at the same time to assume the Op is a woman and therefore the junior in the equation is surely as equally “wrong” as assuming the senior is a man.

Out of interest what’s your source for that stat?

That’s some mental gymnastics right there!

If I don’t get it then it’ll be hard to know whether the mistake was the issue or something else. I know I didn’t answer perfectly on a couple of questions.

What was the mistake?

34% of senior management positions are now held by women globally, an increase of just 1.1 percentage points (pp) since 2023. Just 22% of UK mid-market businesses have a female chief executive officer (CEO) or managing director (MD), down from 30% in 2023.

sadly also a reasonable assumption the SM is a man.

So you ask for feedback to find out

Agreed. But assuming only perpetuates the status quo

This is like ‘the vicar gave my DD £5’ post all over again. OP has used ‘my manager’ and pronoun ‘they’ all along. Most posters have assumed the manager is male. I suspect someone is researching into gender bias and using Mumsnet as a source of data.

Where I work you can ask for feedback if you don’t get a post. Worth asking if it comes to that!

really? I always fall for these kinds of threads!!

I’m not researching anything. I just don’t want to be outing!

Are companies generally honest with feedback? If they did say it was the mistake specifically then I’m not sure what I could do to ever get past it - I made the mistake, my reaction to it was good and I put it right and learnt from it.

I did think the repeated use of they was weird

What happened with the vicar post - never saw the ending?!

I’ll say it again - I’m not researching anything. There’s nothing weird about not wanting to give too many identifying details, surely? Anyway, thanks to all the posters who responded with helpful replies. I assume I will find out next week if I’ve been successful.

In my experience yes, they have no reason to lie if they’re going to take the time to give feedback at all.

If they did say you didn’t get the job and the feedback was about the mistake then potentially you’d be best looking at jobs outside this company if you want a promotion. They are unlikely to suddenly forget it.

However If as you say this was an easy mistake to make and you handled it well and haven’t done it again (and hopefully processes have changed to make the mistake less likely to happen again) then I would see this as a positive as a manager.

Thanks. I wish I hadn’t opened my big mouth as it sounds like this could go either way depending on the interviewee’s values. I wish I’d never put myself in this position 😔

Presumably it wasn’t your responsibility to tell the senior manager if he should have known but didn’t?

The senior manager was a woman. Why would you have thought it a man. Ludicrous

Honestly it depends on the issue, the type of company you work for and the interviewers. At my company stuff goes wrong all of the time and so you explaining how you sorted it would be great. If you got good feedback at the time then it is likely fine.
Also, do the interviewers know you well? If so, really a non issue.