Ep 10: The Emotional Challenge of Owning Mistakes in NHS Interviews
In this episode Tessa Davis and guest Becky discuss common interview dilemmas faced by NHS applicants. They start by addressing whether candidates should disclose personal matters such as long sick leave or maternity leave, emphasizing that disclosure is optional unless legally required (e.g., GMC restrictions). They advise candidates to pre‑plan any personal disclosure, consider the emotional impact, and decide whether to bring it up early or later in the interview to avoid being derailed by emotion. The conversation then moves to selecting a ‘mistake’ example for the classic “Tell me about a mistake you made” question. They stress that the mistake should be minor but consequential enough to show vulnerability and learning, and that candidates should avoid overly trivial or catastrophic examples. Next, they tackle the less‑common “Tell me about the most interesting case you’ve been involved with” question, recommending candidates frame the story to demonstrate senior‑level, systems‑thinking rather than pure clinical detail, and to highlight any resulting service improvements. Throughout, they stress the importance of using “I” to claim personal ownership, clearly articulating one’s role in team projects, and avoiding vague “we” statements. Practical tips include rehearsing answers, being explicit about team size and individual contributions, and pushing through the discomfort of self‑promotion. The episode closes with a preview of next week’s content on application writing.
Chapters
Welcome back to the next fab episode of our podcast. Hi, Becky, great to have you here.
Great to be here.
Cool. So, first up, we have our question of the week from an Academy student. So, what question have we got this week?
Yeah, the question this week is, how personal is too personal? I've had a long period of sick leave, and I'm not sure what to say about it in the interview.
Okay. So, I think it's quite common that people have something, not necessarily a long period of sick leave, but something that they feel like they're not sure whether to share or how to share. And there's probably different categories of things. With sick leave, they have no obligation to mention it in the interview at all. So, if there's something that— unless there's something that is kind of mandated to declare, for example, if you've got a GMC restriction or condition, then there might be some things that you have to declare. But health stuff, you don't need to tell them in the interview. So I think the first thing is just to know that you've got no obligation to share, and you can choose whether or not to share. It's the same with being on mat leave, for example. You don't have to talk about it and you don't have to share it. Um, but you can if you want to. If there's a reason that you want to, you can, but do it because you've thought through the reasons for sharing and thought through how you're going to share it.
Mm-hmm.
But don't feel obliged. Would that be fair? What do you think? What are your thoughts about this?
Yeah. I think that's true. I, I think that what you say about knowing what you're gonna say about it ahead of it is absolutely key. I think if you've got a, a thing that, that feels like a, you know, an elephant in the room for you, um, you need to decide whether you are going to share it or not. And if you are going to share it, think about how you're going to frame it. What's the narrative that you're going to give the panel around that? What do you want them to know about it? And, you know, how much are you willing to tell them? And I think, know ahead of the interview what you're going to do about it. Don't think, I'm going to see how it goes on the day. I'm going to kind of see what the vibe is. Don't do that around something this important and this personal, because I think you need to know how you're going to tell it. I think the other thing is, you know, when this very personal stuff comes out, if you feel that it's something that you need to share, just be aware that there's probably gonna be quite a lot of emotion attached to it. In a time when you're already under stress and pressure and emotions are heightened. And so I feel if you— if there's something that you really need to get out, then maybe just get it out later, if you haven't already discussed it pre-interview. Because what you don't want to do is get a whole massive rush of emotion at the beginning of the interview and derail yourself for the next 40 minutes so that you can't give the best that you can possibly give. So, have a plan and do it later, I would say.
Yeah, I think that's great advice. The emotion thing, I think, is so important because all of the fact that you're worried about whether or not to talk about something, it means that there is emotion attached to it, which is fine, which is very reasonable. And so, yeah, the leaving it till just see how, go with the flow on the day kind of thing is, I think, doomed for disaster because all of that emotion's there. You don't want to be, you know, bursting into tears at the start of your interview, or just being in your head even thinking the whole way through the interview, did I say— should I have said that? I wish I hadn't said that. And it's just very distracting. So yeah, I think you want to— as much as you can only control so many things in your interview, but you can control what you choose to share about yourself. And you're not under any obligation to share something around sick leave or particular things. You don't have to share stuff, so you can choose what you bring to the interview. And if you choose to bring it, you bring it for a specific reason and have just practised a number of times so that you know how it's going to go.
One of the things for me around this is, if you can imagine after your interview that the panel is going to say, what about this long period of think, Leila, what about, you know, I've heard blah blah. Um, if you think it's going to be a topic of conversation for the panel after the interview, maybe that is something that you would choose to get out, um, in the way that you choose. Um, for example, I, I once interviewed somebody, and at the end of the interview they said, can I just let you know, um, that I've got a conviction, um, from a long time ago. Um, it is spent, but it will come up on my DBS check. Um, I'd really like to discuss it with you now rather than you wondering about it later when I'm not in the room to talk to you about it. I was— I thought that was so brave. Um, and we actually had a really, you know, robust and open conversation about that. And we employed that person, and it was a great decision. So, I think, but he clearly had a plan about how he was going to approach that, and it worked out really well for him. So, I think, you know, decide what you're going to do about it and have a plan if you're going to mention it, and then stick with it.
Yeah, and we do quite a lot of work with our Academy students when they've got something that they need to say. And there are some things, like, obviously you've mentioned a conviction, that they're going So to avoid it is worse because then someone will— it'll be pulled up on the DBS check and they'll be like, why did he not mention that? You know, it seems dishonest in a way.
Mm-hmm.
So there's definitely some things that you have to share. And the way that that person, they obviously felt very confident in discussing it. And I guess the fact that it was a long time ago, maybe they felt more removed from it. And so it was less emotional to discuss. It's something we, do talk to our students about as well is where in the interview to do that. Because the person you mentioned has put it at the end. And sometimes I think we encourage people to put it, just get it out at the start. And that probably depends on how stressed they're going to be about it. Because what you don't want— in this guy's situation, I don't think he— obviously wasn't stressed about bringing it up. But what you don't want is that you spend the whole interview thinking, Oh, I'm going to have to bring this up. I'm going to have to bring this up. Or are they going to ask me before? Or what's going to happen? And then you just do it as a last-ditch attempt at the end. Because that's a risk of also derailing how you go in the interview. So if it's going to be something that you're going to spend the interview being worried they're going to bring up or stressing about how you're going to bring up, sometimes it is better just to do it at the beginning as well and just say, look, before we start, I just want to address the elephant in the room, or whatever. This is the thing that I want to say. And so, I think either of these options are fine, and also sometimes it's fine not to say it. But I think the theme that we're trying to draw out with all of these things is, don't do it off the cuff. Actually have thought about this and have a plan, a reasoned plan beforehand.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, we're going to go into the golden example of The week. What have we got this week?
Yeah, okay, so this is one of our students' potential mistake examples. They had a virtual morning clinical governance meeting, and the student attended that from home, and then they were coming in to do an afternoon theatre list. They got stuck in traffic after the virtual governance meeting. the theatre list was delayed in starting, and then they apologised to the team. They did manage to get everything done on time, and they thought maybe they should have attended the clinical governance meeting from work rather than from home.
Okay.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, yes, they probably should have attended the governance meeting from work, so I suppose in that way It's a mistake, but I don't know, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I'm, I'm sure it was stressful at the time coming in late from track, but if it's a one-off, yeah, I don't know that it's really a mistake enough to be significant enough to say in your interview. Um, I don't know, what do you think?
I— yeah, agreed. I think it's just a little bit kind of bland. Um, I don't think it particularly, you know, shows that you made a mistake.
Is it like in the these things happen kind of category?
Yeah, yeah, it's like, okay, you know, you got stuck in traffic. I think, you know, as long as you're not somebody who consistently, you know, is late for work, then— because that'll be—
But the thing is, if you were someone who was consistently late for work, it wouldn't be a good example to use.
Yeah, that's true. Because they'd be like, well, he won't Yeah.
So then it would be bad. So yeah, either way, I don't think it's really big enough to be a mistake that I would use in the interview. I think this is common. It's a difficult thing choosing a good mistake to share, because you don't want it to be too big. You don't want it to be, I'm always late, and they were like, oh, Tessa, you're late again. You've been late every day for the last month. So you don't want it, or something terrible happened to a patient. You don't want it to to be too big, but at the same time, you don't want it to be too small that they're just like, come on, that's not a mistake. And so, finding that balance, which I think should err closer towards the not being a big deal than being a big deal, it should err towards being a minor-ish mistake, but there needs to be some sort of consequence to it. Otherwise, you're not getting the chance to be vulnerable. You're not showing any vulnerability. You're just saying something that wasn't really— didn't really have an impact on anything.
Yeah.
And it's worth— because it is hard to find this, but you only only need one example of a mistake, because they're only going to ask you it once. So, it's worth spending the time finding this, finding a good example before your interview.
Yeah. So, yeah, it's a fine line, right? We don't want you to think about it for the first time in the interview, and then you talk about the worst mistake that you've ever made, and you accidentally find yourself mentioning a never event, and you cut the wrong leg off or something. Clearly, that's not what we want to go for, but something does need to happened. Um, you know, so things, you know, things that work well are, you know, put the blood in the wrong bottle, um, didn't do a blood test when I should have done, you know, those kind of things where it does cause a delay, maybe some minor harm. You, you know, needed to rectify it and you needed to do some learning from it. That, that those are the kind of things that we want. But I think this one It's just a bit like, yeah, but so I think it's probably not quite enough to show that kind of ownership and vulnerability that we're after. Interview question of the week. So this is a question that's come up at one of our students' interviews, and the question is, tell me about the most interesting case you've been involved with And what did you learn from that experience?
I think this is quite a tricky question because I don't think this is asked that commonly.
It's quite unusual.
So then you've got to think, okay, what are they asking? What— it's thinking, right, what are they asking here and what can we share?
Yeah, I think you've got to think about why is this question being asked at a consultant interview?
Yeah.
Because actually, we've all been involved in some really interesting cases, right? But actually, a lot of the time, we might, you know, you might tell the story in the coffee room, and we go, oh, wow, that's cool, or, oh, that sounds awful. But what does it say about you as a senior member of staff? So, I think you've got to think about what this case shows in terms of learning, systems-level thinking and kind of bigger picture. So maybe there was a case that you were involved in that subsequently was reviewed in some way, or there was some governance process around it, or it went to PSRF or something like that. Obviously we don't want you to be sharing something where you made a mistake. But if this case subsequently changed the process or a patient pathway, then that's the case to share. Because what we want to be able to do is to, you know, talk about, yeah, okay, an interesting clinical case, but then we want to be able to say, and actually, as a result of this case, we reviewed, you know, the whole patient pathway from the pre-hospital events—
Yeah.
Right up to theatre, and we've, changed our system so that now that, you know, the way we, I know, notify cases coming in off HEMS is this. This is how we, you know, activate our major haemorrhage protocol. This is what it means for patients in theatre, and this is how we follow through the whole patient pathway. So yeah, sure, it's a really interesting case, and maybe the bit that you want to talk about is, you know, the resuscitative thoracotomy that was done. And sure, that was really interesting, but actually Talk about end-to-end system change as a result of this case, because that's where you're going to score the points for senior-level thinking. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think that's a great approach to it. The other thing that's kind of come to mind is this, often we tell people when they're going for their interviews that they don't need to prove clinical competence. So, you're already qualified, that's why you're in the interview. care. You know, you've got your CCT, you've got your CESR, you're eligible. So in a substantive interview in particular, you're not trying to prove that you can do the job clinically. In a locum interview, I think that's maybe a bit different because it's a bit more service delivery than, you know, senior-level involvement. But in a substantive, you're not proving where you're up to clinically. There may be an opportunity here though, because it's such a specific question, depending on what specialty you're in and whether it resonates, to talk about A case that is clinically interesting. Normally, I wouldn't say— I don't recommend that people do that because I think it just misses an opportunity to talk about a bigger picture, senior-level thinking. But maybe in this, for example, if you were doing like— if you were applying for some surgical job with a particular interest, actually, it could give you an opportunity to talk about a unique type of case or unique type of procedure. I don't know what you think about that, Becky. I know it kind of goes against what we normally suggest to people, but— Maybe in this question it would be suitable.
Yeah, I think it definitely could work, but then just remember to apply those additional elements on top of it. Yeah, so still show that, okay, so this is a really interesting case, and then what I've done apart from my own learning, then I went and reviewed the evidence around it, I delivered some teaching to the rest of the department, so, you know, I've shared this knowledge more widely. So to show them that you're not now just interested in your own learning, your own clinical skill, because that's what a good registrar does, but you are levelling this up now and being a good consultant, and you are now interested in other people's learning, you know, patient outcomes across the kind of across the service and general service delivery, you know, as as a result of this one particularly interesting case.
Okay, so maybe, yeah, a couple of variations on what your approach could be to answer this, but broadly, make sure you move into senior-level thinking. And I think I don't love this question, to be honest. I wouldn't love being asked it, but I appreciate it may come up. But yeah, it's not my favourite question.
No, I don't love it either. But I think with any question that comes up, if it seems a bit off the wall or a bit maybe a bit easy, then you've got to go, okay, why are they asking me this today?
Just think about it. That's a really good point, because when you think about, when you get used to understanding what they're going to ask you in your interviews, obviously we see like thousands of questions, but when you prep and you realize, right, these are the questions that are likely to come up, you can actually pick when they ask you a question that's not the norm. So, this is not a standard question, and then that gives you just more of a cause to Pause and just think exactly what you're saying. Right, well, this is a bit odd. Why would they be asking me it? And that will help you channel a better answer. Tips and tricks. This week we have got the idea of using I when you're talking about your USPs to say I, not we. And I think people find this really hard because it's the NHS and everyone works— obviously you're working with other people all the time. And none of— no project you're probably ever going to have done is going to be an I, is going to be just, I've done this on my own without anyone else. And so, when you come to talk about it in your interview, you can't help yourself from just saying, we did this, we did that, we did this.
Mm-hmm.
But we really try to push people to take ownership, not to take credit where it wasn't their work, but to be able to take ownership of the parts that they did. So that's fine, you did it as a team, we understand that, of course. But what was your role in the project? Because it's you being interviewed, it's not the team. And actually, the panel doesn't really care whether your team had a great outcome. They want to know what skills you're bringing to the team. And so it's trying to push people to say, right, well, what was your role? And that's the difference between maybe you were on a project team, but you just sat at the back of the room in every meeting and you didn't contribute. Or maybe you led the team, you created the goals, you created the vision, you made sure the meetings happened regularly, you set benchmarks. That's a very different— 2 very different roles in a team, both of which have a we element. But what you want to say is, my role— this was the project, we were in a team of 5 people, my role was to do X, Y, and Z. And try and encourage you to bring that out in your answers.
I recently had a one-to-one with a student who was talking about a project that they'd been involved in, which was transforming the outpatient referral pathway from GP to getting into outpatient services. And there were various aspects. And they'd created a great kind of suite of resources. But what this student was able to do was to say, my role was to make sure that the patient information leaflets around this were updated. I, uh, and, you know, as a result of this, I checked the evidence base around them. I, you know, tested them with a group of service users. I made sure that the, you know, the, the language was at the appropriate level for, you know, most of our, um, local population. I got them translated into various different languages. Um, and so actually, you know, they, they were involved in a project that involved multiple different people But they're really clear on their own role, and the particular value and impact that they added. And that's really important. That's where you score points.
Yeah, because the panel doesn't know what the project involves. They're just imagining it themselves. And until you tell them, they won't be clear. And sometimes in the converse side, people will say to me, we ran a project where we looked at 300 patients, and we made this amazing— they say this amazing change, it sounds like an amazing project. And in my head, it must have been 20 people on the team doing this. And then I say, well, how many people were on the team? And they're like, oh, it was me, or it was me and one other person. And you're like, you should say that because the panel won't know unless you tell them. They'll just be imagining whatever they think it looks like. But actually, once you bring out the specifics and be clear on what your contribution was and how it looked and Even the size of the team or whatever, it becomes a lot clearer what your involvement was, and then these are the skills that you're bringing to the team. Although it feels awkward at first, I know it does, but just keep pushing yourself to say, how can I say I? How can I be clear on what my involvement is? Just remind yourself, it's you they're employing. You're the one who wants the job, so you have to show them your skills. Even if that seems a bit awkward, You have to just go for it.
It's super cringy, right? It just feels really, really awful to kind of blow your own trumpet. Nobody else is going to do it for you. You've just got to do that in the interview. Put all the cringing to one side, and you can just get out and have just one massive cringe at the end if that's what you want to do. But you're just gonna have to push through it in the interview and really own it.
Yeah, and also, you can just imagine all your competitors doing— they're doing it. They're saying, I did this, I did that, and, you know, They will have an advantage over you if you don't push yourself to do that.
Yeah.
We will wrap up there. Thank you very much. We've got great stuff lined up for next week, including thinking about how to write your application to try and optimize your chances of being shortlisted. So I will see you next week, Becky. Thank you.
Sounds great.
