STAR technique, For Interview Questions

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. A strategy that is significantly helpful in response to Behavioural aka Competency aka Leadership questions, which typically start with phrases such as, “Describe a time when…” and “Tell me an example where….”. Let’s understand each of these concepts in a brief manner.

Situation:

• Spend few moments and think of a situation similar to what the interviewer is asking you which had a successful outcome. If there was not a successful outcome, never hesitate to talk about failures. Remember that the interviewer wants you to succeed. They are people who understand that journey is not just successful outcomes but also intermittent failures.
• Candidates usually make a mistake of either jumping on the question immediately without putting enough thoughts which results in either the candidate missing on strong situations that could have been concrete examples to the given question or the interviewer feeling that the candidate does not put enough thoughts before answering.
• Remember to always include the important aspects of who, what, where, when and how so that the interviewer can easily visualise and understand your situation.

Task:

• Explain the task you were assigned and how you took ownership in that situation. Throw some light on your responsibilities in that situation. Pin point the task that you were directly responsible for. Convey the details to the interviewer and at the same time have a look on the clock.
• Remember to walk your interview through some critical aspects like : What was the task assigned to you for the given situation? Secondly, was it you who identified this task? What was the expected result of this task and did it meet the expectations?
• Keep it specific yet concise. Always look out on the clock. Time is a critical component during such rounds where you don’t want to narrate long stories.
• Make sure you highlight the constraints, challenges and obstacles you faced while achieving this task.

Action:

• This is the opportunity where you can dive deep on exactly what you did. How did you accomplish the assigned tasks? These imbibe the steps and procedures that you followed to lead the task to its final outcome.
• Think about all the items that you vested your time in and how you personally ensured that the task was achieved on time. Always highlight what you did and not others.
• Be sure to highlight the good qualities you showed in taking those specific actions but never hesitate to mention the misses and learnings you got while accomplishing the task. This helps interviewers understand that you are not afraid of failures and treat them as a learning for future.
• Demonstrate your best traits to the interviewer in the Action phase. If your actions showed strong leadership, amazing communication skills and great dedication, make sure that you let this information flow to your interviewer. Focus on highlighting the abilities that an interviewer would find desirable. Don’t make it explicit by speaking the above traits out. Explain your role and the interactions honestly. Interviewers are smart to pick up hints about traits. Candidates usually make a mistake of explicitly talking about how collaborative they are, their dedication levels. Usually interviewers will counter that by asking questions like “Tell me about a time when you had conflict with some teammates/ manager”, “Give me an example where you were not interested in the work given and how did you go about it?”.

Result:

• Be introspective here. The result portion of the STAR method is where you demonstrate your achievements and final outcomes.
• Share what the result of the situation was and how you and your actions contributed to that final result.
• What did you achieve? What were the learnings? What were the outcomes of your actions? What were the actions you took? How was the engagement to this outcome? How successful the feature and delivery was?
• If the work is in progress mention its future roadmap and how it would help you create an impact and what status the actions are at.