Are you ready for your closeup? Do you understand STAR power?
Yes, I’m talking about behavior-based interviews, my all-time personal bane as a job seeker and maybe yours, too. These interviews tend to start off innocently enough:
- Tell me about a situation when circumstances required you to…
- Give me an example of a time when you…
- Describe for me the most important…
And then the level of difficulty increases. The recruiter’s questions start growing legs, even tentacles, and before long you’re choking. For example:
Tell me about the last directive from senior management that failed to achieve its desired goal. Why do you think it failed? What role did you play in the process or failure?
Another turn of the noose:
Give me an example of a time when you had to present material or implement a process you didn’t fully support. Did you voice your concern? How? Who did you voice your concern to?
You’re becoming apoplectic:
Describe a situation in which your leadership skills were rejected. Why were they rejected? How did you manage the situation?
OMG! Your mind is racing, your heart pounding, you’re breaking out in a sweat, you feel floored — “um, um…I, uh (gulp), well….” You try to deflect, to buy yourself some time. You ask the recruiter to clarify. If only you had come better prepared. Too late now.
So you scramble for an answer, feverishly sifting through the slot machine of long-buried images in your head, memories of past conversations, the failures to communicate, rejecting the scenarios that only make you look bad. You’re desperate to depict yourself and your past actions in a positive, make that a glowing, light. Ha! Fat chance! Then, having exhausted all your stratagems and the recruiter’s patience, the rambling ensues.
The verdict is a foregone conclusion: You just talked yourself out of a job. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
The STAR approach
Behavior-based questions require you to provide specific — not general or hypothetical — examples of how YOU handled work-related challenges in the past. Recruiters are sticklers about this. The person posing these questions will be assigning marks to each of your answers based on pre-established technical and performance-related criteria, such as competency, strategic and problem-solving ability, command skills, integrity and trust. Three strikes, maybe less, and you’re out. You can squirm, object, get angry, beg for more time, even walk out, or — best tactic of all — you can come prepared.
Situation —> Task —> Action —> Result, a.k.a. STAR and sometimes just plain old SAR, is a framework you must learn to master, or at least adopt, to succeed in answering behavior-based interview questions. You might even add a “Q,” for quantifiable, to this formula. Trust me, I’m still working on it, given how vivid are the memories of my own failed attempts at winging it.
You will have 90 seconds, up to a maximum of three minutes, to articulate your answers, ensuring your description of your actions and accomplishments adheres rigorously to this deceptively simple STAR(Q) outline. No deviations.
My best advice, based on painful experience: get a hold of some sample behavioral questions, carefully formulate and write out your answers, then commit them to memory. What’s more, consider how you might adapt your three or four strongest accomplishments to variations on these question types.
— Judy Margolis