If you’re interviewing with someone from an HR team, or if you’re going for a job that’s in some way government funded, it may be worth knowing about the ‘STAR’ method of answerting situational questions.
It may feel slightly cheesy if you have not come across it before, but,it’s a recognised model for answering behavioural interview questions (or even including info on covering letters). And, it’s commonplace to the extent that some HR people and managers in the public sector will specifically look out for it, and may give you a bit of extra credit if you’ve followed the pattern as, on top of fully answering their questions, it lets them know you understand their ‘rules of operating’.
‘STAR’ is, of course, an acronym. It stands for: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
The model basically suggests that where you are asked ‘behavioural’ or ‘situational’ questions, you should spell out a specific example by giving details of the overall situation, what the task you were supposed to do was, what action you took, and what the result was.
This style of ‘situational’ interviewing will be very familiar to you if you’ve been through a few formal interviews. Rather than simply asking questions like “what makes you stressed?”, the interviewer may ask “tell us about a situation at work where you’ve felt under pressure.”
The interviewer, in this case, is really trying to map your behaviour from a past situation onto what they may expect from you if you are successful in working for their company.
The Two Most Common Errors
Two errors you may make here are:
- Being overly general, to the point you do not give a specific example
- In digital roles, there is also potential to rush the explanation, assuming the interviewer (who may be an HR generalist) has technical knowledge they may not possess
An Example
Here’s an example of how you might answer this for one of the interview cliché questions – ‘your weaknesses’ – firstly if you did not know about the STAR method, and secondly using the method itself.
Q: Tell us about a situation where one of your weakness has affected your team?
Here’s a fairly normal way of answering that question, using the standard pattern of showing a weakness that actually benefits the employer, but falling into the pitfall of being too general:
Well, sometimes I can be a little overcautious about making sure systems are running as they should. The digital world is 24/7. My team would tell you it’s something I’m paranoid about, and that I get stressed about, but I think it’s really important to make sure no customers are affected by downtime. I’ve lost count of the number of checks and balances I’ve put in place to make sure systems are available as much as possible, and I think that’s positively affected customers as a result.
That’s ok, but 1) it does not provide the specific situation, 2) if the interview is with a generalist, they may have no idea what ‘downtime’ means, or why it would be an issue.
Here’s how you may answer that using the ‘STAR’ method:
Well, sometimes I can be a little overcautious about making sure systems are running as they should, to the point where if I’m not confident everything is as it should be, the team begins to feel my stress. An example of this would be:
- [SITUATION] in my last job, we had a set of customer-facing websites. A particular website kept going down, out of our standard business hours, meaning customers were unable to place purchases. The previous manager had assigned someone the responsibility to monitor it but, of course, they couldn’t do that 24/7, and it meant that occasionally a key customer may try to access the site, find out it was down, and notify us – it’s never good to hear of an issue from a customer before you know about it.
- [TASK] I wanted to fully resolve the situation, it was literally keeping me up at night. I wanted to make sure we’d find out immediately if there was an issue and, ideally, have a backup system in place so we would not lose any customer purchases.
- [ACTION] I calculated how much downtime we’d had in the last year, and how much it had cost us. From that, I realised even if we spent £50,000 on fixing the issue, we’d easily be in profit. I put in place a system that automatically checked uptime every minute. If it found an issue, it would fall back to a backup server, and would proactively send an email to my team, and a text message to the key person responsible, so they could investigate.
- [RESULT] This cost us only £3,000 per year and, crucially, no customer has been affected since, meaning the company has saved £150,000 over the period since, with much better customer satisfaction scores.
As you can see, answers can get a bit long, as there are 4 elements to cover off, but following the formal method gives enough context that someone with no technical knowledge could understand the issue faced, see the structured response to it, and understand the positive impact.
The method of behavioural/situational interviewing becomes more and more common as time goes on, with interviewers asking more “tell us about a time when…” questions. As a result, it’s worth preparing for some standard questions that may come up.
If you’re looking to prepare for an interview, and believe they may use this style, here is a set of example ‘situational’ questions, where you could plot your answer with the STAR method:
“Can you tell me about a time when you…”
- had to work with a coworker who was difficult to get along with.
- had to deal with a difficult customer
- took on a leadership role you hadn’t been fully trained for.
- faced a difficult decision without having much information. What did you do?
- had to manage stress to meet a hard deadline.
- went above and beyond your duties.
- had to make a decision that you knew would be unpopular with your coworkers.
- faced a challenging situation in the office.
- had to persuade a coworker to go in a different direction.
- sought out additional responsibilities at work.
- had to manage a very complex project.
- had to deal with conflict within a team.
- had to work for someone you felt was ineffective.
If you’re looking to spend some more time on interview preparation, working through the above and coming up with ‘Situation’, ‘Task’, ‘Action’, ‘Result’ answers is a simple way to get your mind into answering using the method.