How to Answer "Behavior Based Interview Questions"
For many foreign students like me, technical interview questions may not be a big problem, but due to the lack of practice of oral English, we may find behavior based questions difficult to answer.
So I want to introduce STAR principle to deal with such questions. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. We should answer the question in detail, using a specific case and tell the interviewer what's MY effort in that case instead the group's effort.
For example, here is an answer from my experience.
Question: Can you tell me about a time you set a goal and you did everything possible to achieve that goal but still fell short.
Situation: I was an intern in TripAdvisor for Business last summer. We basically deal with hotel owners.
Task: I was told to create a page to show all the errors occurred when activating large hotel chains in our system.
Action: I tried to figure out all errors by myself from directly read the database content. I spent a whole day to collect all kinds of errors and figure out what they mean. I thought nothing is left, so I created a new class to contain all the error types.
Result: It turned out to be that there was already a enum class containing all possible error codes, even contains those have never occurred and can't be found in the database. As a result, I spend another day adapting the existing code to my new page, and throw away my new class for error type. It's a lesson for me to learn that I should always search and ask others whether there is already similar code somewhere to avoid unnecessary work. It is a valuable experience for me.
So, do you get the idea of STAR ?
Here is the original video I watched for this idea.
Great Post! Very impressive since I met similar problem as yours
Behavioral interviews are only used by mediocre recruiters.
Great post, Sean! "S.T.A.R." seems like a good way to answer behavior-based questions in interviews, which are common questions on which interviewees get stuck. I especially appreciated the example... must have been a very handsome and intelligent Product Manager who worked with you on that. :)