Be An Interview STAR

We’ve all had the pre-interview jitters. You want this new job so badly, but have no clue what the people across the desk from you will be asking. How can you prepare for something you can’t predict? While I can’t see into the future to tell you what questions you’ll be asked at your next job interview, I can promise you that the interviewer will want to hear EXAMPLES to back up your assertions about yourself. In this article, I’ll breakdown a technique you can use to prepare and deliver the best examples possible for job interviews.

Career consultants recommend using the STAR approach when describing your experiences. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Activity, and Result. Using this format, you can develop quality examples to accurately demonstrate your experience. Begin by providing some context to the example (Situation). Next, talk about the project you were assigned or took on yourself (Task). Follow that up by describing your specific behaviors that affected the project (Activity), and close it out by detailing the positive results from your efforts (Results).

Here’s an example of a strong, STAR formatted response to a typical interview question: “Tell me about a challenging situation you’ve faced in your career.”

“The company I’m working for now faces tremendous talent wars. When I joined the team, we were losing 60% of our new hires within a year of their start! The organization had never had issues this severe in the past, and didn’t know where to begin. (SITUATION)  I was tasked with improving company retention because it was a major issue for the organization. (TASK) So, I created a survey that the company adopted and sent out to all of its employees for anonymous feedback on their satisfaction levels. The results were a tough pill for the company’s leadership to swallow, but helped to identify three key areas where current and former employees felt the company needed to improve. I worked with leadership to develop strategies on how they could make improvements in these high-need areas. (ACTIVITY) A year after my strategies were adopted, employee retention had improved by 80%!” (RESULT)

You can’t predict what questions will be asked in that upcoming interviewing. But you CAN come prepared with high quality examples of your performance using the methods in this article and in my Weekly Communication Tips series. If you follow the STAR system, you’ll separate yourself from the competition and hopefully land your dream job!