The STAR framework to answer interview questions.
The 3 ingredients of a successful interview.
There are 3 ingredients to a successful interview.
You have to be competent in the subject that you are being interviewed on.
You have to be able to communicate your competence clearly.
You have to be good at counter-interviewing your interviewer.
The first 2 ingredients are needed in the fist part of the interview, i.e. when you are being interviewed by the interviewer. In a 1 hour long interview, this part typically consists of the first 50-55 minutes.
The third ingredient is important in the second and last part of the interview, when you are given the opportunity to ask questions to your interviewer. In a 1 hour long interview, this part typically consists of the last 5-10 minutes.*
With this post, we want to help you bring the second of these 3 ingredients to the table**: clear, concise, and relevant communication of your competence.
* This second part of the interview is so important - and yet so often overlooked - that we wrote another blog post specifically about it!
** Pun intended.
The STAR framework.
The STAR framework is a general communication technique. This technique also happens to be particularly effective in the context of behavioral interviews.
But why the name “STAR”? STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Based on these words, you may have already guessed that the framework invites you to articulate your answer in 4 phases:
Explain the Situation.
Discuss the Task that you needed to accomplish.
Describe the Action that you took to accomplish that task.
Summarize the Result that your action produced.
How does the STAR framework help you in an interview? It gives you a standardized mechanism to answer questions in a way that is logical, to the point, and precise.
The STAR framework can be helpful in multiple occasions, but - in particular - it will make you shine in behavioral interviews, where the questions that the interviewer asks you may intentionally sound vague. By using the STAR framework, you overcome vagueness instead of succumbing to it.
Example.
Here is a prototypical script that you can memorize.
INTERVIEWER: “Tell me about a time when you…”
YOU: “This was the situation: … I understood that the task was to … Therefore, I took this action: … By taking that action, I produced this result: …”
Let’s apply this script to a realistic scenario.
INTERVIEWER: “Tell me about a time when you showed initiative and took the lead.”
YOU: “This was the situation: after a few weeks working on a team project, I realized that my team and I were struggling with completing our assignments on time. In fact, by then we had already missed 2 of 4 deadlines. I understood that the task was to help the team improve with time management. Therefore, I took this action: I collected information on the time availability of each team member and I used that information to set up a series of team meetings occurring every other day. In those meetings, the entire team could collaborate and make progress on the project without distractions. By taking that action, I produced this result: in all of the remaining 10 weeks of class, we were able to submit our weekly team assignment on time.
Tips.
A few important tips:
Don’t be afraid to highlight your contributions: appropriately use “I/me” instead of “we/us” in your answers when you highlight your specific contributions. Don’t brag, but be confident.
Keep your answers short and to the point. Most often, the initial question that the interviewer asks you is a “starter” question. They will use it as a starting point to further probe into your experiences. By keeping your answer concise, you are giving the interviewer more time to ask you the follow-up questions that they really want to ask you. For instance, in our previous example the interviewer may want to evaluate your conflict-resolution skills and follow-up with something like: “Very interesting. How did you resolve conflicts with teammates who did not want to adopt the meeting schedule that you proposed?”.
Prefer quantitative results over qualitative results. Qualitative results such as “Everyone in the team was happy.” or “I solved the problem.” are not very informative. Quantitative results such as “As a result of taking this action, I was able to generate a 3.2% increase in revenue.” or “Thanks to this change, the company’s monthly expenses were reduced from $170,000 to $120,000.$ are not only informative, but offer more opportunities to the interviewer to follow-up and keep the interview flowing nicely. In our previous example, note that we used the number of missed assignment deadlines as the key metric to provide a quantitative evaluation of the final result.
Conclusion.
We wish you success with using the STAR framework in your interviews! If you need help getting in your best shape for an upcoming interview, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
