The STAR method for answering behavioral interview questions

October 4, 2022 Jennifer Scupi

The STAR method is a technique used to answer behavioral interview questions.

What is the STAR method?

The STAR technique / method is a system used by job candidates to answer behavioral interview questions. You can’t really use it for basic questions like “Tell me about yourself” or “Why do you want to work here?” It provides a structure for you to remember so that you include the correct info in your answers.

These are the four steps of the technique:

S – Situation

T – Task

A – Action

R – Result

Let’s look at each of those steps in detail.

Situation

The context. Describe the situation you faced and the background. The who/what/when/where/why.

Include:

Company background: company name, industry, brief overview of product/service.
The project: What was it about? What was the size/scope?
Your role and responsibilities: Your job title, activities, decisions you owned, and decision-making level on the project.
When this happened.

Who was in it with you; what were the relationships?

What would have happened if you didn’t resolve it (blast radius)?

Task

What did you need to accomplish in this situation?

Action

How did you solve the problem? What was involved in the execution?

Some things to include:

What options did you consider? What were the pros/cons of each?
Who else was involved?
What was your thought process?

Results

Was it resolved? What was the outcome you achieved?

How did you measure success for this project? Quantify to understand volume, size, scale. You can give both absolute numbers and relative percentage.

Where was the impact?

Top-line driven: revenue, market share, new customer acquisition
Bottom-line driven (cost-savings): time/person hours, budget, space, equipment reuse
Customer-value driven: CSAT, customer anecdotes, adoption rate, retention rate
Engineering-driven: traffic volume/velocity, week-over-week bug/severity tally, implementation time, deployment time, compute power/time metrics
Risk-driven: risk reduced, crisis prevented
Impact on the team

How do I use STAR?

If you get asked a behavioral question, answer by telling your story, going through the letters of STAR in order.

The first step of your story will be the S part (explain the basic situation).

Then give the T (what was your job in this situation?)

Then A (show what you did).

Last, give the R (outcome).

Keep the letters in mind as you’re saying your answer so you don’t miss a step.

That’s it. STAR is an acronym that reminds you to include all the pieces of your story.

Sample answer for two behavioral questions

Question: “Tell me about a goal you had and how you achieved it.”

Answer given by an SDM

S – I was working at Oracle in 2021 as a Software Development Manager. After I got promoted, I learned that we had more projects ongoing than we had originally pIanned and that some of the projects were taking longer than we had planned. Once I realized this I knew I would need more Engineers to complete the work.

T – Hiring was my responsibility, so I needed to decide how many Engineers to hire.

A – I charted our planned projects and then decided how many people I thought I needed. I used our records as well as my own observations. I came up with the number of people and then asked my colleagues for their opinions. Once we had a final number, which was four, I worked with recruiting to create job descriptions, screen candidates, and then interview them. We spent three months on this process and eventually hired enough people.

R – Now we're adequately staffed, and the work is going well. We didn’t miss any of our deadlines even though we were understaffed, although we had to work extra hours for a while.

Pro Tip: This candidate uses the right structure, but the Results sections lacks metrics. If possible, pick an example where you can use numbers in your results. For instance, "And we made 5% more this quarter," or "My sales numbers are up 25% over last year." Numbers, particularly financial metrics, make the results more impressive. This example did talk about the number of people hired but not the number of projects or the size of the projects.

Question: “Tell me about a time you had a difficult situation with an employee.”

Answer given by a Director of Product Management

S – I recently had an employee, one of my Product Managers, who was not performing well. She was late meeting some deadlines, she missed details, and she lost her temper in meetings occasionally. The people she worked with were complaining about her attitude and the quality of her work.

T – The executive team wanted me to fire her but I wasn't sure that was the right thing to do. I needed to evaluate the situation and make a plan.

A – I talked to HR and the executive team, and we decided I would collect the evidence about her performance in a document and then present it to her. I did this. There were quite a few examples of her mistakes. During her review, she was very angry and blamed her problems on the company structure. We discussed the issues and in the end we decided that we would work closely together for 60 days to improve her performance. I monitored her closely during that time period.

R – My plan was successful in that her performance did improve (as well as her attitude). I'm not happy with the amount of time I had to spend with her, but I hoped that by spending the time mentoring her I would end up with a good Product Manager who could work independently of me.

Use PAR, not STAR

I hope you now understand STAR, but what is PAR?

Many people who know the STAR method find it confusing to use because the S and the T steps seem so similar. If you have no idea what I’m talking about you can ignore this and keep using STAR. But if you’ve been wondering about the similarity and getting confused, this article may help.

Get some feedback

Now that you know about STAR you can start preparing your stories. If you’d like some help, set up a coaching session with me.

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