Chances are that you’ve either had a behavioral interview or are going to have one if you’re
looking for a new job.
There’s one way that you can answer any behavioral interview question that is guaranteed
to please the employer.
I’ll walk you through what it is.
Thousands of people have used this model to answer these questions successfully.
I’ll also walk through a specific example so you can see it in action.
I’m Jen with The Career Force.
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Behavioral interviews are used so that employers can understand your actual experience in a
variety of specific situations.
As a reminder, a lot of behavioral interview questions start out with
“Tell me about a time." or "Give me an example."
If you want to know more about behavioral interviews, I’ve linked to the last video below.
Your goal in answering any behavioral interview question is to give a concise yet thorough
answer so the interviewer can fully understand the circumstances of the situation.
There’s one way to answer that works for any behavioral interview question.
It’s called the STAR model.
It goes through the situation, the task or objective, the action you took, and the result.
Let’s look at each part of this.
Have you heard of the STAR model or used it yourself?
Comment below to let me know.
Let’s take a look at each part of this model and then see it in action.
Let’s look first at the situation.
Talk about the background.
What role were you in?
What was going on?
Why did the situation come up?
Use about 1-3 sentences to let your interviewer know what the situation was.
Next, talk about the task.
What were you asked to do, or what were you trying to accomplish?
Again, this should take about 1-3 sentences.
Action is where most of your response time should be spent.
Talk about what steps you took to accomplish the goal.
Were you successful?
If you weren’t, be clear about what you learned.
I’ll talk a little more about that in the result step.
The reason you want to focus most of your answer on the action is because it talks about
what you specifically did to impact the situation.
So, while you might use 1-3 sentences for the situation and the task, the action could
take 5, 6, or more sentences.
The last step of the star model is the result.
How did things turn out?
If it was a failure, be sure to talk about what you learned.
Failure isn’t a bad thing as long as you learned something.
Actually you may be better off in the future if things didn’t turn out how you were planning.
So be sure to be clear about how things ended up.
Again, as with the situation and the task, 1-3 sentences is all you need here.
Now that we’ve talked about the STAR model, let’s look at a sample in action.
Let’s look at the behavioral interview question, “Tell me about a time you had to made a
judgement call.”
Answer: In my roll managing a new product launch, one of the parts that we needed for
production was delivered the morning we were supposed to start but was non-conforming.
Here I’ve just talked about the situation.
Now the task.
We needed to keep to the production schedule because we already had people lined up for
production runs.
But we also needed to make sure that the units that we shipped at the end met all the specifications
they were supposed to.
I quickly reviewed the function of the non-conforming part and determined that it was critical to
the function of the complete unit.
However, I also figured out that with minimal rework we could go ahead and build with the
non-conforming part and then replace them at the end.
This kept us to the production schedule and allowed us to ship complete good units at the end.
So there I’ve just talked about the action and the result.
You’ll notice that my entire response was about a minute.
In fact, a minute or two is a perfect answer to these types of questions.
A 10 minutes answer is usually a really bad answer because it means you’re not being
concise and clear.
Now that you know how to use the STAR model, practice it yourself by answering a few of
the common behavioral interview questions.
You can find more on our site at thecareerforce.com.
If you’re searching for a new job, check
out our guide that walks you through the key
steps to making sure your job search
is a success.
Thanks so much for watching.
I’ll see you in the next video.