In all of the practice interviews I hold with UCL students, it's often the
effective use of the STAR technique that separates good candidates from the
brilliant ones. In this video I'm going to get to the heart of what the STAR
technique is, why it matters, how to use it and when you should use it so that
you can derive benefits from it too. I'm Raj your friendly UCL Careers Consultant
let's roll the intro and get right into it
STAR is an acronym and it stands Situation, Task, Action and Result, and it
gives you an order and a structure to share examples in an interview. The
Situation sets the wider scene, while the Task starts to narrow your example e.g
during my political sciences degree I was tasked with analysing a Swedish
political campaign, or while volunteering at the Grant Museum, I was tasked with
designing a visitor satisfaction survey. The situation and the Task set your
example up. Now the action section is where you
spend most of your time and you go into rich, full detail about exactly what you
did, and if you want the best marks, also why you did that,
while the Result is simply the outcome. And intuitively it makes sense right... you
set the scene, you narrow the example, you focus on what happened and then what
happened as a result of that. This is simply the bedrock of good storytelling
so that your example makes good sense. So how do you use STAR? Well I'm going to show
you by answering this question: "tell me about a time when you used communication
skills to make a difference"... sure (an example) when I was working at the Grant Museum as a
volunteer, I was tasked with designing a visitor satisfaction survey. The very
first thing I did was to share news of what I was doing with my fellow
volunteers so that (a) they knew (b) they could share their ideas for good
questions to ask in the survey, and it was great for getting diverse viewpoints,
but also (c) by including their questions everyone pulled round to
ensure the success of the survey. The next thing I did was to set up a mini
pilot project where I took the draft questions and I shared them with visitors
to the museum, and it really helped me refine the questions to get them in
their best possible shape. In the meanwhile I kept my manager informed, telling her
of milestones I was reaching, but also sharing an estimated time by which I
might be able to communicate the findings of the survey results. As an
outcome we got 37 amazing survey responses and all the team came together
to work really well, and we were able to implement a
number of changes that they recommended, and I communicated that in following
months by making a you-said we-did board which is visible to all visitors to the
museum. So that's my example of a STAR-based answer now let's break it down to
see what potentially made it effective. Firstly the Situation and the Task were
super short, and I spent the vast majority of my time in the Action
section; maybe 70% maybe even 80%, where I went into rich detail about what I did
and why I did it, for example I said first thing I did was to engage my
fellow volunteers in order to make them feel invested in the project and to get
those diverse questions from them as well. In your example you should
definitely aim for at least 70% of your time spent in the Action section as well.
Secondly, fill the Action section of your example with sub-attributes of the
specific skill you've been asked for. Now you might have noticed that in my
example answer for communication skills, I used and referenced things like open
questions, keeping my manager up to date, engaging people, sharing ideas and these
all act really really well as supporting evidence for communication. So that's
what STAR is and that's how you can use its mighty power! Use it every time you
share an example in an interview... that generally might be in response to
competency questions like "tell me about a time you did X" but also for strengths-based
questions as well where you're going to want to use an example, and if
you're going to use an example, you want to be using STAR. Ultimately, STAR
encourages effective storytelling, storytelling that allows your
interviewer insights into how you will perform in the role. Now if you'd like to
continue the conversation, feel free to leave a comment in the section down
below. I love reading those and responding to
them. And if you have any careers questions, feel free to email me at
careers.marketing@ucl.ac.uk and your question might just be featured
in the next Q&A video coming out in March. That's it from me for this week,
I'll see you next time!