Hi guys, my name is Richard McMunn, and in this training video, I'm gonna teach you a
really great technique for getting the highest scores possible in your interview, and it's
called the STAR technique.
It's a commonly used method for responding accurately to situational type interview questions,
and those kind of interview questions are, "Can you give me an example of when you've
worked effectively as part of a team?"
"Can you give me an example of when you've carried out a difficult task under pressure?"
"Can you give me an example of you've carried out effective customer service?"
"Can you give me an example of when you've been flexible in a work-related role?"
So I'm gonna quickly go through what it is, and them I'm gonna give you sort of a quick
sample response to one of the common interview questions, and then I'll tell you where you
can get loads of written-down responses for situational type interview questions.
So, STAR technique.
When you're constructing your responses for your interview, so before you go in there,
you're gonna prepare your responses to the kind of questions you're gonna get asked.
This is how you construct it.
First and foremost, you explain the situation.
What situation were you in, and what had to be done?
So if the interview question was, "Can you give me an example of when you've been flexible
in a work-related role?"
I would say, "Yes, it was Friday, late afternoon, 4:00, and my boss came in and said that we
needed to do X, Y, and Z before we all went home at 5 p.m."
That's the situation.What was the task?
That's the next thing.
So you describe the situation, then you describe the task, and the task is what had to be done.
So I'll then move on, I would say, "Okay, the task was that we had a lorry load of new
equipment and stock coming in quickly, it was late in the day, and we had to carry out
a quick stock check before 5:00."
That's the task that had to be done.
And an important thing, when answering a question of that nature is explain anything that was
important that's relative to the task, whether it's safety-related, anything to do that demonstrates
your good organizational skills or also demonstrates your ability to carry out accurate tasks.
So situation, the task, and then we move on to the important part, which is action.
So what action did you take, and what action did other people take with regards to the
task?
So you then go on and explain what you actually did and other people did to get the task completed.
So I'd say, "Okay, we all got together, we had a quick brief about the job, what was
going to be done, and at that point, we all allocated tasks.
Okay, so we played to everyone's strengths.
I went and did this part, the other person went and got all the stock in off the lorry.
Somebody checked it all through, we made sure it was put away accurately, safely, and in
the correct place."
So you go into detail about the action that you took, and also action of other people.
And then at the end, you get through to the result part.
Okay, and I'm gonna give you a really important tip in a second with regards to this.
So what was the result following your actions?
And the tip is always make sure the result is a positive one following what you did,
because what you don't wanna say is, "Okay, so we went through the situation, the task,
the action, and then we didn't quite manage to achieve it."
Obviously, that's not gonna get you high marks.
Say, "Yeah, at the end of the task and the end of the action, everything was positive,
we got it all done, and our boss praised us for the work that we did."
If you follow this and you have this in your mind, you'll make sure that you go through
the entire situational response in a thorough manner.
You will cover all of the different areas.
What I like about this is when I'm preparing for interview questions and I'm putting together
my responses in my mind, I just focus on STAR.
What was the situation, what was the task, what action did I do and action did other
people do, and then what was the result?
And you can't go far wrong with this.
Now I mentioned about sample responses.
If you click the link right now below this video, it will take you through to my website,
where you can get a few sample responses that you can use as a template and a blueprint
when responding to situational type interview questions, and you'll see on the blog post
that I've used the STAR technique.
I hope you've enjoyed that tutorial.
Please give the video a thumbs up.
I'd really appreciate that and it'll motivate me to do more.
Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, and if you'd like me to do any further videos
for you, put them in the comments box below the video, and I'll get straight onto it.
Thank you very much for watching.