STAR Interview Technique
Learning Goals
- Understand how to use the STAR technique when answering interview questions
- Begin to gather a collection of stories to use in a behavioral interview
Preparation
Before this session, review the three strengths you identified in the “Your Strengths” PD session.
Warmup
You are in charge of hiring a nanny (or maybe a pet trainer). You are interviewing a candidate who says, “I am a great babysitter. I babysit all the time. My friends all ask me to sit their kids. I like to tailor the experience for each family - if a kid likes science, I have a bag of science experiments we can do; if a kid likes games, I have so many games to play. I have a CPR certification, too.”
This isn’t a BAD response by any means! But it could be even better!
With your partner discuss: How could this answer be improved? How could it be more specific, or better illustrate the sitter’s skills?
STAR Technique
While interviewing you will get asked a lot of broad behavioral interview questions. Let’s read through some example questions:
- What helps you do your best learning? What resources, environment, pace, team, etc?
- Describe a successful idea or project you worked on. What are some of the challenges you had to overcome? What made it a success?
- Describe an example of how you have handled a stressful situation.
- Describe your teamwork experience in a coding environment. How big of a team did you work with?
- How do you handle things when you run into a code problem you can’t figure out?
- Give me an example of a time you faced a conflict while working on a team. How did you handle that?
- What is one of your strengths? How have you seen this strength in practice as a developer?
Use this as an opportunity to tell stories about your relevant experience and highlight your strengths. A great template to use to plan out your stories is the STAR method:
- Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenge and situation in which you found yourself.
- Task: What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation. Some performance development methods use “Target” rather than “Task”. Job interview candidates who describe a “Target” they set themselves instead of an externally imposed “Task” emphasize their own intrinsic motivation to perform and to develop their performance.
- Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it, and what the alternatives were.
- Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions and did you meet your objectives? What did you learn from this experience and have you used this learning since?
Example:
Tell me about a successful project that you’ve worked on.
In this example, focus on establishing the situation or scenario for the project. Set the stage for the listener – how many people were involved in this project? What was the timeline? What were the main technologies used?
Then move into the task/target and discuss the objective of the project. What was the purpose? Who was the user?
Then, walk through all of the actionable steps you/your team took to meet the objective of the project. What successes did you have? What challenges did you run into? What steps did you take to overcome those challenges?
And finally, what were the results of this project? What were you able to accomplish? What would you have done differently?
Practicing STAR
Time to practice the STAR technique. You and your partner will take turns playing the role of interviewer and candidate, and you will both answer the following question.
What is one of your strengths? How have you seen this strength in practice as a developer?
When you are not answering the question, listen closely to the person who is speaking so you can share feedback:
- Did they include all four parts of the STAR technique?
- Did they speak in specifics (ex: “I did XYZ”) or just in hypotheticals (ex: “I would do XYZ”)?
- Did they provide enough context to help you understand their story?
Once you have both had a chance to answer, give feedback and discuss how you felt that went.
Take 3 minutes to think about what story you want to tell for this interview question and then your instructor will open up pair breakout rooms.
Gathering Stories
A “good answer” to an interview question is as unique as you! When answering interview questions, giving the “right” answer is only about 30% of your job. The other 70% of your job is helping the interviewer understand YOU: your skills, your experiences, your approach, the way you learn, the way you receive feedback, the way you grow!
The nice thing about these types of interview questions is that they are vague enough that with a small collection of stories you can have one that fits well for almost any question!
Your next step is to start building your collection of stories!
Here are some ideas for where you might look:
- Your Time at Turing
- Work Experience
- Volunteer Experience
- Academic Projects
- Sports or Other Student Organizations
- Taking Care of Siblings
Are there any situations where you worked with customers, delivered on tight deadlines, took initiative, had a leadership role, overcame a challenge, or navigated tricky communication challenges? Are there situations that highlight your strengths?
Individually
Write a brief description of 6 stories you could tell in an interview. Try to have at least two that are “negative”, or where the situation was not ideal and you had to overcome a challenge.
Pull two different stories from your story collection and use them to answer the following interview questions using the STAR technique.
Describe an example of how you have handled a stressful situation.
What helps you do your best learning? What resources, environment, pace, team, etc?
You will then find a time to meet with a partner who will act as your interviewer. Record the responses you give in your mock interview using Loom or a Zoom recording. Your instructor will send out a list of partners.
✅Send brief descriptions of your 6 stories and your video answers to the two interview questions in a Slack message to all instructors.
