the STAR Method

Review the Technique

STAR Technique

While interviewing you will get asked a lot of broad behavioral interview questions. Here are some examples:

• 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?

Practice the Technique

First, take a few minutes to reflect on your past experiences answering behavioral questions:

• What topics have been difficult for you?
• Which of the STAR components have you struggled with?