Response Strategy & Method (STAR Approach)

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Behavioral Interviewing is based on the premise that examples of past behavior are the best predictor of future behavior. Interviewers have identified certain skills and competencies (鈥渃ritical capabilities鈥) essential to the position and will ask you to describe a specific instance in your past related to these qualities. They will use this information to draw conclusions about how you are likely to react should you encounter a similar situation in the future.

Some of the skills and qualities you may be evaluated on include:

  • Problem Solving
  • Flexibility
  • Achievement/Drive
  • Decision Making
  • Communication
  • Leadership
  • Initiative/Execution
  • Conflict Management
  • Stress Management
  • Handling Details
  • Business Acumen
  • Teamwork
  • Technical Expertise

The best approach to take when answering these types of questions is the STAR interviewing approach: Situation/Task, Action, Result

Situation/Task: give an example of a situation you were involved in that resulted in a positive outcome or a positive learning experience or describe the tasks involved in that situation.

Action: talk about the various actions involved in the situation鈥檚 tasks

Result: what results followed because of your actions
It is important to be as specific as possible when formulating your answer. Select ONE specific incident from your coursework/group projects, work experience, or extracurricular activities.

 

Example

Tell me about a time when you set a goal for yourself and did not reach it

Situation/Task: During my sophomore year at 国产传媒, I was participating in the Social Media Internship for Stockton鈥檚 Communication Studies program. The point of the internship was to learn how to utilize social media platforms to strengthen your client/brand/company鈥檚 reputation as well as reach more audiences, such as college students within the Communication Studies program at 国产传媒. My goal was to gain two hundred followers by the end of the semester, to reach 1,000 followers, I knew if my team and I could do this it would be a huge success for the internship and for myself. 

Action: I was making sure we were interacting with 国产传媒 COMM students on Instagram, playing around with the different social media content formats such as Stories and Reels. However, the number of followers we had was not going up as easy as I thought it would. More of the current followers were engaging with the content that we were producing but were not attracting many new followers on Instagram. At that rate, if we had kept going with our plan, we were just going to maintain the number of followers that we had started with in the beginning of the semester.

Result: I realized that I had to take a different approach to the kind of content we were producing and posting to social media to make any increase in followers for the semester. I created a survey to assess what kind of content the students wanted to see on the socials, turns out they wanted more content relating to their beloved professors. For the rest of the semester, we would conduct a beat called, 鈥淔aculty Spotlight,鈥 that allowed students to learn more about their COMM professors and their lives. This beat gained a lot of follower engagement and attracted about one hundred new followers to the Instagram page. I was a little disappointed because I could have reached the two hundred new follower goal if I had stopped to ask the public that I was creating content for, the type of content that THEY would like to see on their feed. However, I鈥檓 happy to say that I took that same proactive approach in my next social media internship, and I have gained over 400 hundred followers within two weeks for my company鈥檚 Instagram page.

 

How to Prepare

  • Think of specific examples of instances in your past when you had to demonstrate the skills and qualities listed above. You can use examples from work, classes/group projects, and extracurricular activities.
  • Analyze the position for which you are applying and identify the critical capabilities. Listen carefully in the information session and/or closely read company literature to help you with this analysis.
  • Take inventory of your critical capabilities. Do they match? If so, can you remember a time when you demonstrated the use of any of these capabilities? If not, think about how you would react if you encountered that situation.
  • Formulate STAR answers based in the critical capabilities that match the position. Integrate technical knowledge into your answer whenever possible. Try to use different experiences for each capability to show that you can learn from many situations.
  • Be prepared to provide examples of when results didn鈥檛 turn out as you planned. The interviewer may be interested in HOW you overcame obstacles. Focus on what you learned from the experience or how you would approach the problem differently next time.
  • Practice your stories as much as possible, though without memorizing like a script.

 

Sample Behavioral Questions

  1. Give me an example of a time in which you had to be relatively quick in coming to a decision.
  2. Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond the call of duty to get a job done.
  3. Tell me about the most significant project you have worked on in which it was actual crucial to keep track of details while still managing the 鈥渂ig picture鈥.
  4. Describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way.
  5. Give an example of when you had to work with someone who was difficult to get along with.
  6. Can you tell me about an occasion where you needed to work with a group to get a job done?
  7. Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgement and logic in solving a problem.