STAR Method for Interview Questions

If you’re interviewing with companies for high paying interview then you need to use the STAR method for interview questions. It’s absolutely non-negotiable not to use these questions. Understanding how to answer questions in STAR format will also help with your storytelling, which is a very transferrable skill.

February 29, 2024 by Kazu Fujimoto

What is the STAR Method for Interview Questions?

The STAR method for interview questions consists of the framework of answering questions in the situation, task, action, result format. This is the optimal way to answer interview questions in 2023 and onwards. There is no better way to answer interview questions other than using the STAR method.

Excluding specific technical questions, all behavioral and situational type questions must be answered with the STAR format.

Even questions such as “What are your strengths” or “What are your weaknesses” need to be answered using the STAR format.

Situation

This is where you explain the situation you were in. No matter what you’re asked, make it relevant to the position you’re applying for. Whether it’s industry experience, leadership experience at a club, or project experience in school, make sure to use these types of situations to start the story off.

Task

Next, go into what task you had regarding the situation. This can be something such as you being responsible for the completion of a design, a presentation, or a report that you had to submit. These types of tasks can be applied to situations such as school projects, lab reports, internships, or standard industry tasks.

Action

Action will be the specific actions that you took to get the task done for the situation that you were in. Look at action as something you physically did for the project.

Specific actions include:

• Having to physically stand up to someone to get your deliverables finished
• Creating presentations and reports to senior leadership for projects
• Make specific changes and implementations to software that reduced in efficiency improvements

Use the above specific actions as guidelines to craft the answer for your interview.

Result

This will be the specific result that occurred as a function of what you did. Make sure the result is something quantitative as numerical results will give the hiring manager a feel for what you did.

Specific results you can use are:

• Meeting budget requirements on a large scale $300M project for the oil and gas industry
• Operational efficiency changes of 10% increase as a result of your inputs
• Meeting mission critical schedule requirements for a government agency responsible for employing 500,000+ job seekers

Example Interview Questions That You Need To Use The Star Method (And Answers!)

Whenever you’re asked a question in an interview, pause, and think to yourself – “do I need to answer this using the STAR method?”

If it’s a technical question such as what is the formula for the velocity of the rocket or Tell me about your experience with Discounted Cash Flows, you won’t need to be as storytelling.

But for any type of question relating to your traits or a “tell me about a time” type of question, you need to use the STAR method.

What are your Strengths?

One of my strengths is being metric driven. I’d like to highlight a situation where I was responsible for releasing bills of materials for oil & gas products. As a design engineer, I noticed the current bill of materials upload process was very obsolete. To improve the process, I suggested that we automate the bill of material upload process based on inputs.

This was a long standing effort between me and the programming group overseas. We spent many meetings in different time zones hashing out specific details such as logic and code inputs. We eventually ended up succeeding with the rollout of the code and this took a process that took 1 week into 1 day.

What are your weaknesses?

My greatest weakness is that I lack spacial awareness. When I perform modeling and design in CAD, I sometimes lose sight of spacial awareness. This could be as a result of not having too much physical contact with parts. I noticed I had this weakness early on as a student, and what I did was put myself in more of those environments.

I joined the Automotive Society of Engineers at our school and helped designing and building the brake system of our vehicle.

Tell me about a time you ran into a conflict, and tell me how you resolved it.

As a manufacturing engineer, I was the lead responsible for the build, assembly, and delivery of our military product. I had to direct technicians who would assist me in doing the physical work.

Tell me about a time you had to stand up to someone.

One of my manager assigned me a project when I had too much work on my plate. I noticed that this was unreasonable so I decided to confront my manager about this. I explained to my manager that I was already juggling multiple projects for 3+ customers and that I cannot take the extra work on. As a result, my manager understood my concerns and told the customer that we could not get it the time they wanted. The customer was upset, but after I finished my projects, I was able to finish the deliverables.

What was your biggest failure in your career?

My biggest failure early in my career as a machinist was when I was responsible for doing a simple project. The project that I was responsible for consisted of manufacturing a square aluminum 6-sided dice. When I set the material on the machine, I did not do it properly and as a result, when it was time to face off the surface, the material came loose from the machine. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it taught me a huge lesson in redundancy. As an after effect, I practice a lot of redundancy when I write processes and procedures in the industry.

Closing

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