Estimated Runtime: ~9 minutes
Tell me about a time when..." If you've interviewed anywhere in the past decade,
you've heard this opening. These are behavioral questions, and they're asked
because research shows past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
The standard framework for answering is STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result.
Everyone knows STAR. Almost nobody uses it well.
Here's the secret — the action section should be sixty percent of your answer.
Most candidates spend too long on the situation, rush through the action, and
give a vague result. Flip that. Situation: one to two sentences. Give the
context briefly. Task: one sentence. What was your specific responsibility?
Action: this is your time to shine. Walk through the specific steps YOU took.
The decisions you made. The approach you chose. Why you chose it. The obstacles
you navigated. Be detailed. Be specific. Use "I," not "we.
Result: quantify. Always quantify. "Revenue increased by thirty-two percent."
"Customer satisfaction scores improved from three point two to four point
seven." "Delivery time decreased from fourteen days to six." Numbers make your
stories credible and memorable. If you can't quantify the result, describe the
concrete impact in specific terms.
Total answer time: ninety seconds to two minutes. Not three. Not five. Two
minutes maximum. If you can't tell it that concisely, you haven't practiced
enough.
Mistake one — too much situation. Don't spend three minutes painting a picture.
The interviewer wants to know what you did, not the full history of the project.
Mistake two — using "we" instead of "I." Team accomplishments are great, but the
interviewer is hiring you, not your team. Mistake three — vague actions. "I
worked really hard on it" tells the interviewer nothing. What specifically did
you do? Mistake four — no quantified results. "It went well" or "they were
happy" is not a result. Mistake five — rambling. Practice until your stories are
tight, focused, and land within two minutes.
Prepare eight to ten STAR stories, mapped to common behavioral competencies.
Practice until each one is under two minutes and heavy on specific actions and
quantified results. Next lesson, we tackle technical interviews and case studies
— the formats that require a completely different preparation approach.