Land Your Dream Job: The Headhunter’s Guide to Mastering Situational Interview Questions Using the STAR Method

Congratulations, if you made it to the interview stage you are already outperformed 98% of the other applicants. If you have followed the Headhunter’s Guide earlier this month, you might have fallen off your chair when you found out there are an average of 250 applicants per position with only five making it through to the interview stage (check out tips for job seeking in today’s day in age: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/tips-from-recruiter-how-active-job-seeker-2018-alex-benjamin/)!! If 2% of applicants, on average, are interviewed and if only 20% of those candidate are hired that means that there is an average of a .4% submission to hire ratio…ouch for both job seekers and employers alike!

By making it to the interview stage you have already proven to be successful in two areas. First, whatever source you used to apply worked. Whether you had an internal referral that passed your CV to the hiring manager, applied though a specialized recruiter, or via an online application, your CV made its way to a decision maker who has interest in speaking with you. Second, your CV did its job. The main goal of your CV is create enough interest in your qualifications and achievements so that an interview is requested. Thinking of your job search as a relay race, your CV is the first runner on the field and as an interview is requested, it hands the baton over to you to finish the last leg of the race. Said another way, if your CV puts you in front of the pack by being in the top 2% of application, it is up to your interviewing skills to finish the race in first place. The good news is you no longer need to worry about being in the top 2% any longer. Now you need to be laser focused on being the best of the final five.

The Best Prediction of Future Behavior

Hiring managers, regardless of your profession, tend to look for the same set of qualities during an interview. They want to hire candidates that: meets the requirements of the position (your CV already provided an introduction), add value to the company, are team players, are dependable, fit within the corporate culture, and, most importantly, can solve a specific problem or set of problems that they are facing. The only reason why they are hiring in the first place is because there is a problem that needs to be fixed. For example, if a receptionist leaves the company and there is no one to answer incoming calls, there is a problem. If a company’s supply isn’t able to keep up with demand (aka growth), there is a problem.

The whole point of an interview is to assess potential future behavior. So how can you best predict future behavior? By assessing previous behavior. It’s that simple. The hiring team wants to learn how you solved problems in the past so they can utilize those skill sets to benefit their company in the future.

The easy part of interviewing is talking about yourself. You can talk about your education, what attracted you to your industry, what you learned in each of your roles and the reasoning behind each career change. What separates the top 20% of interviewees from the rest of the pack is their ability to not only talk about their story, but to paint a picture of the problems they can solve along with the previous successes they can expand upon joining their next employer. This is the part of the interview that separates the girls from the women, the boys from the men. Talking about yourself is easy, but being able to make a team of strangers confident in your ability to solve problems consistently and repeatedly over an extended period of time takes skill and practice.

Situational Questions are a Powerful Tool

Situational questions are simply those that ask a candidate to explain how they would handle a specific situation by giving examples of previous experiences. These questions can be job requirement focused, such as “Walk me through an example of how you set up Excel spreadsheet to track sales,” or they can be used to assess soft skills such as leadership experience, “Tell me about a time where a project you were working on was behind on its timelines and how you were able to delegate tasks to your team members to deliver the project on time.” A more general example would be, “Tell me about a time that you had to work closely with someone that you didn’t necessarily get along with.”

Employers ask situational questions because of their effectiveness of weeding out candidates who may not have the breadth of experience they are looking for. Although your CV may have peaked the manager’s interest, companies are uniquely structured which means that sometimes a candidate may look good on paper, but once you find out that don’t have specific experience (perhaps at their company some of the duties were handled by another department), their level of experience may not meet the requirements. Furthermore, just because someone put a list of skills and achievement on their CV, doesn’t mean they are true. Unfortunately, CVs are full of fraud, some of which had been deliberate, while other times it was due to accident/lack of attention to detail. For example, I have seen candidates copy and paste their company’s job description directly to their CV, including the 25% of tasks they wound up never being responsible for. I have seen others blatantly lie by adding a college degree they don’t have or by adding experience they don’t have (nor can explain in detail) in order to make their CV more attractive to potential hiring parties. If you are a hiring manager, you might be shaking in your boots right now, because if you don’t ask the right questions, you are at risk of spending time and money hiring someone who is misrepresenting their candidacy.

Answering Situational Questions Using the STAR Method

Although situation questions can be a little nerve wrecking, there is a formula to create meaningful answers that will leave the interviewer’s eyes wide open with their heads bobbing up and down with satisfaction. The STAR Method is a simple four step process:

S = Situation- Set up your story by adding context to describe the situation. Think of it as the: who (was involved), what (was going on at the time), where (did this take place), when (did this happen), and how (the situation came to be).

T = Task- Explain the task or problem that needed to be solved and highlight any particular challenges or road blocks that were encountered.

A = Action- Describe the actions YOU took. It is okay discuss the support of other team members who were involved, but focus on your individual contributions. Also, be sure to bring attention to the actions you took that would bring value to what the hiring manager is looking for. In other words, what actions did you take that could be replicated in order to add value to the position you are applying to? Perhaps you dedicated your nights and weekends to work toward meeting a high profile deadline, you were able to make a team that was previously butting heads successfully collaborate with one another, or maybe you simply used your expert knowledge to solve a problem that no one else was able to.

R = Result-What was the outcome and how did your contributions directly affect the result? What did you learn from the situation? What have you learned from the situation and how can you replicate a successful result? 

It is best to use examples that lead to a positive outcome; however, some situational questions focus on failure. For example, “Explain how you dealt with failure in the workplace and how you were able to learn from your mistakes.” In this type of situation, you want to pick an example that was clearly a failure, but not devastating enough to jeopardize your candidacy. This isn’t the time or place to release your inner demons. Instead, give an example of how you were the phoenix, rising from the flames. For a hiring manager, this could be taking the blame for hiring a poor performer and the lessons you learned to help better vet future candidates. For an individual contributor, this could be detailing a time where you hesitated to ask for help, causing the project to nearly be delayed. You may have learned the power of being transparent and keeping communication open with leadership along with their reciprocal support. 

Being Specifically Specific

Part of being able to sell your worth as a problem solver is by convincing the team that you are an expert of your trade. And as an expert, you should be able to be provide specific examples of problems that you have tackled and how you handled them in a successful way. For example, if you need a kidney transplant you are going to pick a surgeon that is a specialist in transplants. You are going to sit down with him or her to discuss each step of the procedure, possible risks, post-surgery instructions, and long term follow up. If your surgeon is a true specialist, they should be able to address each of your concerns while walking through the surgery in detail, including any process that follow potential unforeseen issues that may arise during the surgery. If the words, “I don’t know,” or, “I’m not sure,” come out of their mouths, you probably want to find another surgeon. Why? Because they should be able to be specifically specific on the surgery. During the interview process, a true expert is someone that is specifically specific in their answers, especially when talking about specific situations and when giving examples.

Practice Makes Perfect

While reading the couple of examples I have scattered above, your blood pressure may have raised a couple of points, imagining yourself at an interview being put on the spot and not having a well thought out answer. The fear of “drawing a blank” can be debilitating and usually results in the mind racing to find an example, any example, as awkward silence looms. This is where practice can make the difference.

If you Google “list of situational interview questions” you will be sure to find more than enough sample questions to prepare for. One of the more comprehensive lists is an 18 pager that come from Henderson State University career resources: https://www.hsu.edu/Career/completelistofbehavioral.pdf.

In reality, you aren’t going to know what questions the interviewer is going to ask so it is nearly impossible to come up with exact responses to rehearse. Creating answers to 18 pages worth of samples (while it would give great practice) is not only overwhelming, but completely overkill. Instead, I suggest preparing answers to a handful of questions that are either the most challenging or that directly relate to the position you are applying to. The key here is not to come up with a cheat sheet for the interview, but to get used to the thought process of coming up with a meaningful example, followed by being able to clearly and concisely describe the situation, tasks, actions, and result. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. You may even be able to use some of the situations that you explored during your practice to help answer completely different questions asked during the interview. There is a lot to learn from your best successes.

What to Watch Out For

There are three common mistakes when it comes to answering situation questions. First, not answering the question. Either you don’t have an example to talk about or you give an example that is irrelevant. Giving an example that is unrelated to the question or speaking in general terms may suggest to the hiring manager that you may not have the experience they are looking for, or that you may lack focus and attention.

Second, you aren’t prepared and wind up panicking to think of something to say. Rather than using a great example, you use any example that comes to mind. Often, by the time you get to the end of the story, you either a) realize the downward spiral you got yourself into, or b) a much better example pops into your mind after it’s too late. Sometimes these examples lead to giving unrelated answers or, worse yet, you mistakenly pick an example that either sheds a negative light on your candidacy or questions your qualifications for the position.

Third, your story never gets to the point. I think we all have a friend that takes a half hour to tell a five minute story. Be concise and to the point. Only provide details that provide context and meaning. As a rule of thumb, try to keep your answers to a couple in length. There may be questions that take a little longer to explain, but there is a fine line of presenting a detailed answer and just rambling on.

Summary

You’ve made it to the top five, beating out an average of 245 applicants. Now is the time to stay focused and prepare to answer the most difficult questions thrown your way during the interview process. Familiarize yourself with the STAR Method (situation, task, action, result) and come up with examples to program your beautiful mind to be able to come up with meaningful examples that show the hiring team you are the expert they need to hire. The more you practice, the more likely you will be to avoid the top three pitfalls. This will lead to more offers, better offers, and hopefully will help you land your dream job.

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Next Week’s Topic: How to Interview Your Recruiter

Tags: Candidates, General