Rock your Next Blockchain Interview with These STAR Tips

If it’s been a while since you’ve interviewed, you might feel a little rusty. We’ve all been there. How, exactly, do you highlight your strengths? Which success stories do you focus on? Do you highlight your successes, or do you focus on the wins of the teams you’ve worked on? Is it too forward to list or talk about your achievements?

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve come across in the professional world is to answer interview questions using the STAR format. Employees hired at the highest levels at top-performing companies swear by this method, and for good reason. The STAR format focuses on situations, tasks, actions, and results. Here's what STAR is all about:

1. Situations are challenges and obstacles that set the context of your story.

2. Tasks are the deliverables needed for you to overcome the problem.

3. Actions are the steps you took towards your goals.

4. Results are what were you able to achieve with those actions to resolve the situation.

This is the stuff great teams, great companies, and great job performances are made of: a combination of concise, clear communication, relentlessly relevant storytelling, and results-driven work. Before I give a few examples of the STAR format, let’s talk about value for a second.

Value is defined as the usefulness, desirability, or importance of something. Knowledge is considered to be valuable because it is useful for generating ideas and, when properly applied, can lead to positive creative, social, and economic outcomes. Developers with years of experience with object-oriented programming languages are valuable because they possess a highly desired and sought-after skill. Blockchain as a technology is valuable because it is an important breakthrough in how we store information in a distributed, secure, auditable manner to create trust.

The STAR method for responding to interview questions is all three of these: useful, desirable, and important. It helps you present your talents and strengths concisely and memorably, and usefully enhances interpersonal communication. It makes the jobs of recruiters, screeners, hiring managers, and interview teams easier and less time-consuming when assessing your fit. And it is an important skill to demonstrate having, as it highlights your ability to communicate the value or value proposition of something - in the context of interviewing, you. (As an excellent bonus, the STAR format is portable: it can help a founder pitch VCs on the problem they’re solving, help a business development team describe the value of the solution they’re selling, and help managers or teammates conduct meetings more effectively).

Below I give two examples formatted with the STAR Method.

My Path to My First Blockchain Job

A year ago, I learned about blockchain technology through a Forbes article and fell in love immediately. I went to a few crypto Meetups and quickly realized that I wanted to learn how the technology worked. But I didn’t know anyone in the blockchain space. I would need to find a community of similarly-minded folks. So I created a blockchain Slack group for people in Seattle and used LinkedIn to find others in the city with an interest in "blockchain”. I sent them invitations to the Slack group and managed the intake process for each newcomer, encouraging introductions and participation. Within eight weeks, the Slack group grew to several hundred people, and I met a vibrant community of passionate blockchain builders, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs based in Seattle—including the CEO of the lifeID team, whom I would later join. By taking this initiative, I helped to connect others, built a new online community (with 500+ members), and landed my first blockchain dream job.

• Situation: I fell in love with blockchain but didn’t know anyone in blockchain
• Task: I needed a community
• Action: I started and bootstrapped an online space
• Result: I created a community of several hundred people and got a great job

In an interview with Nori this year, I said, "Blockchain is a space that rewards curiosity, community, and collaboration." Find ways to tell stories that highlight your own curiosity, community, or collaboration in the blockchain space or at your recent jobs, and use the STAR format when you do. This will help you nail more of your interviews and land a job faster.

Below is another example using the STAR technique and also incorporating the themes of curiosity, community, and collaboration.

How I Built My Credibility in Blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity

When I joined lifeID, I knew I had a mountain ahead of me to climb: come to understand not only blockchain technology, but also learn about self-sovereign identity technology specifically and cryptography generally. The reason is that an open protocol for censorship-resistant and user-owned identity relies on all three — a blockchain for storing smart contracts for key recovery and other functions, interoperable standards for decentralized identifiers and decentralized identifier documents, and strong cryptography for users and organizations to manage their keys and prove ownership over their identities. I didn’t understand any of that at the time. But I knew that I could not have credible conversations with industry peers or create interest in lifeID without generating situational fluency in all three areas. Thus, my goal was to learn enough to be credible in all three categories. So I joined the World Wide Web (W3C) community in charge of decentralized identifier standards and began building relationships with long-time identity experts from the Rebooting the Web of Trust, Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), and W3C Community Credentials Group communities. I took people out for coffee, hopped on national and international Skype calls, asked a lot of questions, and did a lot of listening. I became a W3C Advisory Committee Representative and joined the W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group. I also began a weekly ritual of spending Sundays reading about cryptography. And I started giving talks and presentations about blockchain and self-sovereign identity, sharing new knowledge in real-time while acquiring it. The result? I’ve come to understand and speak with confidence and credibility about the basics of encryption, decryption, one-way hash functions, and digital signatures. I’ve been invited to speak at conferences in and outside of Seattle and have received positive feedback from multiple CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, and CISOs for being knowledgeable about the intersection of business problems and blockchain’s possibilities. I built credibility. Additionally, my work has drawn inbound interest in lifeID from public and private organizations and enterprises curious about lifeID's approach to self-sovereign identity.

• Situation: I didn’t understand the technical foundations of blockchains, self-sovereign identity, or cryptography
• Task: I needed to learn enough to be credible in these areas
• Actions: I joined professional communities and studied regularly to learn about my bleeding-edge profession
• Result: I gained credibility in the market and am having effective conversations with C-suite executives about blockchain, identity, and security

Trust, like a partner or a customer, is expensive to acquire. There is such a thing as a "trust acquisition cost", especially with brand new technologies. To acquire it, to be able to hold a conversation with someone with the decision to buy or try a new solution, you have to be credible. Credibility requires spending considerable time and energy learning, building community, and collaborating with those who have more knowledge or expertise than you do. The reward is trust. Find ways to evaluate your track record for recent examples of how you've built credibility and domain knowledge, and format your response in the STAR format above. Do this for any question that could come up during your interview process, and you'll soar.

I hope this helps you, reader. I'm a big believer that if we're not sharing our learnings with others, we're missing out on half the fun of life and work: seeing others grow too. What I've shared here is a method that has been recommended profusely to me, that you may use it on your path.

One more thing: if all of us in blockchain elevate our game in job interviews related to this technology, we can individually and collectively become rockstars and help advance the growth of our companies and of the blockchain industry.

Good luck.

[This article is cross-posted from my blog, Blockchain Dreamers].