STARR/STARL Method for Behavior Interviews

STAR methodology is a great approach to outline your story during behavior based interviews, you will be able to provide interviewers with the valuable information they are curious about. There is one step further though, about Retrospective/Learning, what is your learning from the story, and what would you do differently immediately after the story, and what would you do now given the evolution of technology and your accumulated experience since the event.

It is important to demonstrate by providing answers in a formatted way to tell the interviewer: what was the situation, what was the impact of the business, and why it is challenging. You need to provide your interviewer a reason to keep listening, and they can learn something from this, and understand your way of thinking.

Note: it is important that the story you provide will reflect your roles and responsibilities. For example: fixing a production bug might be huge for an intern engineer, but might not be significant to someone at director level, in general.

Situation.

Background. First thing you need to provide is the context: what was your role, what was the organization you were working for, especially if the company is not well known, you can add some information about the business they are into, size of and market ranking of the organization, plus anything you deem necessary for the interviewer to understand the full picture.

Problem Statement. What was the actual thing you had to accomplish and move forward with? The following questions will help you think about the actual problems you were trying to solve, and you may not need all of the statements, it is just for thought provocation. The point is you must be clear about the problem and why it is worth solving.

What was the problem you were trying to solve, what was the process you are going to improve, how did you identify the issue, whose initiative was that, what is the impact on business, customer, engineering team. Why it is a problem/ why do we need to make change, why it is challenging,

Always keep in mind: [Data, Facts, Numbers]. It would be great if you build this into your story.

Note: Pause and check in with your interviewer here. Ask if this level of details are ok. So you can adjust the level of details before getting into the rest of the story: continue with the same level, provide more detailed info in the following descriptions, or need to be more abstract and concise.

Task.

Be specific about your tasks, you may provide the overall picture if it is a team effort, but need to make sure you highlight your specific tasks: As a team we are facing/we are tasked with ABC, and I am responsible for xxx. It would be great if you include timelines here: I need to complete the insight report in 2 weeks, etc.

Action.

Start with a transition statement: the first thing I did was... Be specific about your own contributions, even if you are a manager and are responsible for the overall outcome of the actions: As a team we achieved this, completed that, and then what did you do exactly, for example: I made the decision xxx, I called for meetings to address abc, I put a plan together to achieve xxx for the team to execute.

Make sure you highlight the conflicts, tough challenges here, and decisions, trade offs you have to make here. Present findings and recommendations, highlight benefits and challenges, anticipated timelines, and final recommendation.?Like in a good movie or book, this is the climax part where it gets interesting for the audience, in this case, your interviewer.

Don't forget: [Data, Facts, Numbers]. Also:

Check in with your interviewer, to see if they need more information in a specific area, any clarification is required, or in general, any questions so far. "Do you want to dig into anything deeper that I just mentioned from those items?" or "Do you want to focus on a couple of other concepts that I introduced to you?"

Result.

Give it a strong finish, feel proud to share the result.

First, provide immediate result, which is the answer to the question. How do you present the result, and to whom. What is the impact to the customer, to the business, or the team, the person you were dealing with. It is important to highlight how to do you measure the result, metrics, direct and indirect feedbacks, etc.

Remember to use: [Data, Facts, Numbers].

Second, compound/accumulated, and long lasting result. The higher the position you are interviewing for, the more important this part is. Is there any methodology and mechanism developed in the process that can be reused, or applied elsewhere? How to leverage the result? For example: what is the forecastable cost savings in the next 10 years with the software changes/process optimization. It must reflect your role and responsibility, a senior leader should be focusing on long term and lasting effect, how past performance effect future performance, and application of the learnings. This can include share the mechanism through trainings, documentations, to other teams, etc.

Retrospective/Learning

Typical STAR method doesn't include this part, however, I think it would be nice to share with the interviewer what is your learning from the process.

It can include: what I learned from this process is xxx, your thoughts on what you could have done differently immediately after, also as now you have more experience, and there are new technologies, methodologies, what you would have done differently now. This will show you have a deep thinking about the problems, your continuous learning mentality.

Check in with your interviewer. Ask interviewer if they need more information on any specific areas, or if they have any follow up questions - upward management. In most cases there would certainly be follow up questions.

Final Notes on taking behavior interviews:

The importance is you need to have a mainline of the story, you can dive deep into one area, but should be able to get back and continue with the mainline of the story.

You are trying to get the focus of your interviewer, have a thought about how to make the story attractive, how to make the interviewer feel like he were there when this happens. The challenges in it, and why it is a challenge, and the scale of impact.

Be authentic. Make sure this is your story, and make sure the content is accurate. Remember, it is highly likely the interviewer will figure out if any part of the story is inconsistent with your answers in other questions, or there are contradiction in the story where your responsibilities and actions don't match.

Prepare and practice. You can easily find online about typical behavior interview questions and start practicing around them prior to the interview. Think about 5-6 stories you can tell the interviewers in different domains and dive deep into the details.

Expect the unexpected. You should be thrilled to dive deep with the follow up questions, which means you really dig deep into the details, and it is super important in a business world. Don't be afraid if you got a question you haven't prepared in the previous steps, that is normal, just focus on what previous situation would match the question, and apply the STAR method as you construct the story. Also, just like in system design interviews, don't be afraid to ask clarification questions if you are not 100% clear about the question.

There are other methodology can be used in behavior based interviews, like PAR: Problem, Action, Result; 5Ws: Who, What, When, Where, Why. You can find the details on how to apply those through Google Search.