Star Interview Questions and Answers

What is The Star Method?

Star interview questions and answers refers to using the STAR method for answering those difficult job interview questions commonly labeled, behavioral, competency, skills, functional, based job interview questions.

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These are open (requiring more than a one word answer) interview questions that in essence require you to tell the interviewer about an experience you have had and how you handled it. Great stock is put in these questions and your answers because as creatures of habit, humans tend to handle situations the same time and time again.

The Star method is a framework for answering these questions that ensures you include all the components your interviewer will be looking for. A star story is the answer to one of these questions put together using the star method framework and presented in a story format (easy for both you and your interviewer to remember).

What To Consider When Building Star Interview Questions and Answers

When looking to prepare your star interview questions and answers I personally think it is helpful to consider that though you should prepare your answers you can only drive yourself nuts by trying to pre-empt the questions you will receive, but you can rely on a technique that should cover most eventualities.

Realize that all businesses are looking for you to either help them make more money, or help them save money; your role no matter how small contributes to the objectives of the business. So you will have to face some form of the “what can you do for us?” questions, and should in some way demonstrate how you can help save them or make them money.

Obviously the interview will delve into the actual skill or function you perform, so if you’re an accountant, you will get some finance questions, but a lot of the interview questioning is because they are looking for specific character traits. I like to break these into eight people types:-

• The boss – leadership
• The expert – one of more skills at expert level
• The good citizen – mentoring, caring, helpful
• The star – the high achiever
• The team player – selfless works diligently for the good of the team
• The self improver – happy to dedicate their own time to continuously improve
• The juggler – able to multi task and do anything thrown at them
• The problem solver – creative ideas person

To best prepare star interview questions and answers you need to honestly marry up your skills and personality traits required for your target job; and create star story answers that demonstrate them.
This way you can create a well rounded set of prepared star storey answers that you can adapt to any interview questioning.

Star Interview Questions and Answers Example

So if we use our accountant as an example, and suggest that they are quite senior (leadership), therefore qualified (expert), quite creative (problem solver), strong self improver, average across the other traits and in their own admission a poor team player (no disrespect to accountants).
Clearly they should focus on developing star interview questions and answers around their strengths, do the best they can with their average traits, and turn their weakness into a strength in an honest way. For example they could admit to realizing they are a little to focused on occasion to be the ideal team player, and therefore delegate team related duties to subordinates that have the team skills, but as a diligent self improver are studying a book on modern business team dynamics to try and improve this weakness.
Companies love candidates that understand their own strengths and weakness, play to their strengths and manage their weaknesses.
Read more about putting together your STAR Method or star interview questions and answers here.

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