Tutorial of the STAR method for answering behavioural interview questions

So you’ve applied to that position in a great company and they called you back. Awesome! That signals their trust in your qualifications and they are interested in getting you hired for the job. Although the interview process varies and each company has its own hiring policies, usually one needs to go through a phone screen with a recruiter, an assessment test, and one or more in-person interviews (which can be online or face-to-face). In this article, I’ll walk you through a technique for acing your in-person interview; it relies on demonstrating your problem-solving skills during the interview.

A behavioural interview is meant to assess your ability to resolve a difficult situation professionally (and effectively). The classic yet powerful recipe to answer behavioural questions is the STAR method, which is a results-driven approach that focuses on solving a specific situation meaningfully. Without further ado, let’s see how it works through some examples.

Example 1: Teamwork

Question: Describe a time when you had a conflict with your colleagues. How did you handle it?

Strategy: Conflicts are bound to happen. The interviewer wants to know how you would react when disagreement arises in the workplace. The goal here is to demonstrate that you are a team player and can solve conflicts. To answer this question, choose a situation in which the situation was resolved well and use the STAR method:

Situation: One incident that had the most impact on me happened when I was responsible for an advanced analytics project for a client in Australia. One week after an analytics platform that we developed was deployed into production, the client’s data engineering team changed the way the data was stored in the database. This caused the analytics engine to return NA values. Our project manager demanded that the client pay for the change request, but the client insisted that we make the changes for free as they considered this a bug in the analytics software.

Task: We needed to find a way that brings us to achieve our common goal and work together as a team.

Action: We decided to look into the details of the problem together. Clearly it is important that the deployed model is adaptable to changes in the data, but it is also important to continuously monitor and update the analytics model after deployment. I discussed this with the project manager, and we proposed it to the client. The client saw the benefits of our proposed solution and agreed to award us a contract for monitoring and updating the model, because their data engineering team was still exploring with multiple things and there might be further changes in the future.

Result: “We were able to maintain a fully-functioning analytics system in production even while taking the time to work together to consider an important issue not everyone agreed with at the time.”

Example 2: Motivation & Values

Question: Desribe a time when you showed initiative

Situation: When I started my software practical in BioQuant last year, I found out that there was no existing documentation for using the HPC computer cluster within the team. Back then the team had four people, but everyone was so busy and under some kind of pressure to get results. Thus, when my colleagues, who are biochemists, need to use the cluster, I noticed that they need to spend lots of time googling how to do certain tasks.

Task: We need a documentation that my colleagues can easily refer to when using the HPC cluster, such as how to submit and schedule jobs, monitor the jobs, etc.

Action: As I worked through the steps to setup my cluster environment, I document what I did, and in the end I came up with a guide on how to properly install the libraries, I wrote a template script for automating the job scheduling and so on. And I share this with the entire team.

Result: This makes the team more productive, because they no longer need to waste time on the internet, for example when submitting a custom job because now there is a template that is ready to use. These little things helped me to earn respect from my teammates and also supervisor.

Question: What motivates you at work?

Situation: There are a couple of things that motivate me. First is my passion for data science. I had worked as a data scientist for 1.5 years in Singapore, but I decided to go back to the university to study a masters degree. I did this because I enjoy working with data, and I wanted to be exposed to the state-of-the-art in machine learning and deep learning, which is something that is not easy to have in the industry (Task, Action).

Result: Thanks to this choice, I have the luxury to read the latest papers in machine learning, reimplement them, contribute to open-source projects on GitHub, and at the same time help the research group in Heidelberg that I am part of.

Situation, Task: The second thing that motivates me is the desire to be a good colleague and team player. So when I was working in Singapore, the ability of other colleagues to perform their job was contingent on me doing my job well. For example, my colleague in charge of building the visualization component needs the data that were transformed by my analytics engine.

Action: If my colleagues need the output of my task, it is a motivation for me to make sure that my job is delivered on time to help the team.

Example 3: Job readiness

Question: Tell me about a problem or challenge you encountered and how you dealt with it.

Situation: When I was working in Singapore as a software analyst, part of my job was to promote high performance computing education to university students. Then, I was assigned as the mentor for a team of students from a local university. The challenge was that the team needed access to a supercomputer to participate in a student competition, and you cannot expect the students to buy their own hardware. So what I did was to write to supercomputer vendors such as HP, Cray, IBM, and NVIDIA on behalf of the students for sponsorship (Task, Action).

This strategy worked really well, because my employer was a good customer of the companies I mentioned, and this helped the students to win the runner-up position in the competition, which was probably not possible without the hardware sponsorship (Result).

Example 4: Resilience

Question: Tell me about a time you failed and how you dealt with it.

The one that comes to my mind is last year, when I took the masters/PhD lecture titled “Geometric Methods in Data Analysis”, a.k.a. “Topological Data Analysis”. I severely underestimated the amount of time that I needed to review the lecture materials and I had another exam on the same day. But Topological Data Analysis is an active area of research and I wanted to study the subject properly, so I decided to fail the exam in the first attempt. In this way, I can focus on studying for the other exam that was happening on the same day and then take my time to review the vast topic of TDA.

As a result, I am able to ace both exams with very good scores and master the two subjects well.

General Tips

In addition, you may be asked: “What do you know about the company?” To answer this question, be sure to speak about:

1. The company’s priorities
2. The industry in which the company belongs to
3. How you can help the company achieve its goals or mission

A sample answer would be the following.

So before this interview, I did some research. I checked out some articles and blog posts and also went to company.com to visit the ‘About Us’ section. Then I also checked out [Company’s product]. What I learned is that [Company Name] is trying to improve human health and change lives for the better. I think that, in the past, it was really expensive to sequence the human genome. Thanks to [Company’s technology], the cost of sequencing a human genome has been down to less than one thousand pounds, from perhaps 1 million one decade ago.

So what [Company Name] is doing, is trying to unlock the power of the genome through constant innovations in its products and investment in its people. Moreover, the technologies at [Company Name] are used not only by pharmaceutical companies, but also by laboratories around the world to advance research in life sciences. Therefore, I think that [Company Name] is a company that is doing its best to improve human health by unlocking the power of the genome and also to enable innovations in life sciences. I find that [Company’s mission] is very inspiring and I believe it can inspire me to make a difference.

Keep the STAR method in mind whenever you are asked to problem-solve or describe an experience during interviews.

Finally, remember that interviews are, after all, just conversations to achieve a common goal: getting you hired!