Outside gaining organizational, managerial and leadership skills, another benefit of doing an MBA in a prestigious Business School like Lagos Business School is that you will also gain systematic and analytical skills for tackling day to day problems and other situational or behavioral- based questions. MBA will make you become articulate, logical and critical in your reasoning. One of the places where we need these analytical skills is in responding to behavioral-based questions that often come up at interviews and in other interactions. In this blog post, I will be sharing with you the popular STAR technique for tackling behavioral interview questions.
The acronym STAR stands for situation, task, action and result. The first letter in the acronym which stands for situation demands us to describe a situation, event, project or challenge we have faced in the past and when it took place. In doing this, we must try to be as precise as possible. When you have presented the situation, the second letter which stands for task expects us to explain the task and its goal. In doing this, we have to state our specific role in the situation or project we have presented. When we have stated our role, the next point is to provide details about the task or steps we took in order to address or resolve the situation we have earlier presented. Lastly, the technique concludes with the result or outcome from the actions taken to tackle the situations presented.
This method has proven to be a good technique for answering behavioral interview questions. For instance, when you are asked to describe a time when you faced a difficult moment at work and how you were able to sort the problem. Another example is when you are asked to share about a mistake you made at work and how you were able to handle it or to tell about a difficult decision you made at work and what you did. These are all examples of behavioral-based interview questions. Using the STAR method to answer these questions will help us respond to questions in a structured, precise and articulated manner without having to beat about the bush. Also, this technique sort of provides a direct guideline and framework for tackling issues, and makes us appear smart and competent in our response and approaches to issues. In all, the STAR method helps us explain in a simple yet profound manner, how we handled specific work situations and challenges.
To conclude, as prospective job seekers, you will always be required to respond to behavioral-based questions when you attend interviews for a job. Interviewers ask these questions in order evaluate your soft skills. Thus, we have to have the STAR technique in our fingertips and be ready to use it to answer related questions during interviews. As future leaders of organizations and businesses, we are also going to encounter a lot of problems and situations. The STAR method will help us in better analyzing and addressing the issues we are going to encounter on the course of our work.
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