Employ the STAR Interview Method to Land Your Next Job

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1:09And what it does is it helps you create that direct link between the achievements and the job that you want. And these need to be within two minutes when you answer these stories because nobody has patience anymore. Nobody wants to hear you ramble. I discuss all of this in my recent hbr article the star method is used for behavioral questions they usually start with things like tell me about a time when or have you ever had to deal with or give me an example of or describe a situation they're asking you to tell a story s a situation what were you up against what did you have to deal with the situation was my boss told me that we had to pivot what we were working on because there was a client situation and the client wasn't happy t task we couldn't just drop all the other clients we had to figure out how to incorporate this work that my boss needed done on top of everything else the action is what did i do to do that so the first thing i did was i rallied the team and we sat down and talked about the urgency of this particular task that our boss needed to be done and then from there i built out a project plan and a road map and anything else you had to do to get this project done now we're at our results great results we got the project done We got the other project done.

2:20And the most important thing I think that we got done is we didn't burn ourselves out any further because we were able to put a plan in place and ensure that people had breaks. People still got their vacations. People were able to breathe and come to me with any problems. Now I just gave you some more soft skills there, right? That you're a good leader. I just, you just basically said, I'm a good leader without saying that. And then the T, which is the takeaways. The most important thing is that you connected to the job that you're interviewing for. The takeaways are, look, not only do we get the job done, but the one thing I realized that if we planned this a little bit better, and we planned a lot, we paused for a minute, even though it was urgent, and we planned it.

3:01And by doing that, we were able to move a lot faster without overburdening people and making them more exhausted. And I know that's exactly what you're looking for, because I see in the job description you mentioned here, you want somebody who's able to pivot and also to be strategic. And those are the two main things that happened in this particular story that I'm telling you about. It's a way to focus and you have to write it down because that allows you to then manipulate and figure out which things need to go in, what should I weed out. So it's a structured approach that allows people to feel confident about the story they're telling and which details to include and which details to leave out.

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