StarInterview

STAR is one of those cheesy business course acronyms. It stands for:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

Like most things covered on those busines courses, there's nothing particularly clever about it. It is effective, though.

In a recruitment situation STAR is used to get candidates to explain what they did in some situation similar to ones that they will come up against in future.

A STAR interview proceeds something like this:

Tell me about a time when...describe a kind of situation?

The candidate explains what the particular situation was

You mean that...interviewer confirms their understanding, and iterates this?

Tell me what you had to do

The candidate says what their role was, and what part of the situation they ad to deal with

You mean that...again the interviewer confirms their understanding.?

Tell me what you did

response confirmation?

Tell me what the outcome was

response confirmation?

So, there was this situation?, and you had to task?, so you action? and you ended up with result?

The questioner deals only with the facts as the interviewee remembers them, without making value judgements. By making the interviewee recount what they did, and by iterating the questions, recapitulation and confirmation the interviewee tends to remember more and more of what happens, and can even re-experience some of the emotions that they had at the time.

The structure serves, in the recruitment scenario, to prevent the candidate speculating or answering based on hypotheticals.

In our workshop, we hope that it will provide information about people's past work that is comprehensive and accurate. It's imoprtant to capture the whole of the STAR for a particular situation.

Ivanand I did a run-through last weekend, he might want to tell you a bit about his impressions of the technique. -- KeithB