Key takeaways
- The STAR method is a way of telling something that happened in four parts: the situation, the task you had, the action you took and the result.
- Structured interviews, with the same questions for every candidate and a scale to score them, predict job performance better than free-flowing interviews.
- Not every question calls for STAR: «tell me about yourself» or «why do you want this job» work better as present, past and future.
- Six well-prepared stories of your own are enough to answer the 15 most common interview questions, changing which part of each story you lead with.
Why the same interview questions keep coming up
Whether you are interviewed by a recruitment agency, the HR team of a large employer or the owner of a small business, almost every interview ends up circling the same questions. Employers need to compare several candidates for the same vacancy, and to compare them they have to ask the same things. The more professional the process, the more alike the questions become.
A structured interview is one that asks every candidate the same questions and scores the answers against a scale agreed in advance. The guide published by the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recommends scales of between 3 and 7 levels and separates two kinds of question: behavioural ones, which ask about something you actually did, and situational ones, which set out a hypothetical scenario from the job.
The meta-analysis by Paul Sackett and colleagues, published in 2022 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, reviewed how well each selection method predicts later performance. The structured interview came out top, well ahead of the unstructured interview. The practical conclusion for anyone job hunting: if the questions are predictable, preparing for them is not cheating, it is doing your homework.
is the validity of the structured interview for predicting job performance, the highest of the methods reviewed by Sackett and colleagues in 2022 (on a scale of 0 to 1).
Source: Master HR, New study providing updated validity estimates (summary of the estimates by Sackett and colleagues)is the validity of the unstructured interview, the free conversation with no set questions or scale, in the same review.
Source: Master HR, New study providing updated validity estimates (summary of the estimates by Sackett and colleagues)levels is what the OPM's US guide to structured interviews recommends for the scale used to score each answer.
Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Structured InterviewsWhat the STAR method is and how to build an answer
The STAR method is a structure for telling a specific example from your experience: Situation, Task, Action and Result. The National Careers Service sums it up as the situation you had to deal with, the task you were given, the action you took and what happened as a result, including what you learned from it.
It is for behavioural questions, the ones that begin «tell me about a time when…» or «give me an example of…». The interviewer is not after your theory of how to resolve a conflict: they want to know how you resolved one. «I always try to listen to everyone» cannot be scored; a STAR answer can.
| Part | What it answers | Share of the time | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Situation | Where and when it happened, in one or two sentences | About 10% | Telling the history of the whole company |
| Task | What you personally had to sort out | About 10% | Mixing it up with the team's task |
| Action | What you did, step by step | About 60% | Saying «we did» without explaining your part |
| Result | What changed, with a figure or a fact, and what you learned | About 20% | Ending with no result, or with an adjective |
The 15 most common interview questions and what each one assesses
This is the list we use at Cernoria to prepare for an interview. It is drawn from public careers guidance and the question types the OPM describes, not from a survey with percentages. We group them into four families, because each family is answered with a different structure.
| Question | What it assesses | Structure |
|---|---|---|
| Tell me about yourself | Whether you can sum up your profile for this role | Present, past and future |
| Why do you want this job? | Whether you have done your research and mean it | Role, employer and you |
| Why are you leaving your current job? | Your reason, and whether you criticise others | Brief fact and what you are looking for |
| What are your strengths? | Whether you know what you do well and can prove it | Strength plus a fact |
| What is your greatest weakness? | Self-awareness and willingness to improve | Real weakness and what you do about it |
| Tell me about a conflict with a colleague | How you work with other people | STAR |
| Tell me about a mistake you made | Ownership and learning | STAR |
| Tell me about a time you worked under pressure | Organisation and priorities | STAR |
| What is your biggest achievement? | What you value and the results you get | STAR |
| Tell me about a time you persuaded someone | Influence and communication | STAR |
| Tell me about a change you had to adapt to | Flexibility and learning | STAR |
| What would you do if a customer complained about something that was not your fault? | Judgement in a scenario from the job | Steps and why |
| What would you do in your first 90 days? | Whether you understand the role | Listen, organise, propose |
| What are your salary expectations? | Whether you know the market and a deal is possible | Range with evidence |
| Do you have any questions for us? | Interest and judgement | Two or three questions of your own |
Questions about you: five model answers
The first five do not ask about a past event but for an introduction, and answered with STAR they sound forced. A different structure works better: what you do now, what you did before that brought you here and what you are looking for next, always tied to the role. The examples come from Hannah Example, an invented operations analyst in Leeds applying to be a logistics coordinator.
1. Tell me about yourself: «I am an operations analyst at Pennine Distribution, where I run stock control for two warehouses. Before that I spent three years in customer service, which taught me to look at every process from the point of view of the person waiting for the order. I now want to lead a team, which is why this role caught my eye».
2. Why do you want this job?: «Because it asks for exactly what I do every day, stock control and working with hauliers, and adds something I want to do: coordinate people. I also saw you are opening a new site in Wakefield, and setting up processes from scratch is what I enjoy most».
3. Why are you leaving your current job?: «I have learnt a great deal, but there are no coordinator roles opening up at my company in the next few years. I am looking for that step, and I would rather take it with a business that is growing».
4. What are your strengths?: «Organising processes. When I joined, stock was counted once a year and there were always discrepancies. I proposed cycle counting by zone, and within a year the discrepancy fell from 4% to 1%».
5. What is your greatest weakness?: «I find delegating hard: I tend to check everything myself. Since I trained two new starters last year, I have used a checklist so each of them checks their own work, and I only review a weekly sample».
Behavioural questions: six complete STAR answers
Questions 6 to 11 are where STAR really earns its keep. The OPM guide explains the thinking behind them: the best predictor of how someone will work is how they worked in similar circumstances in the past. Each of Hannah's answers follows the four parts, with the action as the longest.
6. A conflict: «Last year the sales manager was promising next-day delivery that the warehouse could not meet (situation). I had to fix it without slowing sales down (task). I pulled together a month of data, showed him which areas we could reach next day and which we could not, and we built a delivery-time table by area that the sales team started using with customers (action). Late-delivery complaints halved within two months, and I learnt to bring data rather than complaints (result)».
7. A mistake: «In my first year I booked a large order wrongly and it went to Newcastle instead of Hull (situation). I had to recover the delivery and make sure it did not happen again (task). I told my manager straight away, arranged a redelivery with the haulier for the next day and proposed a double check for orders over 50 cases (action). The customer received it a day late, the double check is still in place and it has not happened again (result)».
8. Under pressure: «In the run-up to Christmas two people on the shift were off sick (situation). We had 400 orders to dispatch in two days (task). I reorganised picking by zone, asked the office team to help with packing and prioritised the orders with promised dates (action). 385 went out on time and the other 15 with advance notice to the customer (result)».
9. Biggest achievement: «The annual stock take always closed with big discrepancies (situation). I set out to reduce them without shutting the warehouse (task). I designed cycle counting by zone, built the spreadsheet and trained the four people on the shift to do it in 20 minutes a day (action). Within a year the discrepancy fell from 4% to 1% and the year-end close went from three days to one (result)».
10. Persuading someone: «I wanted to switch haulier for an area with frequent delays, but procurement preferred the usual one on price (situation). I had to show the change was worth it (task). I worked out what six months of returns and redeliveries had cost us, compared it with the other haulier's rate and proposed a one-month trial (action). The trial went well and the switch stuck, at a lower total cost (result)».
11. Adapting to change: «The company changed its warehouse management system halfway through the year (situation). I had to keep dispatch running during the migration (task). I did the training before everyone else, wrote a one-page guide to the most-used steps and became the go-to person for questions on the shift (action). In the first week we dispatched 90% of our usual volume, and in the second, 100% (result)».
Situational and closing questions: four model answers
Situational questions set out a case you have not yet faced. According to the OPM, they rest on a different idea: what people say they would do is closely tied to what they actually do. Answer them with steps and the reason for each one; if you have a similar real example, add it at the end. The two closing questions need concrete preparation: a figure with evidence behind it and questions of your own.
12. A customer complains about something that was not your fault: «First I listen to the whole complaint without arguing about whose fault it was. Then I tell them what I am going to do and by when, and I find out where it went wrong. The customer cares about getting it fixed; the blame I sort out afterwards, internally. It happened with a haulier who lost a delivery: the customer never found out whose mistake it was, only that the order arrived the next day».
13. Your first 90 days: «The first month, listening: getting to know the team, the processes and the warehouse figures. The second, sorting out the two or three things that waste the most time. The third, proposing changes backed by data and with the team on board».
14. Salary expectations: «From similar roles advertised in West Yorkshire and my experience, I am looking at between £X and £Y a year. I would also like to understand the rest of the package». In the UK salaries are usually discussed as gross annual figures, so give yours that way.
15. Do you have any questions?: «How is success in this role measured in the first year?», «What is the team's biggest challenge right now?» and «What are the next steps?». Never «no, I think you have covered everything»: it is the last impression you leave.
An example from start to finish: from a memory to a STAR answer
How Hannah built her answer about the conflict with sales, from remembering the case to being able to tell it in a minute and a half. The method works for any story.
- Pick the event
Hannah went back over her last year looking for a real disagreement with another team. She dropped a minor argument and chose the delivery-times one, because it had a measurable result.
- Write the four parts separately
One sentence of situation, one of task, four or five of action and one of result. She wrote it on a sheet of paper without worrying about how it sounded.
- Put a figure on the result
She checked the complaints log so as not to quote a made-up number: they had gone from about 40 to about 20 a month. She said «halved» because that is what she could back up.
- Tell your part with first-person verbs
She changed «we made a table» to «I pulled the data together, showed him and we built it together», so it was clear what she did and what the team did.
- Rehearse it aloud against a clock
The first version took three minutes. She cut the background on the company and got it down to a minute and a half. Then she prepared what to say if asked how the sales manager reacted.
The bank of six stories: the Cernoria method
Nobody needs fifteen different stories. What we use at Cernoria to prepare an interview is a bank of six stories of your own, each told with STAR, reused by changing which part you lead with. The stock story works as your biggest achievement, as a strength and as an example of leadership, depending on what you are asked.
| Story you prepare | Questions it answers |
|---|---|
| An achievement with a measurable result | Biggest achievement, strengths, why we should hire you |
| A disagreement with a person or team | Conflict, teamwork, persuading someone |
| A mistake of yours and what you changed afterwards | Mistake, weakness, learning |
| A situation with little time or few resources | Pressure, priorities, organisation |
| A change you did not choose | Adapting, learning fast, uncertainty |
| A time you helped or trained someone | Leadership, communication, teamwork |
At Cernoria we see it this way: an interview is not won with perfect answers but with true events told in order. Six stories you can stand behind under any follow-up question are worth more than fifteen lines learnt by heart.
How to practise and how to handle follow-up questions
The National Careers Service stresses two things we often see go wrong: telling your examples in a conversational way so you do not sound rehearsed, and being ready for follow-up questions on each example. Interviewers tend to probe exactly where a story has a gap: what you did yourself, why you chose that, what you would do differently.
- Rehearse each story aloud, against a clock, until it lasts between one and two minutes.
- Do not learn it word for word: learn the four parts and the figure in the result.
- For each story, prepare an answer to «what would you do differently?».
- Keep the job advert to hand and mark which story answers each requirement.
- If you have no exact example, say so and give the closest one; made-up stories fall apart under follow-up.
- After each interview, note the questions you were asked: next time you will recognise the family.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most common interview questions?
The ones that come up most are «tell me about yourself», why you want the job, why you are leaving, strengths and weaknesses, several behavioural questions (conflict, mistake, pressure, achievement) and salary expectations. Six prepared stories cover almost all of them.
What is the STAR method in an interview?
It is a way of answering questions about past events in four parts: situation, task, action and result. It keeps the answer specific and easy to score, and the action, what you did yourself, takes up most of the time.
How long should an interview answer be?
Between one and two minutes for a STAR answer, and less for short questions such as why you want the job. If you go over two minutes there is almost always too much background: trim the situation and keep the action and the result.
What if I have no work experience to use with STAR?
Use examples from your studies, placements, volunteering or personal projects: the method works just the same. A group project at university with a real disagreement and a concrete result is a perfectly valid STAR story.
How should I answer the salary expectations question?
With a gross annual range based on similar roles advertised in your area, and a sentence saying you would like to understand the full package. A range with evidence shows you have done your research; a random figure leaves you no room to negotiate.
Sources
- Paul R. Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry and Filip Lievens, Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022
- Master HR, New study providing updated validity estimates (summary of the estimates by Sackett and colleagues)
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Structured Interviews
- National Careers Service, The STAR method
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