Interviews can be a daunting prospect, especially if you’ve not done one in a long time. The good news is, interviews are something you can practice, prepare for and get really good at.

As you progress in your career, from technical to leadership you’ll find that the weighting of interviews move from purely technical questions to behavioural ones. Behavioural Interview questions are the standard format of a structured interview, and are looking for you to tell the interviewer about something that occurred in the past and how you handled it. An example might be ‘tell me about a time you had difficulties with a co-worker’.

The trouble with behavioural interview questions is that the answer isn’t necessarily tangible, and even though you might know what you want to say, or what you think the interviewer is looking for, expressing it well can be difficult for a few reasons.

Firstly, the interviewer isn’t just looking for the outcome, they are looking for how you went about finding the solution.

Secondly, because you’re potentially nervous or perhaps not used to talking about things like this it can be difficult to know if you’re answering the question well, and when to stop talking. This is especially relevant if the interviewer isn’t giving you much feedback during the interview.

The Gold Standard of providing answers to behavioural interview questions is called the STAR method. Situation, Task, Action, Result. What it achieves is it tells all the important parts of the example whilst providing a structure to your answer and an endpoint, so you know when you’ve answered the question well enough.

Here are some tips to help you structure STAR answers to behavioural questions:

Prepare for the Interview:

Before the interview, think about the skills and experiences that are relevant to the job you are applying for. A behavioural interview question will always ask for an example of something that happened in the past – and will almost certainly be relevant to the job or interview. There are only a certain amount of topics they can cover, so you can prepare very effectively.

Describe the Situation:

When answering a behavioural interview question, start by describing the situation or challenge you faced. Make sure to provide enough context for the interviewer to understand the situation.

Explain the Task:

Next, describe the task or objective you were trying to accomplish in that situation. Be specific and describe the goal in a clear and concise manner.

Outline the Action you took:

Describe the specific actions you took to achieve the task or overcome the challenge. Focus on what you did and what steps you took, rather than what the team or others did.

Highlight the Result:

Finally, emphasise the result or outcome of your actions. Make sure to quantify the results, if possible. For example, “As a result of my efforts, sales increased by 20% in one quarter.” This will show the interviewer the impact you had.

The purpose of the STAR format is to deliver an example in an impressive and succinct way which demonstrates to the interviewer that you can think and communicate in a structured manner. You should be prepared for the interviewer to go into more detail with you about your answer.

Finally, in my experience successful interviews are conversational. You want to keep your answer succinct, and impactful. Avoid going into a monologue, you should use your interviewers body language and non-verbal queues to know when to wrap it up.