In the Job Interview: Should I answer questions using the STAR Method or Tell a Story?

Jan. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- Which is better: S.T.A.R. interview answers or story answers?  The difference between using a STAR method of crafting answers to interview questions and leveraging a story can be dramatic.  STAR answers tend to be shorter and very direct.  Stories serve the purpose of answering the question, while entertaining the listener.  Stories also create a vehicle to display competencies in a more credible manner.  For example, if you simply state that you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself the hiring manager may believe you or not.  But if you tell a story in which it’s clear that you are laughing at yourself, you’ve demonstrated the truth of the claim.  In this case the story is superior.   Not all job interview questions lend themselves to storytelling, but it is useful to have several stories, which you can draw upon for the job interview.  

The story below is not my own.  I have changed minor facts to protect the innocent but the original staff portion of the story and the growth goals are true.  The way I first heard the answer is contained in the STAR table below.  You will see that there was much more here than what was revealed in the STAR version.  Often people are a little too cautious in the job interview and miss the juice in a story when they try to tell it too succinctly.

STAR Version
The STAR method lays out the Situation, Task, Action and Result.  It is an excellent way to structure an answer to an interview question, especially one where a story does not seem to fit.  You start by describing the situation you faced.  Then, you lay out the tasks you were assigned and perhaps the difficulty you faced.  Next, you talk about the action you took to achieve the task.  Finally, you describe the result.  

The interview question was: “Tell me about a time you had to work under pressure.”   Here is the STAR version before we discovered there was a good story here.

S.T.A.R. Narrative:
I stepped into a new role to run an office where we distributed small grants to individuals and groups for community projects mostly to foster skills education and to subsidize employment opportunities.  The established team consisted of 2 experienced grant workers and an excellent intern who’d been there for nine months. Unfortunately, two weeks into the job, they all left and I was all alone.  That created a lot of pressure on me.

My chief goal was to rapidly expand the grant giving process to have a more substantial impact on the distressed community, particularly in education and employment initiatives. It was an ambitious goal and would have been challenging with the original staff, and now was doubly so with just me in the office.

I felt a lot of pressure because I had to keep the grants flowing while anticipating the additional effort of hiring and training a new staff. But then I hit on a great strategy to hire a handful of local college students to fill in part time.  I'm a good motivator and organizer and managed to get this team up and running quickly, and together we overcame the setback.

The student team really came through.  Together we greatly expanded the program and ended the year beating the original goals. I think I handled the pressure quite well.


Story Version
In crafting the story version you start by laying out the narrative much as you do in creating the STAR answer.  But in the case of crafting the story, once you’ve established the basic narrative you go looking for some element of surprise.  It’s the elements of unexpectedness in a story that make it engaging.

In the story above, I asked for more details where I thought I might find surprise.  I asked: how the three people left the office; how the decision to hire college students came about; and what happened to the college students at the end of the period.  When I asked these questions the surprises emerged.  Here is the story version of that answer:

“Ambitious growth goals often can create real pressure in a job, but you can imagine the pressure I found myself under when just two weeks into a new job managing a grant-making office in a distressed community, I fired my entire team.    It was a small staff consisting of a pair of highly experience grant workers, a man and a woman, with 15 years experience between them.  Plus, we had a very capable intern who’d been there just under a year.  From a grant awarding and management perspective, these three knew what they were doing.

Two days into the job, though, I noticed that the woman seemed to spend a great deal of her day on the phone having conversations that did not sound grant related.  When I broached the subject with her, she said that she was just wrapping up some personal matters.  When it continued over the next couple of days I pressed her on what she was doing. It turned out that she was running a personal business on the side.    I told her that I had no issue with her having a personal business but that she had to run the business on her own time and could not use office time or resources to do so.  She nodded and for the next day or two she worked exclusively on grant work.  However, soon she was back to her old tricks.  I told her that if she didn’t stop, I’d have to fire her.

Then all hell broke loose.  “Fire me? Fire me? For what? running a legitimate business?” She screamed at me.  “At least I’m not forging checks like someone else in the office.”

I was startled.  Well,  it turned out to be just one check, but a large one.  A week or so before I got to the office a grantee had shown up at the office to pick up his check.  But the police followed him into the office and arrested him on a parole violation.  He went straight back to jail.  This left his check un-cashed.  It turned out that the intern looked a bit like the grantee.  So, the other gentleman in our office convinced the intern to take the check to the bank and cash it,  and they would split the proceeds.  Which is exactly what they did.  

Naturally, I had to fire the two of them for their fraudulent action, but I also had to fire the woman for failing to report the crime to senior management.  That left me alone under enormous pressure to both fulfill the goals and hire a completely new workforce.

Then I had a brainstorm.  One of our goals was to find more opportunities for part time work for college students at the local four year college.  I immediately got permission from our head office to bring in five college student on a part-time grant basis to help me run the office.  I thought I would choose science and math majors because they would be less threatening to the future permanent staff since they were unlikely to want to make grant management their career.  Of course I was wrong about that, because later I learned that two of the five students went into grant work after graduation because they’d come to love what we were doing.

To make a long story short, we never did hire back permanent replacements.  It was easy to fire up these students, organize the work around dual controls on all disbursements, and let each student see what a positive impact their individual contribution made to the community.  They were such good workers; we had no trouble beating the goals by a wide margin at a much lower office cost.”

Stories are far more engaging and much easier to listen to.  Stories don’t even need to answer the question very precisely.  Moreover, in an interview you want to be memorable.  A good story like this one will get re-told by the hiring manager, and that makes you memorable.

For more on crafting stories go the this video http://blog.peakinterview.com/2010/11/27/video-crafting-s...  On how to create competitive advantage in the job interview and win the offer read The Peak Interview available at http://shop.peakinterview.com.