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Before you start ...

The job candidate tells the group which job field they're looking into (ie: front-end web development, data science, SEO marketing).

Question

(This is for the interviewer to ask.)

"I'd love to hear about your work so far. Could you tell me about a recent [insert job field] project you worked on?"

Potential Clarifications

(The job candidate (JC) can ask clarifying questions to understand what the interviewer (I) is looking for.) Possible scripts:

• JC: "I'd like to talk about a personal project I recently did. Is that ok or would you prefer another example?"
  • I: "Sure -- I want to understand your process for approaching a problem. You can give any example."
• JC: "I have a recent work example I'm proud of, but I can't reveal much information due to an NDA. Should I give another example?"
  • I: "Yes, please. I really want to hear about the results of your project, so would love to hear any data you can share. You can even pick a personal project."

Answer: Use STAR!

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

(Optional: Scroll to the bottom of the page to find some examples of how a job candidate can use STAR to answer.)

Examples of STAR in Practice

1. Situation: Describe the specific event you were in.
   1. "My team recently had to launch a website with a tight deadline."
   2. "I decided to compete in a Kaggle competition. The datasets were for a food delivery company, and I'm very interested in businesses that provide on-demand services."
   3. "I wanted to run an A/B test on an email subject line."
2. Task: Describe your personal goal. (If applicable, you can mention the business goal also.)
   1. "Our marketing team wanted a complex homepage, with a lot of subpages and navigation, for a conference they were holding in three weeks. My responsibility was to work with Design and ensure the front-end side of the website matched all the specs."
   2. "The Kaggle competition wanted new ideas for how to predict high-demand times -- basically, when will people be ordering the most food? Personally, I was also interested in seeing which cuisines were most popular at which times."
   3. "The problem at hand was that people were not opening my emails, so I decided to focus on open rate. I wanted to solve this first before I moved onto other problems like click and conversion rates."
3. Action: Describe how you reached your goal. Mention the tools you used and the skills you applied.
   1. "I immediately met with the design manager so we could be aligned on timeline and goals. Because the copywriters were not yet finished, I used dummy text to build the main page and one subpage. Since there were so many subpages, I opted to use [this front-end framework]...."
   2. "First, I did some exploratory analysis to just get a better idea of what the data showed. For example, I found very few people ordered food when the total was less than $10, so I knew most people ordered multiple plates for delivery. Next, I applied [this model]...."
   3. "I wrote up two subject lines: one was a question and kind of click-baity - like "do you know why …?". The other said what the email was about, like "Learn more about ..." I originally had a small sample size, but realize I wouldn't get much statistical significance with that denominator, so I had to first expand my audience. ..."
4. Result: Don't be shy about expressing your success, but it's ok if the result wasn't what you wanted. Describe what you learned and what you want to do next.
   1. "Although we did launch the website in time, a huge issue was that the copy was not ready. Therefore, the styling we did just didn't make sense for all the images and subsections the writers wanted in the pages. We had to do last minute negotiations to cut text. I learned that ..."
   2. "I did rank in the top 100 of the competition. It really solidified how much I enjoy applying data science to this industry. That's why I was so interested in this job -- I really want to look into how we can use data to ensure there are enough people to deliver food at high-demand times."
   3. "I actually ended up seeing a 30% difference. Such a big difference is really rare in email marketing! It made me realize my audience wasn't interested in clickbait, they wanted to know what we were sending to them. This helped me rethink not just my email strategy, but my blogs also."

You can continue practicing with the same question, but these are similar questions that normally ask the same or similar thing:

• Tell me a bit about what you've been doing.
• What have you been working on?
• Tell me about a time you did X. (Tip: Usually, the employer is looking for a work example. If you don't have that, it's ok to use a personal or learning project you did.)
  • "Tell me about a time you worked on a front-end project with a group."
  • "Tell me about a time you were faced with a difficult situation at work."
  • "Tell me about a time you had to meet a tight deadline."