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Preparing for a successful interview that leads to a potential job for you requires multiple factors. However, the most important is your ability to answer questions clearly and concisely while selling yourself to the interviewer as the best choice for the position. 

This is where the STAR method comes in. Although this method is best used to answer behavioural interview questions that require you to put yourself in situations or recall how you handled a situation in the past. You can still always adapt the basic principles to tackle any interview question.

The STAR Method

The STAR method, when used properly, is a question-answering formula that helps you present your answers in a structured and coherent manner. That way, you remain focused on your interviewer’s questions and do not end up sharing trivial details.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how the STAR method developed or where it originated. Regardless, it is only popular today because it works. Instead of just telling a story at your next interview, structuring your answers with the STAR method paints a vivid picture for your interviewers and highlights your role in achieving the desired result. 

STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. Let’s take a closer look at each of those:

S – Situation

The first step to applying the STAR is describing the situation or surrounding circumstances. This is very important as it helps your interviewer understand the position you, your team, or your company was in. For instance, if asked to “Describe a time you had to apply initiative or out-of-the-box ideas in your work?” You can start by explaining your role and why the team required your initiative.

Here’s an example: For a sales-related job, you could describe your previous or current role on a team and point out that three years ago, the team’s output was decreasing due to some new competition in the market or because the marketing methods the team relied on no longer produced results like before.

T – Task

The next step with the STAR is to point out your particular task in that situation. Sticking with the abovementioned situation, you can tell your interviewer about your assigned task. In our already established situation, let’s assume that your team lead asked all team members to develop ideas to boost sales by 50%. 

The task here for you is straightforward: Produce an idea, and implement it to boost sales by at least 50% for that year. 

A – Action

After describing the situation and your task, you then have to tell your interviewer about the action or series of actions you took after carefully considering the situation and the task assigned to you. 

If, at that time, you came up with the idea to use trending memes to create social media content as a marketing tool, you should then describe this to your interviewer. You can start by describing how you came up with the idea, pitching it to your team, and how you led or contributed to its implementation.

R – Results

Finally, showing that your actions produced results that set your team in the right direction or met the deliverable you were initially assigned is essential.

To conclude your answer to the question while highlighting results, you could say, “After adapting our social media marketing to connect with a wider audience, our organization recorded a 57% increase in sales that year.”

Conclusion

The key to maximizing the STAR method is practicing it consistently with a few scenarios which you can use to answer different interview questions. 

At JobGo, we believe that internalizing this approach to answering interview questions could contribute significantly to a candidate’s success.

Is AI another “new normal”? Over the past few months, we have become exposed to the immense potential Artificial Intelligence offers. Two years ago, you probably would have never imagined that AI could, one day, help you sound like Barrack Obama or Taylor Swift. 

However, AI use has been around for a while, and recruiters have used it for almost ten years. Still growing in popularity, a 2021 Forbes article revealed that 99% of Fortune 500 companies employ AI in some form while hiring. A 2023 Tidio study also shows that 65% of all recruiters use AI in their process.

Naturally, some valid concerns still exist with the use of AI in hiring. However, at the risk of sounding a bit cliche, the truth is that it can only get better from here. Furthermore, the benefits that the implementation of AI offers to your recruitment process are enormous. 

We do not claim that recruiting AI is perfect, but it is rapidly improving. Solutions are beginning to emerge to tackle the problems we currently know of. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Tackling the Problems of AI in Recruitment

One of the biggest problems discovered with the application of AI in recruitment is bias. You’ve probably heard about the Amazon story when they found their recruiting AI was biased against women. Of course, this was not a conscious bias, but it mostly never is. Discrimination is also not always gender-based. Recruiting AI could unconsciously learn to discriminate based on race or age. 

So far, the good thing is that we now realise that this is a problem. It arises because most recruiting AI is trained on the datasets of previous hiring patterns and preferences at organisations. But unlike human recruiters, AI’s impersonality means it does not understand the need for affirmative action to correct years of bias in an organisation. So, once it is trained on resumes or behaviours that biased recruiters previously used to make hiring decisions, it tends to continue that pattern.

Many service providers now carry out periodical algorithmic audits to solve the bias associated with recruiting AI to ensure a transparent process with objective metrics for candidate selection. Policymakers have also attempted to regulate how AI is being used to recruit in New York. Although the New York legislation has faced criticism for the loopholes it contains, it is still a step in the right direction. 

We expect similar legislation in the European Union later this year or early next year. When it comes into force, the EU law will require companies that employ AI in their hiring to be more transparent about their use of AI and the factors that affect the AI’s decision-making. The transparency in processes that this law will bring about will make it easier to identify bias while also tackling the “black-box” scepticism surrounding AI use in business.  

The JobGo Approach

With our understanding of the problems with recruiting AI, how do we at JobGo, give you a service that prioritises objectivity, helping you source and recruit the most qualified candidates? Simple, we combine the best of both worlds. 

AI is undoubtedly useful for several aspects of recruiting, like searching for candidates, filtering applications, communication, etc. However, when combined with efficient human oversight and a human-led approach for other aspects like interviews, you end up with a fast and efficient system that only hires the most qualified candidates for a role. 

So, do you need a service that gives you efficient tools with human expertise? Contact us today.