According to Kee Meng Yeo and Scott C. Hammond in article entitled Moving Beyond Behavior-Based Questions written for HREOnline.com, “behavior-based interviewing needs to include an exploration of a candidate’s learning ability as an essential component in verifying their contribution to business success and to determining how they learned — and what they learned — while meeting the challenges of their previous assignment, even in situations where success may not be as evident, such as in the current economic environment”.
Thus, it is no longer sufficient to use the STAR approach in responding to interview questions:
- State a situation that occurred while you were at work in the past which presented a problem that you had to deal with.
- Specify the time or the context of this problem to enable the interviewer to understand the importance or gravity of the issue at hand.
- Identify the specific action that you took in response to and to resolve the problem.
- Describe the results of the action that you took and how it resolved the problem.
To bring to light your ability to learn and gain insight from previous challenges that confronted you at work, you need to add another component to your STAR. Illustrate how this specific problem situation has enriched your experience by way of gaining a valuable insight. Portray how you gained this insight and why; and, most importantly, how you intend to apply this learning into similar situations that you would encounter in the future. The key word here is the future. Hiring managers might not only be interested in how you performed in the past but more so on how you would perform when you get hired.
