Storytelling in the STAR Answer Format for Behavioral Interviews
"Tell me about a time..."
BigTechCo interviews can be five hours or more of questions along this line.
These behavioral interview questions are designed to provide insight into how you approach a variety of work situations, what you learned in the process, and your communication skills. Answers are expected in the STAR format. For those not familiar, STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
STAR can seem daunting at first. It did to me. But it's just one of many storytelling frameworks, and answering these types of questions is really about telling a story where you're the star of the show.
But what's a story? Stories have three parts: a beginning (the Situation), a middle (the Task and Action[s]), and an end (the Result).
Here's a behavioral interview question and short story answer example.
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"Tell me about a time you encountered a problem at work."
"In the early days of digital.forest the server room was a room in a building and the air conditioner was a window-mount unit. It was a very hot summer and I thought that if I closed the door to the rest of the office space when I went home at night the air conditioner would be more efficient. My pager rang early in the morning when a customer couldn't contact their server. I went to the office and discovered everything had overheated and shut down. I had to air out the building and wait for everything to cool down before I could turn everything back on. After that was done, I called all my customers back and told them what had happened. I learned I shouldn't close the interior door."
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It's a story, but it's not very compelling and it's lacking detail, particularly quantifying detail.
But what makes a compelling story? Conflict.
Conflict isn't just about disagreements, it can also be about constraints or incompatible goals.
Here's a retelling that's hopefully more compelling.
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"In 1995, I moved my startup from my basement to a shared office with a web development firm. One of the principals had a family friend with extra office space, which was a single-wide trailer in a welding yard in Redmond across from the concrete fabricators.
This was the early days of the commercial Internet before data centers and I was at one end of the trailer and they were at the other and we had a number of shared clients. They'd do the web design and I'd handle the colocated servers. I had about 40 servers at the time stacked on industrial shelving I'd bought at Home Depot. My desk was right next to the servers and the room was always warm and humming from fans and hard drives. Air conditioning for the building was two window-mount air conditioners at both ends of the building and we had pocket sliding doors to segment our spaces with the kitchen and bathroom in the center.
At the end of June, we had a hot spell into the mid to upper 90s and the air conditioner was working extra hard to keep up with heat from the servers. When I arrived at work in the mornings I had to air out the building because it could barely keep up. One night, I had the bright idea to close the pocket door, thinking the concentrated heat would mean the air conditioner would be more efficient.
I was wrong. Very wrong.
Some time around 4:30 AM my pager woke me. A customer's server wasn't responding. Then the pager went off again. And again. And again. Something was definitely wrong.
I'd had serious problems with my Internet telco installation, so I was afraid the network had gone down. I lived about 30 minutes away from the office but without traffic and regard to traffic laws, I made it in about 20.
Through the outside door to the office, normally you could hear the hum of the servers and feel it in the stairs. As I stood before the door, it was dead quiet except for three things: birdsong, the abnormal buzz of the air conditioner, and the ringing office phone. There was no hum. Worse, the doorknob was hot. It was so hot, I had to use my shirt to turn it so I wouldn't scorch my fingers.
A blast of hot air hit me as I opened the door and my heart went cold. Every server was off. I quickly unplugged everything, including the phone, both terrified of and relieved there hadn't been an electrical fire.
I unplugged the phone because a mentor of mine had once told me that during emergencies, if you're busy answering the phone you're not busy solving the problem.
After a few moments of worrying about how the heck I was going to pay my clients back for ruining their servers and software to the tune of about $200,000, I started to work the problem.
Step one was to assuage my customers. I changed the company voice mail to say we were having a service interruption and that I would follow-up when I had more information to share.
Step two was to open all the windows and doors to air things out and take advantage of the cooler temperatures of early dawn.
Step three was investigating the air conditioner. It was blowing cool-ish air, but not cold. I went outside to take a look and discovered the heat exchanger was encased in ice. That explained the odd buzz. At some point in the night it couldn't cool any more because the ice prevented any more heat exchange and defaulted to blowing the warm, outside air in.
I went back inside and had a think about the situation. What was different about this night?
The pocket door! But why did it have that effect?
After more thinking it struck me. Physics.
By closing the door I had done two things: I had reduced the air volume that could absorb heat and isolated the other cooling source. Less air + less cooling = meltdown. I had my root cause.
I plugged the phone back in and went through my voice mails. I called those customers back first and then went down my customer list. My message was short and simple. We'd had a cooling failure and after everything cooled off, I'd plug everything back in and if their equipment didn't come back up I'd make them whole somehow.
That done, everything was still hot so I took the opportunity to re-cable everything. Company growth had been fast and cabling was a tangled mess. I zip-tied power strips to the shelving, looped power cables to length, and custom-cut Ethernet cables and tied them up as well. When I was done, it was much tidier, would present better during customer tours, and it was operationally easier to access and work on the servers.
This took a couple of hours and I held my breath and started to power servers up. Server after server spun back up like nothing had happened. I was lucky. Every piece of equipment still worked. After confirming everything was back online, I called every customer again to let them know and then changed the voicemail back to normal. By the time I was done, it was around noon.
I was lucky, I didn't lose a single customer.
I learned I shouldn't shut the door to the office for extended periods and let my office mates know so it wouldn't happen again. I also learned I had much to learn about and plan for environmental controls. When we moved into new offices in 1998 and had a dedicated data center, we installed a separate HVAC system."
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When I tell this story in an interview, I'm much more succinct and aim to tell the story in two minutes or less because there are often follow-up questions where I can add more detail.
Is it more compelling with the details and quantifications? Do you see the conflicts and how they drive the narrative? Do you see the STAR format?
Your stories don't need to be as dramatic or have such high stakes. They just need to have a beginning, a middle, an end, and some conflict along the way. There are many example behavioral questions out there and I recommend building up a story bank of stories to help you ace the interview.
Good luck!