star interview questions about problem solving

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• Behavioral Interviews

The STAR Interview Method: How to Answer + Examples

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result, and this method will help you create structured, concise, and engaging responses to behavioral interview questions. Whenever you need to tell a story to demonstrate your skills, STAR is your go-to.

If “telling a story” sounds intimidating, don’t worry. We wrote this guide with the help of career coach Pamela Skillings, recognized as “A guru in the world of interviewing” by the Wall Street Journal. Her insights and tips will help you learn the STAR method and quickly create engaging answers to increase your chances of landing a job.

After reading this article, you’ll know:

• What is the STAR method and how to use it for the greatest impact
• How to make your STAR answers shine bright (samples included)
• How to easily prepare your answers before the interview

Don’t waste days compiling overused interview techniques. Get original answers to every single question you could expect.

What Is the STAR Method?

The STAR (Situation-Task-Action-Result) method, a.k.a. the STAR format, is a way to answer behavioral interview questions and other common questions that require storytelling. It proves you’ve got the skills needed to excel in the position you applied for — based on a story about how you used those skills in the past.

Usually, you’ll need to use the STAR technique when answering behavioral interview questions , that is, questions that begin with:

• Tell me about a time when…
• Can you recall a situation in which…
• Give me an example of a time when you…

The STAR method can be useful in answering any question, whenever you’d like to use a story or illustrate something with an example. For instance, questions about:

• Your proudest accomplishments
• Times you failed
• Your strengths
• Your weaknesses
• Situational questions – questions about a hypothetical situation

“I recommend that when it’s possible, candidates add a short STAR example to the hypothetical. Like: ‘Here’s a description of how I would generally respond. For example, I recently had a situation…’ Not always possible but definitely helpful. A real example is much more memorable and convincing than theorizing.” — says Skillings.

For more information on behavioral interviewing and how to answer these questions using the STAR method, check out the video:

If you want to learn more about how to answer the most common interview questions, how to sell yourself in an interview, or negotiate your salary, sign up for our free course .

How to Create Answers Using the STAR Method

Let’s break down each component of the STAR method and learn the best way to craft compelling stories.

We’ll use an example of a retail sales associate being asked the following question: “Tell me about a time when you initiated a successful project or an idea.”

Describe the situation so that your interviewer understands the context. There’s no need to be too detailed. Providing a general context with the most important facts should be enough. This should take around 15% of the total answer time.

For example:

Briefly describe your specific task or responsibility in that situation. No need to go into detail here either, just make sure to highlight what your role was.

This is usually the shortest part and should account for 10% of the whole answer.

The main part of your STAR answer. You need to be as detailed as possible when describing what actions you took to achieve something. The Action part should take up around 60% of your answer (it might seem a lot, but remember, you have to describe what you did — step by step).

Here, interviewers will look for clues about your experience and skills. Depending on the skill the question is supposed to assess, this bit will show them:

• How you think.
• How you organize work.
• How well you work with others.
• If you have an analytical mind.

✅ Pro tip: The question hints about what skills you’ll need to highlight in the Action part. For example, in our case, the question “Tell me about a time when you initiated a successful project or an idea,” will look to assess:

• Your ability to take initiative (because you initiated a project)
• Your analytical skills (because you spotted potential areas of improvement)
• Your problem-solving skills (how you completed that project or idea)
• Your communication skills (because you had to successfully present an idea and get approval for its realization)

Here, you should mention the tangible results of your actions. Ideally, these will be quantifiable data (%, $), but you can also include qualitative things (bonuses, positive feedback, promotions, awards).

✅ Pro tip: You can also touch upon lessons learned from your experiences. This is especially important for questions about less flattering experiences you had, like the ones about your failures or weaknesses.

Here’s what the entire answer would sound like.

Sample answer using the STAR method

Interviewer: “Tell me about a time when you initiated a successful project or an idea.”

STAR Method in Action: Sample Questions and Answers

Sample star answer to a question about teamwork, industry: it consulting.

Interviewer: “Share an example of when you had to adapt to a team member’s working style.”

Situation: A few months ago, I was assigned to work on a project with a coworker from another department.

Task: Our task was to develop processes for several new services our agency introduced to our clients. After the initial meeting, I noticed big differences in how he and I approach work. I’m flexible and tend to focus on the big picture. He’s detail-oriented and prefers a structured approach.

Action: We decided to split the work accordingly. I focused on the goals of these new services and how to best follow them through procedures. I also worked on identifying key milestones and major project components. He, in turn, worked on granular steps, created structured plans for each project phase, and developed in-depth documentation and manuals explaining the processes.

Result: We ended up completing the project a week before the deadline and with minimal reiterations from the management team. The experience taught me that such a big difference in working styles is not a disadvantage: on the contrary, it’s a complementary strength that helps us contribute to the team and the company in the best possible way.

Why we like it: The candidate saw a way to turn a potentially difficult clash into a productive experience, displaying positivity and great interpersonal skills. They also proved their problem-solving skills by devising a plan where both people could contribute to the project through their unique strengths.

For a detailed guide on all behavioral questions related to teamwork, check out How to Answer Teamwork Interview Questions (Tips and Examples) .

Sample STAR answer to a question about problem-solving

Industry: hr.

Interviewer: “How did you approach a situation where you had multiple problems to solve at the same time?”

Situation: In my last position where I worked as a recruiter, we got into a high-demand hiring season where we had to fill in several key positions across several departments simultaneously.

Task: At first, I didn’t know what to focus on, as I was in charge of managing open positions and moving candidates through the hiring process effectively.

Action: I decided to structure my approach and began by researching each position thoroughly to gauge the urgency and criticality of the role. It helped me prioritize and allocate resources accordingly. I made strategic use of our applicant tracking system to streamline the sourcing and screening processes to filter out only the best, relevant candidates. I also used industry-specific platforms and forums to track people.

Result: This helped me meet the hiring goals and decrease the time needed for hiring. 2 years later, all the people I hired then are still in the company, which proves they were a good fit.

Why we like it: The candidate explained in detail their process for solving the problem, which gives the interviewer insight into their approach, problem-solving skills, prioritization, and analytical thinking.

If you want to learn all about how to answer problem-solving skills, we’ve got a super detailed guide for you: Answering Problem-Solving Interview Questions: Tips and Examples .

Sample STAR answer to a question about leadership

Industry: email marketing.

Interviewer: “Tell me about a time when you had to lead under pressure or a tight deadline.”

Situation: Last year, my team got a big ad-hoc project from one of our main clients.

Task: The deadline was tight, and we had to conceptualize and create 30+ BFCM promo emails.

Action: As soon as we got the brief, I scheduled a meeting to organize and divide the workload and set clear timelines. I prioritized tasks based on the email’s scheduling date and offer importance. I established the order of operations, and we had a clear process on who was doing what and when. Still, there were times when we had to improvise but transparent communication made it easy. Each person was like a piece of a puzzle and we worked tirelessly.

Result: It was like watching a well-organized sports team — their efficiency was admirable. We finished all emails on time and generated $850K in revenue from them. The client was thrilled.

Why we like it : The candidate kept their cool in a high-pressure situation and relied on their leadership and organizational skills to set an efficient process and inspire their team to give their best.

If you want to learn more about how to answer leadership questions, check out Behavioral Interview Questions: Leadership [How to Answer + Examples] .

If you’re applying for your first leadership position, head here: 20+ First-Time Manager Interview Questions and Answers + Tips

Sample STAR answer to a question about communication

Industry: education.

Interviewer: “Tell me about a situation when you persuaded someone to see things your way at work.”

Situation: Two years ago, I wanted to integrate some practical, real-world examples into classes and courses.

Task : I especially wanted to do this in my lessons and I wanted my students to get some hands-on experience in marketing.

Action: For this, I thought about involving a local retail business. So I had to convince my coworkers, teachers, and school administration to apply this unconventional approach. To make it convincing and enjoyable, I created a mini-game where teachers would play the role of students engaging in a simulated marketing project. Before the game, during the presentation, I put a lot of emphasis on how students could benefit from this and apply their theoretical knowledge to real-world situations.

Result: They appreciated my efforts and ideas and agreed to explore the possibility of collaborating with one of our local businesses. Eventually, we did manage to make it happen, and I learned how important it is to be relatable, creative, and fun when pitching new ideas.

Why we like it: The candidate found a new angle for persuading someone to see things their way — they were relatable and used humor and entertainment as their main weaponry.

If you want to learn more about how to answer questions about communication and working in diverse teams, check out Answering Behavioral Interview Questions: Intercultural Fluency .

Sample STAR answer to a question about initiative and ownership

Industry: marketing.

Interviewer: “Tell me about a time when you worked with little to no supervision.”

Situation: I worked in an internal marketing department in a marketing agency. We used to launch quarterly reports about industry trends and events that shaped the previous quarter.

Task: During a particularly busy season, the entire company was focused on client work. My coworker and Iwere left to write, design, publish, and promote the report without any help.

Action: We decided to split the tasks: I wrote the report, she edited it and added insights from industry experts we got in touch with. She designed the report, and I wrote the copy for the landing page and other promotional materials. Finally, we found a simple drag-and-drop page builder and created the landing page, connected it to our website and email service provider, and tested everything. Everything went pretty smoothly, and we managed to publish the report on time, as if nothing had happened.

Result: We got a lot of positive feedback from the readers. I realized I wouldn’t have been able to do it all by myself, and this experience taught me how important it is to work with someone you trust.

Why we like it: The candidate displayed resourcefulness and the ability to do the work independently. They also showed they can get along with others in high-pressure situations, and that they’re a reliable person who can deliver the work even if the circumstances are not ideal.

How to Prepare STAR Answers Before the Interview

Research the job.

You can’t properly prepare unless you know what exactly you’re preparing for. So you’ll need to research the job to understand what skills and competencies the position requires, and what kind of experience an ideal candidate would have.

Your best bet is the job ad itself. Read it carefully, and pay special attention to sections like “What you’ll be responsible for” or “Your duties.”

You can also check the company website — perhaps you can find the company structure there, and details about the team your potential position is in, as well as how it’s connected to other teams internally.

Check out the company’s social media and website for clues about company culture, as that can help you gauge what soft skills might be a nice addition to your experience and existing skills.

Reflect on your past

Think about your achievements that might be similar (or identical) to what’s expected of you in the job you’re interviewing for.

Think about:

• Things you achieved on your own
• Things you achieved with your coworkers
• Your failures and weaknesses
• Your strengths and interests
• Lessons you learned from certain experiences

Then, think about typical skills that behavioral questions tend to explore. These are usually:

• Communication
• Problem-solving
• Decision-making
• Initiative and ownership

Then, connect the dots. What is your proudest accomplishment, and what’s the skill that helped you achieve it? What’s your biggest failure? What caused it?

Write down these ideas and details and include them in the final version of your answer.

Finally, connect your past achievements or duties to potential interview questions. Draw parallels between the skills and experiences you have and the ones they need. Find a way to illustrate how you can contribute to their company.

More tips below:

Practicing for interviews is key, but especially so when it comes to delivering STAR-based answers.

If you don’t practice, here’s what will happen:

• You won’t have relevant stories to illustrate your skills.
• Even if you manage to think of something on the spot, you won’t provide all the relevant details.
• You won’t figure out the key skill they’re looking to assess.
• You’ll be nervous and scramble to find the right words.
• Your delivery will be a mess.

Practicing will prevent all of these problems and make sure both your answer and your delivery are perfect — it takes some time, yes, but it also makes all the difference between “we’ll call you” and “you’re hired!”

You can use an Interview Simulator to practice for just about any behavioral question. The tool will assess the quality of your answer and suggest how to make it better by adding more power words, improving your pace of speech or vocabulary, reducing filler words, and much more.

You can have as many takes as you like, until you feel confident and excited about that interview.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Being too general.

Get specific in all the components of your STAR answer! Sure, you already know that the Action part needs to be the longest and most detailed, but don’t skip over important info in other components.

If a piece of information is relevant to the story, contributes to the context, and illustrates your experience or skills, include it.

Missing the point

If a piece of info doesn’t contribute to your point in any way — drop it. There’s no need to use irrelevant details. Although there’s no fixed limit to the length of a STAR answer, it should be long enough to provide only key details that illustrate your point.

If you’re having doubts about whether or not to include a detail, ask yourself “So what?” If you can’t find a direct connection to the story, skip it.

Focusing on the wrong story

A story that doesn’t connect to the job you’re applying for or that doesn’t illustrate the right skill is useless, no matter how fun.

Anticipate common behavioral interview questions, research them, and think about what skill(s) they’re trying to assess.

The situation from the question will reveal what skill they’re trying to assess (usually what goes after “Tell me about a time when”). Once you discover what it is, you can think of additional, complementary skills that would be nice to have.

Below is a list of common behavioral questions and skills they’re seeking to uncover. The bolded elements are the main skill the question is targeting, the rest are complementary, desirable skills to display.

• Describe a time when you had to handle a conflict between two team members ( Conflict resolution , teamwork, interpersonal relations, communication, leadership)
• Can you share an instance where you went over and above to help a team member? ( Teamwork , taking initiative)
• Can you give an example of a time when your team disagreed with your decision, and how did you manage it? ( Conflict resolution , leadership, persuasion, communication)
• Describe a situation where you had to make a tough decision with limited information ( Decision-making , resourcefulness, analytical thinking, calculating risk)
• Discuss a situation where you implemented a creative solution to a problem ( Problem-solving , analytical thinking, creativity)
• Share an experience of leading a team through a major organizational change ( Leadership , problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, communication)
• How have you handled a non-performing team member? ( Interpersonal relationships , handling feedback, leadership, problem-solving)
• How have you persuaded someone to see things your way at work? ( Persuasion , communication, interpersonal relationships, teamwork)
• How have you handled communicating with a diverse group of individuals? ( Communication , teamwork, creativity)
• Talk about a project or task you started on your initiative ( Taking initiative , task ownership, problem-solving, analytical thinking)

Not preparing ahead of time

As we already said, preparation is key. Not preparing your stories and STAR answers in advance will seriously mess up your chances of landing that job for all the reasons discussed in the headings above: your answer will be messy, you’ll miss the point and tell the wrong story, you’ll sound unconvincing, you won’t be able to provide relevant detail, and you’ll probably get confused and start stuttering.

For this reason, anticipating the most common behavioral questions and preparing a few stories in advance is key.

Plus, a single story can serve you multiple times for multiple different questions.

Not to mention, you’ll be ready for job interviews that will come in the future. All it will take is just a bit of refreshing your memory.

The STAR Interview Method: Popular Opinion vs. Expert Advice

Assignmenthuge102 posted on Reddit :

Does anybody else feel demoralized after a STAR method interview? I can’t stand STAR method interviews (situation, task, action, result). It seems so fake and it doesn’t seem to get the most out of the candidate because of how manufactured their responses are. What are your thoughts on this method? Has anyone had success with it? What are your experience? 

Career expert comments:

Like any other framework, the STAR is the template to be adjusted and changed according to a candidate’s unique experience. If used lazily, it will produce inauthentic answers.

But if used properly, it’s just a way to create meaningful answers quicker and easier – not a tool for mass-producing manufactured answers. So it’s likely that the STAR answers this person heard from others and used themselves were not correctly made.

If a candidate has strong achievements, their STAR answers won’t be boring or predictable because it’s not likely that someone else managed to earn that amount of money, or reduced churn by that percent, and similar. So I’d say to focus on results and quantify them in the STAR answer.

From there, candidates are allowed to play around. I would say that reordering the STAR elements can be a fun way to stand out. For example, starting your answer with:

“I once saved $23K for my company simply by introducing a detailed QA checklist.” is a great way to hook the listener and make them want to hear more. From there, you can work your way back and explain how you did it and why it needed to be done in the first place.

In the same thread, Confident-Mushroom80 said:

The best way to get through them is to literally sit down with a Google Sheet and copy/paste STAR questions onto it and then methodically formulate the best possible answer for them. Format it nicely so it’s effective for your eyes. Refresh the answers in any way you see fit according to the new job you are interviewing for. If you’re on Zoom or whatever you can literally have it open on a second screen and scroll through to find things in real time in case your brain flies out your ass in mid-interview.

… and BootyMcSqueak answered:

I did this too. Until they asked questions I wasn’t prepared for and tried doing STAR on the fly. I felt flustered trying to word everything in that specific format. I did not get the job.

Career expert comments: 

Don’t do this unless you want to get flustered and ruin your chances of landing a job. Interviewers can easily spot a canned answer, doesn’t matter if you’ll read it from a Google Sheet or learn it by heart. They might not comment on it, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it.

A better approach here would be to focus on the stories and how you can adjust them to answer several different questions – not on individual questions and a canned answer for each.

So prepare several strong stories that showcase your skills and then adjust them to answer the question you get in an interview. If you prepare them for the key skills relevant to pretty much any position (teamwork, problem-solving, communication, analytical skills…), you’ll be covered.

You’ll have an answer to the question, you’ll know exactly what you need to say, but you’ll do a bit of improvisation to adjust it, which will prove it’s authentic and not scripted.

Summary of the Main Points

• The STAR method stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
• STAR is used to answer all behavioral interview questions, but it can be useful whenever you want to tell a story, regardless of the type of question you get.
• When using this framework, you should provide enough relevant information to set the context, describe the problem and your part in it, your action (how you solved it), and the results.
• The Action part of your answer needs to be the longest and most detailed: it needs to take up around 60% of your STAR answer.
• Always include quantifiable results. If this is not possible, mention qualitative results like bonuses, promotions, positive feedback, and similar.
• It’s best to mention the lessons learned in the Results part, especially when answering questions about your less flattering side: your failures and weaknesses.

_____________________

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What is the START method? Is it different from the STAR method?

START stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result, Takeaway. Essentially, it’s the same as STAR, with another component, Takeaway, in which you talk about lessons learned from the experience. That said, you should list lessons learned in the Result section whenever possible, so essentially, START and STAR are the same.

Can I use the STAR method when answering questions other than the behavioral ones?

Yes, you can use the STAR method whenever you want to tell a story to illustrate your point — at pretty much any time during the interview, not only when asked a behavioral question. You can also use it when answering situational questions, to add a realistic picture in addition to your hypothetical reaction.

Why do I find the “tell me about a time” questions so hard?

You might find the behavioral questions hard or challenging in case you don’t prepare in advance. In such cases, it’s hard to think of relevant stories on the spot, it’s difficult to properly describe relevant skills and experience, and your delivery will be poor because you’re nervous. This is why preparing and practicing answers for these questions is crucial for informative, engaging answers and confident delivery.

How to use the STAR method if I can’t think of an example of a specific situation?

If you haven’t experienced the exact situation that a question refers to, think of a similar one, or analyze the question, figure out which skill it seeks to assess, and provide a story where you displayed a similar skill. If this doesn’t work, think of situations that share similarities or certain aspects with the question asked. If that doesn’t work either, create a hypothetical scenario that demonstrates the skills from the question. However, you’ll need to be transparent and communicate that this is a hypothetical situation. In the Situation and Task parts of your answer, briefly describe the scenario you’re using as a basis for your response. In the Action part, describe what actions you would take in a situation, explaining why you made that particular choice. In the Result part, discuss the potential outcomes or the expected results.

Can I use the STAR interviewing technique effectively if I have no experience?

Yes, because your answers don’t need to be based solely on your work experience. You can draw upon other aspects of your life, like education, volunteering experience, internships, extracurricular activities, personal projects, hobbies, or any other situations where you demonstrated relevant skills or qualities.

Which interview questions, in particular, should I answer using the STAR format?

Primarily behavioral interview questions (the ones that begin with “Tell me about a time when” or “Can you recall a situation when”). But you can use the STAR method regardless of the type of question, whenever you want to showcase your experience and skills through storytelling.

Maja Stojanovic

Fact Checked By:

Industry Expert Contributions:

Pamela Skillings

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25 STAR Interview Questions and Best Answers for 2024

Are you preparing for a job interview and heard of the STAR interview technique? The STAR interview technique is a powerful tool that can help you give a clear and concise response to behavioral questions. This technique helps you articulate your past experiences and how you dealt with specific scenarios.

The STAR interview technique involves breaking down your response into four key components: Situation, Task, Action, and Result. By following this structure, you can provide a comprehensive answer that showcases your abilities and demonstrates your potential as a candidate.

It’s critical to prepare for a STAR interview as it can be the difference between landing your dream job and missing out on the opportunity. A well-crafted response using the STAR interview technique can leave a positive impression on the interviewer and showcase your capabilities.

In this article, we’ll cover 25 STAR interview questions and provide the best possible answers. By the end, you’ll have a thorough understanding of how to utilize the STAR interview technique and will be better prepared for your next job interview.

Background Information

When it comes to interviewing candidates for a position, hiring managers often use the STAR method to assess their skills and experience. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result, and this method helps to provide a structured approach to interviewing.

Overview of the STAR interview questions and format

The STAR interview format involves asking candidates behavioral questions about specific situations they have been in and how they handled them. The interviewer will ask the candidate to describe a situation, the task they needed to accomplish, the actions they took, and the results they achieved.

For example, a hiring manager might ask a candidate to describe a time when they had to solve a difficult problem at work. The candidate might respond by describing a specific scenario, the steps they took to solve the problem, and the successful outcome that resulted from their efforts.

Differences between STAR interview and other interviews

One of the main differences between the STAR interview and other types of interviews is that it focuses on specific situations rather than hypothetical scenarios. The interviewer is looking for concrete examples of how the candidate has handled challenging situations in the past.

Another difference is that the STAR interview is more structured than other interviews. The interviewer follows a specific format and asks questions in a specific order, which helps to ensure that each candidate is assessed in a consistent and fair manner.

How hiring managers use STAR interviews to assess candidates

Hiring managers use the STAR interview to assess a candidate’s problem-solving skills, communication skills, and ability to work under pressure. By asking candidates to describe specific situations and their response to them, hiring managers can gain a better understanding of how the candidate might handle similar situations in the future.

In addition, the STAR interview helps to provide a clear and concise picture of the candidate’s skills and experience. Each question is designed to reveal specific information about the candidate, which can then be used to make a more informed decision about their suitability for the position.

The STAR interview format is a powerful tool for hiring managers, and understanding how to prepare for and answer STAR interview questions can greatly increase a candidate’s chances of landing their dream job.

Preparation for a STAR Interview

In order to have a successful STAR interview, there are several key preparation steps that you should take. These steps will help you to communicate your experiences and accomplishments effectively, and to stand out as a strong candidate for the job position.

Key Preparation Steps

Review the job description: Review the job description thoroughly in order to understand the key skills and experiences that the interviewer is looking for. Make sure that you are able to speak to those skills and experiences in the STAR interview.

Reflect on your experiences: Reflect on your past experiences and identify examples that demonstrate the skills and experiences listed in the job description. Write down specific examples so that you can easily refer to them during the interview.

Practice: Practice answering STAR interview questions with a friend or family member. This will help you to feel more comfortable during the interview and to deliver your answers with confidence.

Importance of Research

Researching the company and job position is critical for a successful STAR interview. It demonstrates to the interviewer that you are interested and invested in the job and company. Here are some tips for effective research:

Go to the company website: Review the company’s website to understand its mission, values, and culture. Look for any recent news or press releases.

Read reviews: Read reviews on websites like Glassdoor to get an idea of what employees and former employees think of the company.

Research the industry: Research the industry in which the company operates in order to understand the current trends and challenges that the company may be facing.

Effective Communication

Effective communication during a STAR interview is key in order to demonstrate your skills and experiences effectively. Here are some tips for effective communication:

Be concise: Keep your answers concise and to the point. Focus on the key details and don’t get bogged down in unnecessary details.

Be clear: Make sure that your answers are clear and understandable. Use language that is easy to understand and avoid technical jargon.

Be confident: Speak confidently and clearly. Project your voice and maintain eye contact with the interviewer.

By following these preparation steps and communication tips, you can have a successful STAR interview that allows you to showcase your skills and experiences effectively.

STAR Interview Questions and Best Answers

One effective way to prepare for an interview is to familiarize oneself with common interview questions and have a strategy for answering them effectively. In this section, we will discuss common STAR interview questions and how to answer them using the S.T.A.R (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format.

Using the S.T.A.R Format to Answer Interview Questions

When an interviewer asks a behavioral question, such as “Tell me about a time when you had to handle a difficult situation with a customer,” using the S.T.A.R format can be helpful in providing a clear and concise response. This format involves:

• S ituation or  C ontext (what was the problem, and what was the context?)
• T ask or  C hallenge (what was your role in the situation?)
• A ction (what did you do to address the situation?)
• R esult (what was the outcome, and how did you contribute to it?)

By using this format, the interviewee can clearly demonstrate their skills and experience in handling challenges and achieving positive outcomes.

Common STAR Interview Questions and Best Answers

Below are 25 common STAR interview questions and some tips on how to answer them effectively.

• Tell me about a time when you had to solve a difficult problem.  Use a recent example, explain the problem, your role, and the steps you took to solve it.
• Describe a time you had to handle a conflict with a coworker.  Show how you maintained professionalism and resolved the issue.
• Tell me about a time when you had to lead a team.  Give an example of how you motivated and guided the team to reach a goal.
• Describe a situation when you had to think on your feet to solve a problem.  Explain the emergency or unexpected situation, your role, and the steps you took to solve it.
• Tell me about a time when you had to manage a challenging project.  Describe the project, your role, and how you managed to complete it successfully.
• Describe a situation when you had to adapt to a new situation or unexpected change.  Explain the situation, how you adapted to the change, and the outcome.
• Tell me about a successful project you delivered on time and within budget.  Explain the project, your role, and how you achieved success.
• Describe a time when you had to persuade someone to accept your idea.  Explain the situation, your idea, and how you convinced the person.
• Tell me about a time when you had to learn a new skill or technology.  Explain the skill or technology, your motivation to learn it, and how you mastered it.
• **Describe a time when you had to resolve a customer complaint.

Skills and Competencies for STAR Interviews

When preparing for a STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) interview, it is important to identify the key soft and hard skills needed for a successful interview.

Soft skills, such as communication, problem-solving, and adaptability, are crucial in demonstrating your ability to work well with others and effectively manage challenging situations. Hard skills, such as technical expertise and industry-specific knowledge, are equally important in showcasing your qualifications for the job.

In addition to identifying these skills, it is important to showcase your technical and non-technical competencies in the interview. This means highlighting your ability to not only perform the required tasks, but also demonstrating how you successfully managed various situations and achieved results.

To effectively showcase your skills and competencies, it is important to answer interview questions in a clear and specific manner. Avoid general and vague responses, as they may not adequately demonstrate your abilities. Instead, use specific examples and quantifiable results to illustrate your accomplishments.

For example, instead of saying that you have “strong communication skills,” give a specific example of a time when you effectively communicated with a difficult coworker, client, or team member. This demonstrated your ability to listen, collaborate, and negotiate effectively.

Being prepared to identify and showcase your key skills and competencies in a STAR interview will help you stand out as a strong candidate for the position.

Handling Difficult STAR Interview Questions

Preparing for a STAR interview is essential, as it helps you put your best foot forward and demonstrate how you’ve used professional and personal experiences to excel in past roles. However, sometimes you may come across difficult questions during your STAR interview.

Preparation strategies for handling challenging STAR interview questions

Preparing for difficult STAR interview questions involves two essential strategies: research and practice.

Before the interview, research the company and position you’re applying for, as well as their core values and goals. This will help you predict potential questions you may face and give you a good idea of how to answer them.

Practicing is another great way to handle difficult STAR interview questions. Research common questions asked during a STAR interview, and practice answering them with a friend or family member. You can also record your answers and observe your body language and tone to identify areas of improvement.

Examples of challenging STAR interview questions and how to approach them

• Tell me about a time when there was a conflict with a coworker, and how did you handle it?

This question seeks to know your conflict resolution skills, interpersonal skills, and tactfulness. To approach this question, highlight how you handled the situation calmly and professionally. Use specific examples of how you listened to the other person’s perspective, worked together to find common ground, and resolved the issue respectfully in the end.

• What do you do when you face a challenge that you don’t have the skills or experience to handle?

This question seeks to evaluate your adaptability and problem-solving skills. Use this opportunity to demonstrate how you have successfully handled challenges beyond your experience, such as seeking help from mentors or colleagues or engaging in self-education to acquire new skills.

• Tell me about a time when you failed to achieve a goal, and how did you overcome it?

This question seeks to know your resilience and tenacity. Be honest about your failure but focus more on how you positively approached the experience. Discuss how you analyzed the failure, learned from your mistakes, and took corrective actions to achieve your goal ultimately.

Importance of maintaining a positive attitude and staying calm during a STAR interview

When answering difficult STAR interview questions, always maintain a positive attitude and stay calm. Ensure you listen to the interviewer’s questions, take a moment to think, and compose yourself before answering. Demonstrate that you can remain calm even when faced with a potentially challenging question.

Remember, employers are looking for the best match for their organization. Maintaining a positive attitude and staying calm during difficult STAR interview questions will give you an edge over other candidates.

Preparing for potentially difficult STAR interview questions through research and practice will help you handle any question with ease. Be confident and maintain a positive attitude, even when faced with challenging interview questions.

Common Mistakes and Pitfalls in STAR Interviews

When it comes to acing a STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) interview, there are a few common mistakes and pitfalls that candidates often fall into. Here are some of the most common ones to watch out for:

Lack of preparation

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes you can make in a STAR interview is not preparing thoroughly beforehand. Not knowing the job description, company culture, or the specific qualifications of the role you’re applying for can seriously limit your ability to provide strong STAR examples.

Focusing too much on the situation

It’s important to provide context for your STAR examples, but it’s also important not to get bogged down in the details. If you spend too much time describing the situation or task, you risk losing your interviewer’s attention and not being able to fully demonstrate your skills.

Overuse of “we” instead of “I”

While teamwork is important, it’s essential that you can demonstrate your own personal contributions to a successful outcome. Overemphasizing the contributions of the team can make it seem like you were a passive participant and may hurt your chances of being selected for the role.

Poor storytelling skills

The STAR method should be used to create a narrative that shows off your experience, skills, and successes. However, if you are not a good storyteller and have trouble outlining events in a clear and concise way, then the interviewer may struggle to fully understand the points you’re trying to make.

Tips on How to Avoid Common Mistakes and Pitfalls

The good news is that all of these mistakes can be avoided with a little bit of planning and thoughtfulness. Here are some tips to help you avoid these common pitfalls:

• Research the company and job description beforehand
• Practice your STAR stories ahead of time to ensure they are both concise and engaging
• Use “I” instead of “we” when discussing your personal contributions to successful outcomes
• Focus on the actions you took and the results you achieved, rather than getting bogged down in the details of the situation

Strategies for Recovering from a Poor Interview Performance

Even with careful preparation, it’s still possible to have difficulty with a STAR interview. If you feel like you didn’t perform your best, don’t panic. Here are some recovery strategies to consider:

• Follow up with the interviewer and thank them for their time
• Address any concerns you feel came across in your interview in a follow-up email or note
• Practice your interview skills and continue to work on your STAR stories to improve for future interviews

By keeping these common mistakes and tips in mind, you can ensure that you’re fully prepared to tackle any STAR interview that comes your way.

After the STAR Interview

Congratulations on completing your STAR interview! Don’t relax just yet; there are still a few critical things you should do to ensure that you make the best impression possible. Below are some essential actions you should take after your STAR interview:

Actions to take post-interview

Reflect on the interview : Take some time to think about the interview questions and your answers. This will help you identify areas that you may want to improve upon or expand upon in future job interviews.

Send a thank-you note : Sending a thank-you note after a STAR interview is not only courteous, but it also helps show your continued interest in the position. Make sure to personalize your message and mention specific things that you discussed during the interview.

Follow up on next steps : If your interviewer provided a timeline for when they will make their decision, follow up after that deadline if you haven’t heard back. This shows your enthusiasm and interest in the position.

How to follow up after a STAR interview

If you haven’t heard back from the interviewer after the timeline provided during the interview, it’s okay to follow up with a polite email . In your email, mention the position and the date of the interview. You can also reiterate your interest in the company and the position.

Answers to frequently asked questions about STAR interviews

Q: Is it okay to use personal stories during a STAR interview?

A: Yes, using personal stories is encouraged as they can make your answers more memorable and engaging. Just make sure that your personal stories are appropriate and relevant to the question asked.

Q: Is it necessary to use the STAR format during the entire interview?

A: No, you don’t have to use the STAR format for every question. It’s best to use it for behavioral questions as it helps you provide a structured and thorough answer.

Q: Can I ask questions during a STAR interview?

A: Absolutely! Asking questions is not only acceptable, but it also shows your interest and enthusiasm for the position. Just make sure to prepare some questions beforehand so that you don’t forget anything important.

Following up after a STAR interview is just as crucial as preparing for the interview. Take the necessary actions after the interview, such as reflecting on the interview, sending a thank-you note, and following up on next steps. Don’t forget to personalize your messages and continue showing interest in the position. Good luck with your job search!

Sample Answers to STAR Interview Questions

In this section, we will provide some sample STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) responses to some common situational interview questions. These examples will help you understand how to structure your answers in a clear and concise manner.

1. Can you tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult customer?

Situation:  During my time as a customer service representative at XYZ Company, I had a customer who was extremely unhappy with our services.

Task:  My task was to address the customer’s concerns and find a solution that would satisfy both the customer and the company.

Action:  I actively listened to the customer’s complaints and empathized with their frustration. I then apologized for any inconvenience the customer experienced and assured them that I would do everything in my power to find a solution. I reviewed the customer’s account and identified the root cause of the problem. I then collaborated with my team to come up with the best solution for the customer.

Result:  By taking the time to listen to the customer and providing a solution that addressed their concerns, I was able to satisfy the customer and retain their business. The customer left a positive review and referred other customers to our company.

Explanation

This STAR response is effective because it clearly outlines the situation, task, action, and result. The candidate identifies the customer’s concerns and shows empathy, which is an essential quality of excellent customer service. The candidate also demonstrates problem-solving skills by collaborating with their team to come up with a solution.

2. Can you describe a situation where you had to work under pressure?

Situation:  During my time as a project manager, I had a critical project with a tight deadline.

Task:  My task was to ensure that the project was completed on time and within the budget.

Action:  I immediately created a detailed project plan that broke down the tasks into smaller, manageable sections. I then delegated tasks to my team and monitored their progress to ensure that we were on track to meet our deadline. I also identified potential risks and developed contingency plans to mitigate them.

Result:  By taking a proactive approach to project management, I was able to complete the project on time and within budget. The project was well-received by our stakeholders, and we received positive feedback on our team’s performance.

This STAR response is effective because it demonstrates the candidate’s ability to handle high-pressure situations. The candidate showcased their ability to manage projects effectively by breaking down tasks and delegating responsibilities. The candidate also showed excellent problem-solving skills by identifying potential risks and developing contingency plans. Finally, the candidate highlights the positive outcome of the project, which establishes their ability to produce successful results even under pressure.

These sample answers to common situational-based questions using the STAR method showcase the importance of effectively communicating your skills and experiences during an interview.

Tips for Practicing and Mastering STAR Interviews

Are you preparing for a STAR interview? Here are some tips for developing effective responses to STAR interview questions, practicing delivering responses, and building self-confidence:

Strategies for Developing Effective Responses to STAR Interview Questions

• Research the company’s values, mission, and culture. This will help you identify the skills and experiences they value in employees.
• Review the job description and identify the key responsibilities and qualifications. Think about how your past experiences can demonstrate your ability to meet those criteria.
• Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to structure your responses. Be specific about the situation or task, the actions you took, and the results you achieved. Avoid generalizations.
• Use examples from your past experiences that demonstrate your ability to solve problems, work collaboratively, and adapt to change.
• Practice active listening during the interview. Repeat the question to make sure you understand it and take a moment to think before responding.

How to Practice Delivering Responses to STAR Interview Questions

• Write out your responses to common STAR interview questions. Use the STAR method to structure your responses.
• Practice saying your responses out loud. This will help you identify areas where you could improve your delivery or make your responses more concise.
• Record yourself using a webcam or audio recorder. This will allow you to review your responses and identify areas where you could improve your delivery, intonation, or body language.
• Practice with a friend or mentor. Ask them to give you feedback on your responses and delivery.

Advice on How to Build Self-Confidence for a STAR Interview

• Prepare thoroughly. The more prepared you are, the more confident you will feel. Research the company, review the job description and practice your responses to common STAR interview questions.
• Use positive self-talk. Remind yourself of your accomplishments and strengths. Tell yourself that you are qualified for the job and that you have valuable experiences to share.
• Visualize success. Imagine yourself doing well in the interview, answering questions confidently, and impressing the interviewer.
• Practice relaxation techniques. Deep breathing, meditation or visualization can help calm your nerves and boost your confidence. Take deep breaths before the interview, visualize a calm and positive experience or meditate regularly to reduce stress and improve focus.

By following these tips, you can maximize your chances of success in a STAR interview and impress your potential employer with your skills and experience. Good luck!

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The STAR Method Interview Questions + Answers and Examples (2024 Guide)

Understand Competency Based Interview Questions and learn how to use the STAR Method to answer any Competency and Behaviour question like a pro!

Have you been asked STAR interview questions at a competency or behaviour style interview and failed to answer successfully?

Don’t worry you are not alone.

We have been coaching clients to success in job interviews for the past 18 years and we see so many candidates who struggle to give top scoring answers to these tough interview questions.

As we will see below there is a range of reasons for this however the most important fault is lack of structure. In this guide we will show you some tough competency STAR interview questions and we teach you all about the STAR method, a powerful and well recognised technique for answering not just competency but any interview question like an expert.

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In this article

What is the star method, star interview questions – what are they and are they different, 9 star example interview questions, what is a competency or behaviour.

• Employers Love STAR Interview Questions – Why is that?

Why do so Many People Struggle When Answering STAR Interview Questions?

What is the star method for answering interview questions.

• How to Use the STAR Method to Make Your Answers Really Stand Out
• 2 Key Factors That Make a Good Answer Great
• Tips on Choosing Examples for Your STAR Answer
• Sample STAR Answer to Inspire Your Interview Success

STAR Method Example for Problem Solving Competency

• Remember: You Must Include the Correct Behaviours in Your STAR Answer

7 Key Strategies to Keep in Mind When Answering STAR Interview Questions

• How to Answer Any STAR Interview Question With 100% Confidence

The STAR Method is a simple way to structure answers to competency and behavioural interview questions. It stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result and is a widely accepted format to present your examples and stories when being interviewed. We go into this in more detail below.

You may come across the phrase STAR interview questions however in practice these are the same as competency based or behaviour questions and are phrased in the same way. They simply ask you to provide details of a past action, task or performance and your interviewing panel will listen for phrases and keywords to demonstrate what they call ‘positive behaviours’.

Here is a selection of some difficult STAR interview questions taken from the InterviewGold online training system. Take a few moments and see how you would answer, what examples would you use?

1. Describe a time when your leadership skills made a difference. (Leadership Get Answer )

2. Tell us about a change you made which resulted in an improved customer experience. (Changing and Improving Get Answer )

3. Talk me through a time when you had to communicate to a large group. Tell me how did you get your message across effectively? (Communication Get Answer )

4. Give me an example of a time when you showed initiative at work. (Achieving Results Get Answer )

5. Describe a time when you had to make rapid changes to your plans so as to complete an important task on time. (Planning and Organising Get Answer )

6. Tell me about a time you used your political know how and expertise to initiate a difficult project. (Delivering at Pace Get Answer )

7. Talk me through a situation which shows your ability to make optimum use of the resources available to you while delivering top quality service to your clients. (Managing a Quality Service Get Answer )

8. Tell me about a coaching or mentoring strategy you designed and introduced. What part did you play and what was the outcome? (Leadership Get Answer )

9. Describe a time when you successfully challenged someone whose views you knew were incorrect. Tell me what happened and how you convinced them to accept your opinion. (Accountability and Professionalism Get Answer )

These STAR interview questions explore whether you bring the correct positive behaviours to the role, whether you have demonstrated them before or if not if you have taken steps to acquire them.

You may typically be asked follow up questions such as ‘ What have you learned from this experience? ’ or ‘ What would you do differently next time ?’

In terms of answers to STAR interview questions, you must use the STAR method and below you will learn more about it and how this powerful formula can bring professional structure to your interview answers.

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A competency or behaviour is a skill or ability that is required in order to carry out the role and forms the Person Specification, which will accompany the Job Description. Many will be the same across various levels within an organisation but the depth of experience required and complexity within each will increase the higher the role. There are a limited number of these although they may be called different names by different organisations.

For example, in the Civil Service Success Profiles framework you will come across a behaviour / competency called Making Effective Decisions. This may be referred to as simply Decision Making by other organisations however it is the same thing.

Other common competencies are Leadership, Communicating, Collaborating and Partnering (Team Work), Managing a Quality Service, Managing Successful Relationships, Delivering at Pace, Changing and Improving.

Employers Love STAR Competency Interview Questions – Why is that?

Put simply they remove the risk of bias.

In the past managers would often hire based on gut-feeling . They might give the job to someone based on how they looked or dressed or how they spoke. While there still remains a risk of human bias Competency Interviewing reduces this dramatically.

In addition, past behaviour is taken as an indicator of future performance . In other words, if you have successfully done it once, you can do it again. Employers believe that they get more qualified candidates who will perform better in the role.

There is so much advice out there now both online and offline; videos, blogs, books etc.

And yet why do so many people get answering these questions wrong?

We constantly see clients who come to us for interview coaching and who have had poor experiences in a competency interview.

Quite often a client will have had feedback saying that their answers were not detailed enough . They are surprised by this because they will have talked and talked in the interview so how can they not have given enough detail?

Other will have prepared and yet are stumped because the questions they prepared for don’t come up exactly as they planned. They get asked the question in a different format and just go blank.

However the top problem we see is poor structure and this is where the STAR method comes into play.

Put simply the STAR technique is a way to structure your answer. It is recommended for use by most organisations including Government, Civil Service, banks and the NHS.

S.T.A.R. stands for Situation + Task + Action + Result

Start by describing the SITUATION you were involved in. You can use an example from your current or previous job, education, personal experience or any relevant event. Always choose the most appropriate and business orientated example you have and one that best fits the role for which you are being interviewed. Choose an example that allows you to demonstrate the significance of your experience, the most difficult, complex, largest and successful problem, situation or task that you then successfully resolved. Give enough detail for the interviewer to understand what was involved but no more than a few sentences. Include your role, the organisation and when the example took place.

Briefly describe what you were tasked with, your responsibilities and assignments for the situation, the objectives and desired outcomes. Once again a sentence or two is sufficient.

This will be the section that the interviewer is most interested in and you should detail the actions you took to resolve the problem, situation or task. Describe all of the actions, detailing each stage and in the correct, logical order showing your thought processes, how you reached your conclusions and the steps you completed.

This is the most important part of your answer, because it allows you to highlight in detail what your response was and to clearly show your skills in a real-life scenario.

Remember they want to know about the actions you took , so if you are discussing a group project or task, describe what you did rather than the achievements of the team.

You may feel as if you are being overly descriptive but this is necessary in order to demonstrate that you have the experience of the action you are describing; do not assume that the interviewer will guess or infer what you did merely from your describing the context.

The Result is the second most important part of your answer as a successful outcome proves that your actions were effective. Refer back to the Task, making sure that the intended outcomes match the actual Result. Talk about what you accomplished, what you delivered in terms of benefit, what you learnt and if appropriate, what you would do differently next time.

Give evidence to prove success and this can be in the form of figures or numbers, anything that will show just what a winning outcome you delivered. Third party feedback is another great token of evidence so mention positive feedback you received from your manager, team or others.

Finally, talk about what you learned and how this learning will help you in the job being recruited for.

Get Expert STAR Interview Answers Written For You With InterviewGold

How to use the star method to make your interview answers really stand out.

Here’s a secret – it’s all in the Story!

Would you read a book that was boring? No, probably not and you would not recommend it to your friends.

And how many pages would you read before you concluded it was boring? Some might persevere to the end, but most would give up after maybe 20 or 30 pages.

The point I am trying to make is that your answer, your story must be gripping and it must grab the attention of the Interviewers in the first few sentences.

2 Key Factors That Make a Good Interview Answer Great

Almost all Competency Based and Behavioural Interview Questions ask you to provide an example that details a situation you have taken part in.

As straightforward a request as this is, not being prepared with a solid example may cause you to ramble, which could result in a poor score.

The best and most effective way to deliver a high scoring competency interview answer depends on:

• Choosing the right structure
• Choosing the right example

As regards the right structure we have looked at using the STAR method above. In the InterviewGold online training system we teach two other formulas, the IPAR and CARL methods, both of which are powerful techniques which you an use an an alternative to STAR.

Tips on Choosing Examples for Your STAR Interview Answer

Choosing the right example is vital. It must be relevant and real and here are our top tips:

Relevant: Make sure that the example is relevant to the role for which you are being interviewed and clearly relates to the competency being explored. For example, if talking about Making Effective Decisions you should make specific reference to what the decision was, what data you gathered and used, what process you followed and how you met the objectives successfully while dealing with obstacles.

Complex: The task or project must be sufficiently complex for the role. It should also have been long enough in duration and complex enough in terms of actions completed to adequately demonstrate the skills required at this level. Choose one where you had to use other competencies at the same time. In addition make sure that you can talk about problems or obstacles overcome.

Impact: Choose an example with impact in terms of scale, reach, growth, results delivered or improvement made.

Not sure what examples to talk about in your STAR interview answers? InterviewGold gives you detailed lessons with lots of ideas of examples to choose.

Sample STAR Interview Answer to Inspire Your Interview Success

So let’s look at how to use the STAR method in a practical example. We will choose the Problem Solving competency however the method can be used for any competency or skill. Use this example to inspire your own interview answers; think about your own situation and the role you are being interview for and search for relevant and real examples you can use.

How would you answer the question? Can you think of any examples of when you used these skills successfully?

Keep in mind that your answer should be told in a story format to keep the interviewer’s interest. Here is an example situation forming part of an answer using the STAR method.

Competency Question: Tell me about a time when you used your initiative to resolve a complex problem. What was involved and what actions did you take?

Last year while working as Customer Focus Manager with ABC Products Ltd in London, I successfully implemented a new process which reduced the time taken to process customer refunds from 14 days to 2 days, saving over £100,000 annually in agent time and gaining a 50% uplift in customer approval ratings.

In that single opening they are hooked, they know what your story is about, they know you have done something great and they want to hear more.

The next part of the answer is the Task and this should be summarised in no more than 1 or 2 sentences.

Our customer refund process was taking 14 days and was using up an excessive amount of agent time and resources. I was tasked with reducing this to 2 days with the added benefit of saving time and resources.

That’s all they need to know – no more.

I initiated the project by firstly clearly defining the objectives and the procedures.

I completed a walk-through of the existing system and identified where problems were occurring.

I interviewed the agents involved to gather their input into both the current system and their ideas of what they thought would work well. I believed this to be vital as I knew I needed to get them on my side in order to implement the new process.

With all that knowledge, I designed a new process and created a brief that both analysed the problem and outlined the potential benefits of the new process. I then forwarded this to four software companies who specialise in the system we needed.

I considered their alternative approaches and compared each in terms of cost and ease of functionality, discussing with the agents. After having a demonstration and on hands testing, I selected our preferred supplier.

After presentation and consultation with my management team I organised a project team tasked with implementing this new system.

I set up a process for internal and external feedback and communication, ensuring that everyone involved was on board and up to speed.

Throughout, I successfully managed the team members, updated and revised project milestones as necessary and in the end delivered a system that performed superbly.

We always like to see some numbers which demonstrate the scale of the project. So you can simply repeat the outcome that you used in your Introduction as this emphasis the great success you had.

I was very pleased with the outcome. I reduced the time taken to process customer refunds from 14 days to 2 days, saving over £100,000 annually in agent time. It was also a great result from the customers point of view and we gained a 50% uplift in customer approval ratings for the team. Even more pleasing was the fact that the Board of Directors awarded me a prize for top performing team leader as a result of this project.

As you can see this answer is punchy, exciting and demonstrates more clearly the actions completed in a step by step way.

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With InterviewGold’s advanced Answer Builder, you get detailed STAR interview examples tailored to you and your target job.

Remember: You Must Include the Correct Behaviours in Your STAR Interview Answer

When creating interview answers using the STAR method keep in mind that the other key feature of Competency Based Interviews is that your answers will be scored against pre–determined results. These are called Behaviours and can be positive and negative. For example, looking at Communication skills, the positive behaviours the interviewer will look for may include:

• Develops messages using structure and logical order
• Tailors content of messages to meet the needs and interests of the audience
• Conveys messages in a clear and concise manner in language appropriate to the receiver
• Checks understanding of the audience and adapts messages and tone accordingly
• Uses most effective channels as appropriate to the situation

STAR method behaviours for Leadership for example will require you to show an ability to be a role model, to engage with your team effectively and to promote inclusivity and diversity. Ultimately you will need to show that you have inspired and motivated those around you to achieve goals both within your department and outside.

1. Use Real Examples

When considering how to answer, I strongly recommend using authentic examples from your past experiences, as opposed to giving a fabricated or made up account.

2. Avoid Stock Answers

It is tempting to use a competency answer from a book or online and pass it off as your own. I strongly recommend against this. Instead, use the methods and advice outlined here to develop your own personal answers. This will help you avoid a potentially awkward situation during your interview, should you be asked to elaborate on a particular point.

3. Keep it Relevant

You should also take great care to ensure that your answers are relevant to the question being asked. They need to contain a sufficient amount of detail. Show a strong command of the core competency and clearly demonstrate that you are skilled at using it.

4. Check the Job Description and Person Specification

Study the job description and person specification thoroughly so that you completely grasp exactly what core competencies are essential to the position. Use this information to develop and rehearse relevant examples of past situations where you applied these skills.

5. It’s all about I

Always make liberal use of ‘I’. In fact, every one of your answers should be in the first person; always choose ‘I’ over ‘we,’ even in cases where you are discussing a past team collaboration.

6. Review your CV

Carefully examine your resume / curriculum vitae to fully prepare your responses, and devise competency interview answers which correspond to your highlights and achievements. Doing this will provide you with plenty of useful information that you can then use effectively no matter what type of competency question you are asked.

7. Get Jotting

Even making a bulleted list in advance as opposed to devising full answers can be helpful. This will ensure your examples will be fresh and at the forefront of your thoughts during the interview.

Answer Any STAR Competency Interview Question With 100% Confidence

Are you struggling with competency or behavioural interviews? Unsure what to say in your STAR interview answers? Getting tongue tied, going blank and unsure how to answer correctly?

It’s time to stop worrying. With InterviewGold’s powerful ANSWER BUILDER you will have perfectly structured STAR interview answers written for you with just a few clicks.

Just enter your target job and a few details about your task and in minutes you will have a perfect answer for your application or interview.

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27+ STAR Interview Questions & Answers in 2024

Job interview questions can be stressful. Some, more than others.

In fact, if we had to rank job interview questions based on difficulty, some of the hardest would probably be behavioral interview questions.

Thankfully, there’s a foolproof way to answer those - the STAR method.

This not-so-secret formula is the key to answering behavioral questions the right way every single time.

And in this guide, we’re going to teach you all you need to know about it!

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• What is the STAR Method?
• 28 Most Common STAR Interview Questions
• How to Answer Any STAR Interview Question
• 28 Sample Answers for Different Professions and Levels of Experience

What Are Behavioral Interview Questions?

Behavioral interview questions are a subset of interview questions that inquire about specific situations and problems you’ve faced at work.

Their goal is to help the interviewer understand how you behave in a professional setting, hence the name - behavioral interview questions.

Unlike other common interview questions , behavioral questions always require you to explain how you faced a specific situation at work and how you dealt with it.

Popular questions include, “ What is your greatest accomplishment? ” or “Tell me about a time when you handled conflict well.”

But coming up with an answer for any of these questions is never easy, especially if you’re caught unprepared during the interview.

This is where the STAR method comes in!

What Is the STAR Method?

The tried-and-tested formula to pass any behavioral interview question with flying colors is the STAR method .

“STAR” is an acronym that stands for S ituation, T ask, A ction, and R esults.

The STAR method gives you a structure you can follow to give a clear and concise answer to any behavioral questions that the interviewer might throw at you.

Let’s break it down a little bit:

• Situation - Describe the situation and provide the interviewer with context.
• Task - What was your role in this situation? Explain what your duties were and what was expected of you at the time.
• Action - How did you carry out your tasks? Did you go out of your way to fulfill your duties or do more than you initially had to?
• Results - Explain what results your actions had and if the problem was solved successfully or not. If possible, use numbers and concrete data.

Now that we’ve got the theory down, let’s look at how the STAR method looks in action.

Let’s take one of the most common STAR interview questions as an example:

Q: “Can you tell me of a time you accomplished something noteworthy? How did you manage it?”

Situation: “Hmm… well, after graduation I worked for a year as an assistant to Company Y’s marketing director. We had a meeting with a potential client this one time and I was supposed to meet my manager straight at the location of the meeting. On my way there, she called me and told me she was headed to the hospital as a family member of hers had had an accident.”

Task: “She asked me if I could carry on the presentation by myself and if not, I could cancel the meeting. I’d helped my boss while she made the presentation, but I wasn’t prepared to deliver it. I was only supposed to help with setting up the place and carry the documents.” 

Action: “Nevertheless, I like a challenge and I felt confident I could do it. So, I agreed to hold the meeting.” 

Results: “The presentation went well, and the client actually hired our company after that. My manager was more than happy. She negotiated a raise for me and took me under her wing as my mentor after that.”

28 STAR Method Interview Questions

Questions where the STAR method can come in are easy to spot.

Usually, these are questions that ask you to tell a story. The question itself is probably going to ask about a work situation and how you reacted to it.

Let’s look at some of the most common STAR interview questions by category:

5 Questions About Organizational Skills

Do you usually set goals at work? If yes, could you give me an example of a goal you had and how you achieved it?

Have you ever had to work under a tight deadline?

Sometimes employers put too much on their employees’ plates. Was there a time when you were overwhelmed with work? How did you handle the situation?

Describe a time when you had multiple tasks to complete under tight deadlines. How did you prioritize and manage your time?

How do you ensure that your work is completed efficiently and on time? Can you give an example of a specific method you use?

5 Questions About Communication Skills

Tell me about a time when a client asked for the impossible. How did you explain and communicate this to them?

Give me an example of a time when you didn’t meet a client’s expectations. How did you deal with the situation?

Did you ever have to correct one of your superiors when they were wrong? How did you approach that situation?

Can you give an example of a time when your communication skills helped you resolve a tricky situation at work?

Describe a time when you had to communicate a difficult message to a coworker or client. How did you handle it?

5 Questions About Teamwork

• Have you ever faced conflict with a coworker? How did you resolve the situation?

How do you deal with coworkers who don’t cooperate or can’t contribute enough?

Give me an example of a time when you and your team had opposing views on an issue. How did you persuade them to go with your decision?

Tell me about a time when you had to work closely with someone whose personality was very different from yours. How did you handle it?

Describe a successful project you worked on as part of a team. What was your role, and how did you contribute to the team's success?

4 Questions About Adaptability

How do you adapt to sudden changes in the workplace? Could you give me an example?

What was the first job you ever had? Do you remember how you adapted and learned the ropes?

Tell me about a time when you had to think on your feet in order to deal with a situation.

Tell me about a time when you had the liberty to be creative with your work. Was it exciting or difficult for you?

4 Questions About Leadership

Give me an example of a situation where you showed initiative and took charge of it.

• Was there a time when you had to be very strategic to meet a goal?
• Tell me about a time when you handled pressure well.

Can you describe a situation where you had to motivate your team to achieve a challenging goal? How did you do it?

5 Questions About Problem-Solving

Tell me about a time when you were faced with a challenging situation. How did you solve it?

Is there a situation you think you could’ve handled better or differently?

Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond your duties for a job or task.

Give me an example of a time when you came up with a creative solution to a problem at work. What happened?

Give me an example of a time you made a mistake at work.

28 STAR Method Sample Questions & Answers

Question #1.

Situation: “Yes, I always set goals at work to keep myself on track. For example, when I was a digital marketing specialist at XYZ Company, we were launching a new product line and needed to boost our online presence to drive sales. The company set a goal to increase website traffic by 30% in six months.”

Task: “To help achieve this, I set a personal goal to increase our social media engagement by 50% and our followers by 20%. I knew that increasing our social media presence would be crucial in driving more traffic to our site.”

Action: “So, I started by analyzing our current social media performance to see what was working and what wasn’t. I put together a detailed content calendar that included a mix of promotional posts, engaging content, and user-generated content. I also ran targeted ad campaigns and worked with influencers to broaden our reach. On top of that, I made sure we had a consistent posting schedule and used analytics tools to track our progress and tweak our strategy as needed.”

Results: “Thanks to these efforts, our social media engagement shot up by 60%, which was well above my initial goal of 50%. We also saw a 25% increase in followers, surpassing the target of 20%. This played a big part in boosting our overall website traffic by 35%, helping the company exceed its goal of 30%. Plus, these improvements in our online presence led to a 15% increase in revenue from the new product line.”

Question #2

Situation: “Yes, definitely. Last year, at XYZ Publishing, we had an unexpected opportunity to publish an exclusive interview with a high-profile author.”

Task: “My task was to edit and finalize the entire article within 24 hours to meet the print deadline.”

Action: “I immediately prioritized my tasks and set aside less urgent work. I collaborated closely with the writer to make sure everything was clear and coherent, while also touching base with the design team to finalize the layout.”

Results: “We met the deadline, and the article received great feedback from readers. Our quick turnaround also strengthened our relationship with the author and boosted our magazine’s reputation.”

Question #3

Situation: “Absolutely. During the end-of-year closing at my previous accounting job , I had to handle multiple clients' accounts, prepare financial statements, and assist with audits all at once.”

Task: “I needed to manage all these tasks efficiently without compromising accuracy or deadlines but it was a lot of work.”

Action: “So, I prioritized my tasks by deadlines and complexity, delegated some routine tasks to junior accountants, and worked extra hours to stay on top of everything. I also communicated with my manager about the workload to set realistic expectations.”

Results: “Thankfully, by staying organized and focused, I met all the deadlines. We maintained client satisfaction and had a smooth year-end closing for the firm, and my manager was pleased that handled everything so well.”

Question #4

Situation: “Okay, well, I’m kind of a pro at this. I was pursuing a business degree full-time, while I also worked full-time as a sales associate to support myself, and I was active in a boxing club.”

Task: “So, I often had assignments due, work shifts to cover, and training sessions all in the same week. It could get pretty hectic.”

Action: “I created a detailed schedule first. I blocked out time for study, work, and training. I prioritized my tasks by deadlines and importance, so I was often studying early in the morning and late at night. I also communicated with my employer about my schedule to make sure I wasn’t overbooked and I used my weekends to catch up on studies.”

Results: “I managed to stay organized and disciplined, so I maintained good grades, performed well at work, and progressed in boxing. I’d say I balanced all my commitments effectively, and I’m sure I can do it again.”

Question #5

Situation: “As a social media manager, I juggle multiple campaigns, content schedules, and real-time engagement across different platforms all the time.”

Task: “It's essential to make sure all posts go live on time and maintain active engagement with our audience, so I need to stay on top of this constantly.”

Action: “Generally, I use scheduling tools like Hootsuite to plan and schedule posts a month in advance, which helps me stay organized. I also set daily reminders to engage with our followers, respond to comments, and adjust content based on performance analytics.”

Results: “This system keeps everything on track and our engagement high. We saw a 20% increase in follower growth over six months, and our posts so far have consistently gone live without any hitches.”

Question #6

Situation: “As a sales representative , I once had a client who wanted a custom product delivered within an unrealistic two-day timeframe.”

Task: “I somehow had to manage the client's expectations while maintaining a positive relationship.”

Action: “So, I scheduled a call with the client to discuss their needs in detail. I explained the production and delivery process and highlighted why the two-day timeline wasn’t feasible. Then, I offered a more realistic timeline and suggested quicker options to meet their needs as closely as possible.”

Results: “The client appreciated the transparency and understood where the constraints came from. We agreed on a revised timeline that worked for both parties, and the product was delivered as promised. I kept the client satisfied and maintained a strong business relationship, so I’m happy with how that turned out.”

Question #7

Situation: “As a banker , I once had a client who was expecting a loan approval within a week, but due to unforeseen processing delays, it took longer.”

Task: “It was my responsibility to manage the client's disappointment and find a solution.”

Action: “I called the client as soon as I realized the delay, explained the situation honestly, and apologized for the inconvenience. I assured them that their application was a priority and provided a revised timeline.”

Results: “The client appreciated the proactive communication and transparency. Although they were initially disappointed, they appreciated the effort to keep them informed. I’d say it helped restore their trust and maintain a positive relationship with them for the future.”

Question #8

Situation: “Yes, there was a time when my manager, who isn't a web developer or technical expert, misunderstood a key aspect of our website's functionality.”

Task: “I needed to correct him without causing any friction or embarrassment.”

Action: “I scheduled a one-on-one meeting and calmly explained the correct information, using simple terms and visual aids to make it clear. I emphasized that it was a common misunderstanding and showed how the correct approach would benefit our project.”

Results: “He appreciated the clarification and thanked me for bringing it to his attention. So, I fixed the misunderstanding and strengthened our working relationship, since he valued my expertise and honesty.”

Question #9

Situation: “Yes, there was a time when a customer was very upset because their order was delayed due to a shipping error.”

Task: “My job was to calm the customer down and find a solution to their problem.”

Action: “I listened carefully to the customer's concerns and acknowledged their frustration. Then, I explained the situation honestly and apologized for the inconvenience. I offered to track the shipment personally and provided a discount on their next order as a goodwill gesture.”

Results: “The customer appreciated my honesty and the steps I took to resolve the issue. They accepted the solution and even thanked me personally for my help. It turned a negative experience into a positive one, and the customer remained loyal to our company.”

Question #10

Situation: “As a DevOps engineer, I once had to tell a developer that their recent code deployment caused significant issues in our production environment.”

Task: “I needed to communicate this without throwing blame or causing a conflict so we could work together to resolve the issue.”

Action: “I approached the developer privately and started the conversation by acknowledging their hard work. Then, I explained the problem clearly and respectfully. I suggested we work together to fix the issues and improve our deployment process in the future.”

Results: “The developer appreciated my approach. We quickly identified and resolved the problem, and also implemented a better review process for future deployments. This definitely improved our workflow and strengthened our teamwork in the long run.”

Question #11

Have you ever faced conflict with a coworker ? How did you resolve the situation?

Situation: “I’m usually a very easy-going employee and get along with most of my coworkers. There was this one time though, when I was working for Company Y. At the time they had just purchased new software for the company.”

Task: “I was in charge of introducing it to my coworkers since I had previous experience with it. The CEO however, also brought in someone from the software company to assist with the transition as well. We had to cooperate on this task and well.. the guy wasn’t too thrilled about the idea. He often interrupted me whenever I was explaining something, and sometimes didn’t even invite me to some of the training we were supposed to organize together. “

Action: “I decided to approach him and suggested we split the responsibilities. He would handle the theoretical part of the training, like the introduction to how it works, and I’d explain the practical stuff, as in, how we can implement the software for our business case.”

Results: “He agreed, and the transition went smoothly since then. Took us around a week and a half to get the entire team on board and productive with the new tool.”

Question #12

Situation: “In my role as a Java developer , there was a time when a team member wasn’t meeting their deadlines, which was affecting our project.”

Task: “I needed to address the issue to keep the project on track.”

Action: “I first talked to them privately to understand if they were facing any challenges. I offered help with any technical issues and suggested pairing up to complete our tasks so that we could share knowledge and improve their performance. I also kept the team lead informed about the situation.”

Results: “My approach helped improve their contributions. We managed to complete the project on time, and the coworker felt more supported and became more productive as we progressed.”

Question #13

Situation: “As part of the graphic design team, we were working on a major rebranding project, and we had different ideas about the new logo design.”

Task: “I fully believed my concept was more aligned with the brand's vision, but the team had other ideas.”

Action: “I organized a meeting to present my design in detail. I explained the reasoning behind my choices, and I wanted to show how it better represented the brand’s identity and goals. I also provided mockups and visual comparisons to illustrate the potential impact.”

Results: “After seeing the rationale and visuals, the team understood my perspective and agreed to go with my design. The rebranding was successful, and the new logo received positive feedback from both the client and our target audience.”

Question #14

Situation: “Well, as a barista , I once worked with a coworker who was very introverted and preferred working alone, while I’m more outgoing and enjoy teamwork.”

Task: “But we needed to work together during busy shifts to keep things running smoothly.”

Action: “I made an effort to understand their working style and respected their need for space. I focused on clear communication and divided tasks based on our strengths. For example, I handled customer interactions, while they managed the back-end tasks.”

Results: “Respecting our differences and playing to our strengths worked out. We could work efficiently together without clashing. Our shifts ran smoothly, and we even received positive feedback from our manager.”

Question #15

Situation: “I worked on an animated short film for a major client with a team of animators .”

Task: “My role was to animate the main characters.”

Action: “I started by collaborating with the character designers to understand their vision and brought those designs to life with smooth and expressive animations. I also coordinated closely with the background artists and the sound design team to make sure my animations fit seamlessly with the overall project.”

Results: “The project was a huge success. Everything was completed on time, we received rave reviews and even won several industry awards. My animations were specifically highlighted for being detailed and expressive, and bringing the characters to life.”

Question #16

Situation: “When you’re an architect , sudden changes are pretty common. One time, a major client decided to change the entire layout of a commercial building project halfway through the design phase.”

Task: “I needed to quickly adapt the plans to meet the new requirements without delaying the project.”

Action: “I organized an urgent meeting with the client to fully understand their new vision. Then, I worked closely with my team to revise the design, reallocate resources, and adjust the project timeline. I also communicated regularly with the client to make sure we were aligned on the new direction of the project.”

Results: “We managed to adapt to the changes successfully and completed the revised design on schedule. The client was impressed with our flexibility and the final outcome, and I’d say that strengthened our professional relationship because it led to more projects with them.”

Question #17

Situation: “My first job was selling snacks at a movie theater, ages ago.”

Task: “I had to quickly learn how to operate the cash register, manage inventory, and provide excellent customer service during busy weekends and evenings.”

Action: “On my first day, I paid close attention during training and asked a lot of questions to understand how everything worked. I also watched my coworkers to learn tips and tricks that could help me be more efficient. When I made mistakes, I tried to take note of them and adjust. I also made an effort to stay friendly and calm, even during rush hours. I was still in high school at the time, so everything was really new and unfamiliar but I think I had the right idea.”

Results: “Within a few shifts, I felt confident in my role. I could handle the busiest shifts and I even helped train new employees after a few weeks. The experience taught me how important adaptability and attention to detail are, along with some crucial customer service skills . I’ve applied everything I learned in my jobs since then, so it was a valuable experience.”

Question #18

Situation: “I was organizing a large corporate event, and an hour before it started, the caterer called to say they were stuck in traffic and would be late.”

Task: “I had to quickly find a solution to make sure the guests had refreshments on time.”

Action: “I immediately contacted a nearby restaurant that I had a good relationship with and arranged for them to deliver appetizers and drinks quickly. Meanwhile, I communicated with the venue staff to set up the temporary refreshments and keep guests informed about the delay.”

Results: “The guests were pleased with the interim refreshments, and when the caterer arrived, the transition was smooth. The event went off without a hitch, and the client was very impressed with how I handled the unexpected setback. I’d say it taught me how important quick thinking and having backup plans are in event planning .”

Question #19

Situation: “I was once hired to create artwork for a children's book where the author gave me complete creative freedom.”

Task: “My task was to bring the story to life through illustrations , with no strict guidelines or limitations. So, there were pros and cons to the situation. On one hand, I had no restrictions… but on the other, I was missing a framework to work around, so I had to make it myself.”

Action: “I started by thoroughly reading the manuscript to understand the story and characters. Then, I brainstormed and sketched different concepts. I experimented with different styles and color palettes until I found the right fit. Throughout the process, I communicated with the author to make sure my vision aligned with theirs.”

Results: “The project was both exciting and challenging. It pushed me to explore new artistic techniques and trust my creative instincts. The author was thrilled with the final illustrations, and the book received great feedback for its visual appeal. It showed me how exciting it can be to have creative freedom and how important it is to balance creativity with a framework to keep things on track.”

Question #20

Situation: “At my previous job at XYZ Company, I was an IT specialist when we were experiencing frequent network outages that disrupted our work.”

Task: “I realized we needed a more reliable network solution, but it wasn’t assigned to anyone specifically.”

Action: “I took the initiative to look for and identify the root cause of the outages. After finding the problem, I proposed a new network infrastructure plan to my manager. Once he approved it, I led the project to upgrade our systems, coordinated with vendors, and managed the implementation process.”

Results: “The new network significantly reduced downtime and improved our overall productivity. So, I solved a critical issue and tested my ability to take charge and lead projects, which worked out nicely.”

Question #21

Was there a time when you had to be very strategic in order to meet a goal?

Situation: “Yes, when I was the business development manager at XYZ Company, I once needed to break into a new market and increase our client base within six months.”

Task: “I needed to figure out a way to find and secure new clients in a market I wasn’t familiar with.”

Action: “I started by researching the market to understand potential clients and their needs. Then, I crafted a focused outreach campaign with personalized emails and follow-ups. I also reached out to existing clients for referrals and attended industry events to network .”

Results: “The strategy worked really well. We ended up getting 20% more new clients than we aimed for within the six months. It showed me how a targeted and well-planned approach can really make a difference.”

Question #22

Tell me about a time when you handled the pressure well.

Situation: “One of the busiest nights at the restaurant I used to work at is during a big event in the city. It just so happened that on that night, we had a fully booked restaurant with a long waitlist.”

Task: “I was a server , so I had to make sure all tables were served promptly and everyone had a good experience despite the rush.”

Action: “I tried to stay calm and organized, and I prioritized my tasks and communicated closely with the kitchen staff to keep everything running smoothly. I also made sure to check in with my tables regularly to update them on their orders and address any concerns. The busier the restaurant, the slower the orders come out, so it was good to touch base with the kitchen and guests.”

Results: “Even though it was hectic, the night went well. The customers were overall happy with the service, and a few even complimented me on handling the busy night so professionally. My manager praised the team for keeping it together under pressure, and I felt great knowing I contributed to that success.”

Question #23

Situation: “So, I was the game designer at ABC Studios, and we were in the final stages of developing a new game. Unfortunately, the board of executives made us make some huge changes to the gameplay while we had a really tight deadline to meet before the launch.”

Task: “My job was to keep the team motivated and focused to finish the game on time without compromising on quality.”

Action: “I organized daily stand-up meetings to track progress and address any issues quickly. I also set small, achievable milestones to keep everyone motivated. And, to boost morale, I made sure to celebrate each milestone with small rewards, like team lunches or shout-outs in meetings. I also encouraged an open environment where team members could share ideas and support each other.”

Results: “The team stayed engaged and motivated, and we managed to complete the game on time, although barely, given the short notice about the changes we had to implement. Still, the launch was a success, and the game received positive reviews for its quality. My team appreciated the support and recognition a lot, and I’d say that strengthened our collaboration for future projects.”

Question #24

Situation: “Sure, there was a time when I had a student who was really struggling with math and was falling behind the rest of the class.”

Task: “As their teacher , I needed to help them catch up and understand the material better.”

Action: “I first figured out which parts they were having trouble with and then made a special lesson plan just for them. I also set up one-on-one tutoring sessions after school to give them extra help. To make things clearer, I used visual aids and practical examples that made the math concepts easier to grasp.”

Results: “Gradually, the student’s understanding and confidence improved a lot. By the end of the semester, they had caught up with the class and even started to enjoy math. It was great to see their progress and know that my efforts helped.”

Question #25

Situation: “Yes, definitely. There was a time on a construction project when we got hit with unexpected bad weather, which caused major delays.”

Task: “I needed to keep the project on track despite the setbacks.”

Action: “I decided to have the team work longer hours whenever the weather cleared up, hoping to make up for lost time. But this led to everyone feeling really stressed and burnt out.”

Results: “Although we met the deadline, the team was exhausted and morale was pretty low. In hindsight, I should have adjusted the timeline sooner and talked to the client about the delays. Rotating shifts to avoid overworking everyone would have been a better approach. Now I know how important it is to be flexible and communicate more during unexpected challenges.”

Question #26

Situation: “During my time as a real estate agent at Y Company, we got one of the biggest listings the company had ever had. A five million dollar property, newly built, ready to go out in the market.”

Task: “All agents were allowed to work on selling the property since we only had a 3-month deadline set by the owner.”

Action: “I decided I’d add something new to the website to market the house: a virtual tour. I felt like just photos weren’t enough for this property. So, I rented a 360-degree camera, stayed up watching tutorials, and taught myself how to create the tour.” 

Results: “When I presented it to management, they were thrilled. They put up the tour on the website and also asked the agents to send it out to their lists of clients. The person who ended up buying the house was in the United Kingdom at the time and didn’t even come see the house in Vancouver before purchasing it. His agent did. He said his client felt like he’d already been in the house because of the tour and had no doubts about purchasing it.”

Question #27

Situation: “I was working on a project where users were having trouble navigating a new app we developed. That’s a huge problem when you’re a UX/UI designer, so I had to look into it.”

Task: “My job was to find a way to make the app more intuitive and user-friendly.”

Action: “I decided to conduct user testing sessions to see exactly where people were getting stuck. After gathering feedback, I realized that the navigation menu was too complicated. So, I redesigned the menu to be simpler and more intuitive, using icons and a clearer layout.”

Results: “The changes made a huge difference. Users found the app much easier to navigate, and the client was thrilled with the improvement. It showed me how a creative, user-focused approach can solve even tricky design problems.”

Question #28

Situation: “The store I was working for would be opening a new location soon and they offered me the manager position there.” 

Task: “That meant I was also in charge of monitoring the work until the store opened. I ordered the clothing shipments, trained the new employees, and organized the inauguration event. One hour before the event, the last shipment of boxes hadn’t arrived yet. The clothes we planned to put on the mannequins were in those boxes.”

Action: “I called the delivery company and they said the boxes had already been shipped...to the other location of the store, which is across the city. I’d given them the wrong address. There was absolutely no time for those boxes to arrive at the location we were at.”

Results: “So, we dressed the mannequins in clothes from the old collection. I explained the situation to my superiors. They weren’t very happy about it, of course, but they acknowledged that it was a human mistake and that it could happen to anyone. I’ve been a lot more diligent with checking the address on shipments since then.”

FAQs on STAR Interview Questions

Still wondering something about STAR interview questions? Check out the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions below.

#1. How can I ace a video interview?

To make sure your video interview goes well, first check the technology you’re using. Are your computer, camera, and microphone working properly? Consider practicing on the video platform before the interview so you feel comfortable.

Next, you want to make sure your background is professional. Choose a quiet, well-lit space so the hiring manager can clearly see and hear you. If you don’t live alone, make sure your household knows you’ll be having an interview so they don’t distract you.

We recommend dressing professionally from head to toe - even if you’re not there in person, you should be ready to make a good impression. And don’t forget to make eye contact by looking directly at the camera from time to time.

#2. How do I ace a phone interview?

All you really need for a phone interview is a quiet location with good reception, though we recommend you also have a copy of your resume, the job description, and any useful notes.

Even though the hiring manager can’t see you, you should sit up straight - it’s going to help your confidence, which can be reflected in your voice. The same goes for conveying your enthusiasm and eagerness to join their team.

Beyond that, it’s the same as an in-person interview - just practice the most common questions beforehand, listen carefully without interrupting, and follow up with a thank-you email after the interview is over.

#3. How can I get an interview?

The key to getting an interview in the first place is having a strong job application.

First, find a job you’re interested in through a reliable job board or other professional website like LinkedIn. Carefully read the job description and start crafting your application.

Make a tailored resume for the specific job to leave a strong first impression on the hiring manager. And make sure to include a matching cover letter to show you’re genuinely interested in this specific job, not just randomly applying.

#4. What are the five most popular STAR interview questions?

There are plenty of popular STAR interview questions out there, but the five most popular are:

• Tell me about a time you faced a conflict at work. How did you handle it?
• Describe a situation where you had to meet a tight deadline.
• Give an example of a time you showed leadership .
• Tell me about a mistake you made. How did you handle it?
• Can you share an experience where you had to work with a difficult team member?

Each of these questions lets interviewers assess your behavior in different workplace scenarios and evaluate your soft skills , like problem-solving and teamwork.

Key Takeaways

Now, let’s go over the essentials one more time:

• Behavioral interview questions ask you to give an example of how you’ve handled a specific situation at work. They help the interviewer predict how you might react to similar scenarios in the future.
• The best way to answer any behavioral interview question is by using the STAR method. It’s a structure that you can follow for any examples you might have.
• The STAR acronym stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results. This keeps your answers structured and easy to follow, no matter what the question is.
• There are tons of STAR interview questions out there, so it’s important to prepare beforehand and have a few exceptional experiences ready to use as examples. These can be anything that shows your problem-solving, teamwork, conflict resolution, or other soft skills in action.

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20 STAR interview method practice questions (and example answers)

Here are the 20 most common interview questions (with example answers using the STAR method) to help you prepare for your next interview.

The STAR method is an approach to answering behavioural interview questions. STAR stands for S ituation, T ask, A ction and R esult. By responding to interview questions with this structure you can be sure to give a thorough answer that clearly describes your behaviours and skills.

For more information on the STAR interview method, read our blog post on what is the STAR method for interviews .

1. Question: Tell me about a time when you faced a difficult challenge at work and how you overcame it.

Situation: In my previous role as a project manager, we encountered a sudden budget cut halfway through a critical project.

Task: The challenge was to find a way to complete the project within the reduced budget without compromising quality or timelines.

Action: I immediately gathered my team and initiated a thorough review of the project scope and requirements. We identified areas where we could optimise resources, renegotiated contracts with vendors, and streamlined our processes. I also encouraged open communication within the team to generate innovative ideas.

Result: Through our collective efforts, we successfully completed the project within the reduced budget, meeting all project milestones and delivering a high-quality outcome that exceeded client expectations.

2. Question: Can you share an example of a time when you had to work as part of a team to achieve a goal?

Situation: During my time as a marketing coordinator, our department was tasked with developing and implementing a comprehensive marketing campaign for a new product launch.

Task: The goal was to create brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales through a coordinated marketing effort.

Action: I collaborated closely with the marketing team, graphic designers, and copywriters. We conducted market research, identified target audiences, and crafted a compelling messaging strategy. I coordinated the timeline, assigned tasks, and facilitated regular team meetings to ensure everyone was aligned and progress was on track.

Result: Through our collective efforts and seamless teamwork, the marketing campaign was a resounding success. We exceeded our targets in terms of brand exposure, lead generation, and ultimately, product sales.

3. Question: Describe a situation where you had to handle a dissatisfied customer or client.

Situation: As a customer service representative, I encountered a dissatisfied customer who had received a faulty product.

Task: The challenge was to address the customer's concerns, provide a satisfactory resolution, and retain their loyalty.

Action: I actively listened to the customer, empathised with their frustration, and apologised for the inconvenience caused. I promptly investigated the issue, communicated the steps we would take to rectify the problem, and offered a replacement product or a refund. Additionally, I followed up with the customer to ensure their satisfaction.

Result: By handling the situation with empathy, professionalism, and a swift resolution, we managed to turn the dissatisfied customer into a loyal advocate for our brand. The customer expressed their gratitude for the excellent customer service and even recommended our products to their friends and family.

4. Question: Tell me about a time when you had to meet a tight deadline. How did you manage your time and prioritise tasks?

Situation: In my previous role as a project coordinator, I was assigned a time-sensitive project with a tight deadline.

Task: The challenge was to effectively manage my time and prioritise tasks to ensure the project was completed on schedule.

Action: I started by breaking down the project into smaller, manageable tasks and created a detailed project plan. I identified critical milestones and deadlines, and then prioritised tasks based on their impact on the overall project timeline. I also delegated certain responsibilities to team members to ensure efficient execution.

Result: By implementing a structured approach to time management and task prioritisation, I successfully completed the project within the tight deadline. The project was delivered on time, and the client was highly satisfied with the quality of the work.

5. Question: Can you share an experience where you had to resolve a conflict within a team or with a colleague?

Situation: In my previous role as a team leader, there was a disagreement between two team members regarding the allocation of responsibilities for a crucial project.

Task: The challenge was to address the conflict, foster a positive working environment, and ensure that the project moved forward smoothly.

Action: I scheduled a private meeting with both team members to understand their perspectives and concerns. I actively listened to each person's point of view, encouraged open communication, and facilitated a constructive discussion. I focused on finding a compromise that leveraged the strengths of both individuals and clarified the roles and responsibilities moving forward.

Result: By addressing the conflict proactively and promoting effective communication, we were able to resolve the issue amicably. The team members reconciled their differences, collaborated effectively, and successfully completed the project with outstanding results.

6. Question: Describe a time when you had to adapt to a significant change in the workplace. How did you handle it?

Situation: In my previous role, our company underwent a major organisational restructuring, resulting in significant changes to team structures and job responsibilities.

Task: The challenge was to adapt to the new work environment, embrace the changes, and maintain productivity during the transition.

Action: I proactively sought information about the changes, attended company-provided training sessions, and engaged in open communication with my colleagues and supervisors. I approached the changes with a positive mindset, embracing the opportunity for personal and professional growth. I also offered support to team members who were finding the transition challenging.

Result: By embracing the changes and maintaining a flexible and positive attitude, I successfully adapted to the new work environment. I quickly developed new skills, built strong relationships with colleagues, and continued to meet or exceed performance expectations.

7. Question: Tell me about a project or initiative you led. What was your role, and what were the results?

Situation: In my previous role, I was tasked with leading a cross-functional team to develop and launch a new product.

Task: As the project lead, my role was to oversee all aspects of the project, including planning, resource allocation, timeline management, and stakeholder coordination.

Action: I initiated the project by conducting thorough market research and gathering insights from various stakeholders. I facilitated regular team meetings to ensure everyone was aligned, assigned tasks based on individual strengths, and closely monitored progress. I fostered effective communication and collaboration among team members and provided guidance and support throughout the project lifecycle.

Result: The project was completed successfully, meeting all key milestones and objectives. The new product received positive feedback from customers and stakeholders, leading to increased sales and market share for the company.

8. Question: Can you give an example of a time when you identified a problem or inefficiency in a process and implemented a solution?

Situation: In a previous role, I noticed that the inventory management system was causing delays and inefficiencies in product distribution.

Task: The challenge was to identify the root cause, develop a solution, and improve the efficiency of the inventory management process.

Action: I conducted a thorough analysis of the existing system, identified bottlenecks and pain points, and collaborated with the IT department to develop a more streamlined and automated inventory management system. I also created standard operating procedures and provided training to the team to ensure smooth implementation.

Result: By implementing the new inventory management system, we significantly reduced delays and errors in product distribution. The improved process led to enhanced operational efficiency, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

9. Question: Describe a situation where you had to make a difficult decision. How did you approach it, and what was the outcome?

Situation: In a previous role, I was faced with a difficult decision regarding a strategic partnership that had the potential to impact the company's long-term growth.

Task: The challenge was to carefully weigh the pros and cons, assess potential risks, and make an informed decision that aligned with the company's objectives.

Action: I gathered all relevant information, conducted thorough research, and consulted with key stakeholders. I also sought advice from industry experts and conducted a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. I prioritized long-term sustainability and growth, and after careful consideration, I made the decision that was in the best interest of the company.

Result: The decision I made proved to be the right one in the long run. The strategic partnership helped the company expand its market presence, increase revenue, and solidify its position as a key player in the industry.

10. Question: Tell me about a time when you had to handle multiple tasks or projects simultaneously. How did you stay organised?

Situation: In my previous role, I was responsible for managing multiple projects simultaneously, each with its own set of deliverables and deadlines.

Task: The challenge was to effectively prioritise tasks, manage time efficiently, and ensure that all projects were completed successfully.

Action: I adopted a systematic approach to task management and organisation. I created a detailed project schedule, broke down tasks into smaller, manageable subtasks, and assigned realistic deadlines. I utilised project management software and tools to track progress, set reminders, and prioritise tasks based on their urgency and impact. I also practiced effective communication with stakeholders to manage expectations and provide regular updates.

Result: By implementing strong organisational skills and leveraging project management techniques, I successfully managed multiple tasks and projects concurrently. All projects were completed on time, and the quality of work remained consistently high.

11. Question: Can you share an experience where you had to influence or persuade others to accept your ideas or proposals?

Situation: In a previous role, I was part of a team tasked with implementing a new software system across the organisation.

Task: The challenge was to persuade stakeholders, including senior management and department heads, to adopt the new software system and support its implementation.

Action: I thoroughly researched the benefits of the new software system, including increased efficiency, cost savings, and improved data accuracy. I prepared a persuasive presentation highlighting these benefits and tailored the message to address the specific needs and concerns of each stakeholder. I organised meetings, provided demonstrations, and actively listened to their feedback and suggestions. I also offered training and support to ensure a smooth transition.

Result: Through effective persuasion and clear communication, I successfully gained buy-in from stakeholders, and the new software system was implemented across the organisation. The system brought about significant improvements in productivity, data management, and overall operational efficiency.

12. Question: Describe a situation where you demonstrated strong leadership skills. How did you motivate and guide others?

Situation: In a previous role, I was appointed team leader for a high-priority project with a tight deadline.

Task: The challenge was to lead and motivate a team of individuals with diverse skills and backgrounds to achieve the project's objectives within the given timeframe.

Action: I adopted a transformational leadership approach, which involved inspiring and empowering team members. I clearly communicated the project goals, ensured everyone had a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, and encouraged open communication and collaboration. I provided regular feedback, recognised individual contributions, and created a supportive and inclusive team environment. I also motivated team members by aligning their personal goals with the project's objectives and providing opportunities for professional growth.

Result: Through effective leadership and motivation, the team successfully completed the project ahead of schedule while maintaining high-quality standards. The team members felt valued, motivated, and developed a strong sense of camaraderie.

13. Question: Tell me about a time when you received constructive criticism and how you responded to it.

Situation: In a previous role, I received feedback from a supervisor highlighting areas where I could improve my presentation skills.

Task: The challenge was to receive and respond to the constructive criticism in a positive and growth-oriented manner.

Action: I approached the feedback with an open mindset, recognising that constructive criticism presents an opportunity for growth and improvement. I thanked my supervisor for their input and asked for specific examples to better understand the areas of improvement. I then developed a plan to address the identified areas by seeking additional training, practicing my presentation skills, and actively seeking feedback from colleagues and mentors.

Result: By responding positively to the constructive criticism and taking proactive steps to improve, I noticed significant growth in my presentation skills over time. I received positive feedback from my supervisor and colleagues on subsequent presentations, and my confidence in delivering impactful presentations increased.

14. Question: Can you give an example of a time when you had to work under pressure or tight deadlines? How did you handle it?

Situation: In a previous role, I was assigned a project with a demanding deadline due to unforeseen circumstances.

Task: The challenge was to manage my time effectively, stay focused, and deliver high-quality results despite the pressure and tight timeframe.

Action: I immediately prioritised tasks, identified critical milestones, and created a detailed plan to ensure efficient execution. I communicated with stakeholders and team members to manage expectations and obtain necessary support. I remained organised, delegated tasks where appropriate, and maintained open lines of communication to address any challenges or obstacles promptly.

Result: By effectively managing my time, staying calm under pressure, and maintaining open communication, I successfully met the tight deadline and delivered the project on time. The quality of work was not compromised, and stakeholders were pleased with the results.

15. Question: Describe a situation where you had to work with a difficult team member. How did you handle the situation?

Situation: In a previous role, I encountered a team member who had a challenging personality and was often resistant to collaboration.

Task: The challenge was to foster a productive working relationship, effectively communicate, and ensure the success of the team despite the difficulties.

Action: I approached the situation with empathy and sought to understand the underlying reasons behind the team member's behaviour. I initiated one-on-one conversations to build rapport, actively listened to their concerns, and addressed any misunderstandings. I focused on finding common ground and emphasising shared goals. I also provided support, encouragement, and guidance to help them feel valued and included within the team.

Result: By adopting a patient and empathetic approach, I was able to gradually establish a more positive and collaborative working relationship with the difficult team member. They became more open to feedback, started actively contributing to team discussions, and the overall dynamics within the team improved.

16. Question: Can you tell me about a time when you had to resolve a customer complaint or difficult situation?

Situation: In a previous role, I encountered a customer who was dissatisfied with our product due to a manufacturing defect.

Task: The challenge was to address the customer's concerns, resolve the issue to their satisfaction, and maintain a positive relationship with the customer.

Action: I actively listened to the customer's complaint, empathised with their frustration, and assured them that we would resolve the issue promptly. I investigated the matter, involved the necessary departments to rectify the manufacturing defect, and provided the customer with regular updates on the progress. I also offered a replacement product or a refund, based on the customer's preference. Throughout the process, I maintained a professional and courteous demeanour, ensuring the customer felt heard and valued.

Result: By addressing the customer's complaint promptly and resolving the issue to their satisfaction, we were able to salvage the customer relationship. The customer expressed their appreciation for our prompt action and willingness to rectify the situation, which helped maintain their trust in our brand.

17. Question: Describe a situation where you had to work collaboratively with a diverse group of individuals.

Situation: In a previous project, I was part of a cross-functional team comprised of individuals from different departments and diverse backgrounds.

Task: The challenge was to foster effective collaboration, leverage the unique strengths of each team member, and achieve project objectives.

Action: I recognised the importance of inclusivity and open communication within the team. I facilitated team meetings to ensure everyone had an opportunity to share their ideas and perspectives. I encouraged active listening, respect for diverse viewpoints, and constructive feedback. I also leveraged each team member's expertise, assigning tasks based on their strengths, and fostering a sense of ownership and shared responsibility.

Result: Through effective collaboration, the diverse team was able to harness the collective knowledge and skills of its members. We successfully achieved project objectives, leveraging the varied perspectives and experiences to develop innovative solutions. The collaborative environment also fostered personal growth and strengthened relationships among team members.

18. Question: Can you provide an example of a time when you had to handle a challenging conflict within a team?

Situation: In a previous role, I encountered a conflict between two team members who had differing opinions on a critical decision.

Task: The challenge was to mediate the conflict, find a resolution that satisfied both parties, and restore harmony within the team.

Action: I scheduled a private meeting with the individuals involved to understand their perspectives and concerns. I encouraged open and respectful communication, ensuring that each person had an opportunity to express themselves fully. I facilitated a constructive discussion, highlighting areas of common ground and seeking areas for compromise. I emphasised the importance of teamwork and shared goals and worked towards finding a solution that addressed the concerns of both team members.

Result: Through open dialogue and a focus on collaboration, we were able to resolve the conflict within the team. Both individuals reached a mutual understanding and agreement, and the team regained its cohesion. The conflict served as an opportunity for growth and improved communication, ultimately strengthening the team's dynamics.

19. Question: Describe a situation where you had to take on additional responsibilities or go above and beyond your assigned duties.

Situation: In a previous role, a colleague fell ill, leaving a crucial project with an impending deadline unattended.

Task: The challenge was to step in, assume the additional responsibilities, and ensure the project was completed on time.

Action: Recognising the urgency of the situation, I immediately volunteered to take on the responsibilities of my absent colleague. I reorganised my own workload, sought assistance from team members where necessary, and dedicated extra time and effort to the project. I communicated with stakeholders, managing their expectations and assuring them that the project was in capable hands.

Result: By stepping up and assuming the additional responsibilities, I successfully completed the project within the designated timeframe. The stakeholders appreciated my dedication and commitment to ensuring the project's success, and my willingness to go above and beyond had a positive impact on the team's morale.

20. Question: Can you share an example of a time when you had to adapt to a significant change or unexpected situation at work?

Situation: In a previous role, our organisation underwent a major restructuring, resulting in a significant change in team structures and reporting lines.

Task: The challenge was to adapt to the new organisational structure, realign priorities, and continue delivering results amidst the uncertainty and ambiguity.

Action: I approached the situation with a flexible mindset and viewed the change as an opportunity for growth. I sought clarity on the new reporting lines and expectations, proactively reached out to colleagues to understand their roles and responsibilities, and actively participated in team meetings to ensure open communication. I adapted my work processes, adjusted priorities, and remained agile in responding to the evolving needs of the organisation.

Result: By embracing the change and adapting quickly, I successfully navigated the new organisational structure and continued to deliver results. My willingness to embrace change and collaborate with colleagues across different teams resulted in a smooth transition and allowed the organisation to maintain productivity during the period of change.

Top 20 Problem Solving Interview Questions (Example Answers Included)

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By Mike Simpson

When candidates prepare for interviews, they usually focus on highlighting their leadership, communication, teamwork, and similar crucial soft skills . However, not everyone gets ready for problem-solving interview questions. And that can be a big mistake.

Problem-solving is relevant to nearly any job on the planet. Yes, it’s more prevalent in certain industries, but it’s helpful almost everywhere.

Regardless of the role you want to land, you may be asked to provide problem-solving examples or describe how you would deal with specific situations. That’s why being ready to showcase your problem-solving skills is so vital.

If you aren’t sure who to tackle problem-solving questions, don’t worry, we have your back. Come with us as we explore this exciting part of the interview process, as well as some problem-solving interview questions and example answers.

What Is Problem-Solving?

When you’re trying to land a position, there’s a good chance you’ll face some problem-solving interview questions. But what exactly is problem-solving? And why is it so important to hiring managers?

Well, the good folks at Merriam-Webster define problem-solving as “the process or act of finding a solution to a problem.” While that may seem like common sense, there’s a critical part to that definition that should catch your eye.

What part is that? The word “process.”

In the end, problem-solving is an activity. It’s your ability to take appropriate steps to find answers, determine how to proceed, or otherwise overcome the challenge.

Being great at it usually means having a range of helpful problem-solving skills and traits. Research, diligence, patience, attention-to-detail , collaboration… they can all play a role. So can analytical thinking , creativity, and open-mindedness.

But why do hiring managers worry about your problem-solving skills? Well, mainly, because every job comes with its fair share of problems.

While problem-solving is relevant to scientific, technical, legal, medical, and a whole slew of other careers. It helps you overcome challenges and deal with the unexpected. It plays a role in troubleshooting and innovation. That’s why it matters to hiring managers.

How to Answer Problem-Solving Interview Questions

Okay, before we get to our examples, let’s take a quick second to talk about strategy. Knowing how to answer problem-solving interview questions is crucial. Why? Because the hiring manager might ask you something that you don’t anticipate.

Problem-solving interview questions are all about seeing how you think. As a result, they can be a bit… unconventional.

These aren’t your run-of-the-mill job interview questions . Instead, they are tricky behavioral interview questions . After all, the goal is to find out how you approach problem-solving, so most are going to feature scenarios, brainteasers, or something similar.

So, having a great strategy means knowing how to deal with behavioral questions. Luckily, there are a couple of tools that can help.

First, when it comes to the classic approach to behavioral interview questions, look no further than the STAR Method . With the STAR method, you learn how to turn your answers into captivating stories. This makes your responses tons more engaging, ensuring you keep the hiring manager’s attention from beginning to end.

Now, should you stop with the STAR Method? Of course not. If you want to take your answers to the next level, spend some time with the Tailoring Method , too.

With the Tailoring Method, it’s all about relevance. So, if you get a chance to choose an example that demonstrates your problem-solving skills, this is really the way to go.

We also wanted to let you know that we created an amazing free cheat sheet that will give you word-for-word answers for some of the toughest interview questions you are going to face in your upcoming interview. After all, hiring managers will often ask you more generalized interview questions!

Click below to get your free PDF now:

Get Our Job Interview Questions & Answers Cheat Sheet!

FREE BONUS PDF CHEAT SHEET: Get our " Job Interview Questions & Answers PDF Cheat Sheet " that gives you " word-word sample answers to the most common job interview questions you'll face at your next interview .

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Top 3 Problem-Solving-Based Interview Questions

Alright, here is what you’ve been waiting for: the problem-solving questions and sample answers.

While many questions in this category are job-specific, these tend to apply to nearly any job. That means there’s a good chance you’ll come across them at some point in your career, making them a great starting point when you’re practicing for an interview.

So, let’s dive in, shall we? Here’s a look at the top three problem-solving interview questions and example responses.

1. Can you tell me about a time when you had to solve a challenging problem?

In the land of problem-solving questions, this one might be your best-case scenario. It lets you choose your own problem-solving examples to highlight, putting you in complete control.

When you choose an example, go with one that is relevant to what you’ll face in the role. The closer the match, the better the answer is in the eyes of the hiring manager.

EXAMPLE ANSWER:

“While working as a mobile telecom support specialist for a large organization, we had to transition our MDM service from one vendor to another within 45 days. This personally physically handling 500 devices within the agency. Devices had to be gathered from the headquarters and satellite offices, which were located all across the state, something that was challenging even without the tight deadline. I approached the situation by identifying the location assignment of all personnel within the organization, enabling me to estimate transit times for receiving the devices. Next, I timed out how many devices I could personally update in a day. Together, this allowed me to create a general timeline. After that, I coordinated with each location, both expressing the urgency of adhering to deadlines and scheduling bulk shipping options. While there were occasional bouts of resistance, I worked with location leaders to calm concerns and facilitate action. While performing all of the updates was daunting, my approach to organizing the event made it a success. Ultimately, the entire transition was finished five days before the deadline, exceeding the expectations of many.”

2. Describe a time where you made a mistake. What did you do to fix it?

While this might not look like it’s based on problem-solving on the surface, it actually is. When you make a mistake, it creates a challenge, one you have to work your way through. At a minimum, it’s an opportunity to highlight problem-solving skills, even if you don’t address the topic directly.

When you choose an example, you want to go with a situation where the end was positive. However, the issue still has to be significant, causing something negative to happen in the moment that you, ideally, overcame.

“When I first began in a supervisory role, I had trouble setting down my individual contributor hat. I tried to keep up with my past duties while also taking on the responsibilities of my new role. As a result, I began rushing and introduced an error into the code of the software my team was updating. The error led to a memory leak. We became aware of the issue when the performance was hindered, though we didn’t immediately know the cause. I dove back into the code, reviewing recent changes, and, ultimately, determined the issue was a mistake on my end. When I made that discovery, I took several steps. First, I let my team know that the error was mine and let them know its nature. Second, I worked with my team to correct the issue, resolving the memory leak. Finally, I took this as a lesson about delegation. I began assigning work to my team more effectively, a move that allowed me to excel as a manager and help them thrive as contributors. It was a crucial learning moment, one that I have valued every day since.”

3. If you identify a potential risk in a project, what steps do you take to prevent it?

Yes, this is also a problem-solving question. The difference is, with this one, it’s not about fixing an issue; it’s about stopping it from happening. Still, you use problem-solving skills along the way, so it falls in this question category.

If you can, use an example of a moment when you mitigated risk in the past. If you haven’t had that opportunity, approach it theoretically, discussing the steps you would take to prevent an issue from developing.

“If I identify a potential risk in a project, my first step is to assess the various factors that could lead to a poor outcome. Prevention requires analysis. Ensuring I fully understand what can trigger the undesired event creates the right foundation, allowing me to figure out how to reduce the likelihood of those events occurring. Once I have the right level of understanding, I come up with a mitigation plan. Exactly what this includes varies depending on the nature of the issue, though it usually involves various steps and checks designed to monitor the project as it progresses to spot paths that may make the problem more likely to happen. I find this approach effective as it combines knowledge and ongoing vigilance. That way, if the project begins to head into risky territory, I can correct its trajectory.”

17 More Problem-Solving-Based Interview Questions

In the world of problem-solving questions, some apply to a wide range of jobs, while others are more niche. For example, customer service reps and IT helpdesk professionals both encounter challenges, but not usually the same kind.

As a result, some of the questions in this list may be more relevant to certain careers than others. However, they all give you insights into what this kind of question looks like, making them worth reviewing.

Here are 17 more problem-solving interview questions you might face off against during your job search:

• How would you describe your problem-solving skills?
• Can you tell me about a time when you had to use creativity to deal with an obstacle?
• Describe a time when you discovered an unmet customer need while assisting a customer and found a way to meet it.
• If you were faced with an upset customer, how would you diffuse the situation?
• Tell me about a time when you had to troubleshoot a complex issue.
• Imagine you were overseeing a project and needed a particular item. You have two choices of vendors: one that can deliver on time but would be over budget, and one that’s under budget but would deliver one week later than you need it. How do you figure out which approach to use?
• Your manager wants to upgrade a tool you regularly use for your job and wants your recommendation. How do you formulate one?
• A supplier has said that an item you need for a project isn’t going to be delivered as scheduled, something that would cause your project to fall behind schedule. What do you do to try and keep the timeline on target?
• Can you share an example of a moment where you encountered a unique problem you and your colleagues had never seen before? How did you figure out what to do?
• Imagine you were scheduled to give a presentation with a colleague, and your colleague called in sick right before it was set to begin. What would you do?
• If you are given two urgent tasks from different members of the leadership team, both with the same tight deadline, how do you choose which to tackle first?
• Tell me about a time you and a colleague didn’t see eye-to-eye. How did you decide what to do?
• Describe your troubleshooting process.
• Tell me about a time where there was a problem that you weren’t able to solve. What happened?
• In your opening, what skills or traits make a person an exceptional problem-solver?
• When you face a problem that requires action, do you usually jump in or take a moment to carefully assess the situation?
• When you encounter a new problem you’ve never seen before, what is the first step that you take?

Putting It All Together

At this point, you should have a solid idea of how to approach problem-solving interview questions. Use the tips above to your advantage. That way, you can thrive during your next interview.

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• What Is Your Greatest Weakness?
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Co-Founder and CEO of TheInterviewGuys.com. Mike is a job interview and career expert and the head writer at TheInterviewGuys.com.

His advice and insights have been shared and featured by publications such as Forbes , Entrepreneur , CNBC and more as well as educational institutions such as the University of Michigan , Penn State , Northeastern and others.

Learn more about The Interview Guys on our About Us page .

About The Author

Mike simpson.

Co-Founder and CEO of TheInterviewGuys.com. Mike is a job interview and career expert and the head writer at TheInterviewGuys.com. His advice and insights have been shared and featured by publications such as Forbes , Entrepreneur , CNBC and more as well as educational institutions such as the University of Michigan , Penn State , Northeastern and others. Learn more about The Interview Guys on our About Us page .

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26 Expert-Backed Problem Solving Examples – Interview Answers

Published: February 13, 2023

Interview Questions and Answers

Actionable advice from real experts:

Biron Clark

Former Recruiter

Contributor

Dr. Kyle Elliott

Career Coach

Hayley Jukes

Editor-in-Chief

Biron Clark , Former Recruiter

Kyle Elliott , Career Coach

Hayley Jukes , Editor

As a recruiter , I know employers like to hire people who can solve problems and work well under pressure.

 A job rarely goes 100% according to plan, so hiring managers are more likely to hire you if you seem like you can handle unexpected challenges while staying calm and logical.

But how do they measure this?

Hiring managers will ask you interview questions about your problem-solving skills, and they might also look for examples of problem-solving on your resume and cover letter. 

In this article, I’m going to share a list of problem-solving examples and sample interview answers to questions like, “Give an example of a time you used logic to solve a problem?” and “Describe a time when you had to solve a problem without managerial input. How did you handle it, and what was the result?”

• Problem-solving involves identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, and solving problems using a variety of skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision making, and communication.
• Describe the Situation, Task, Action, and Result ( STAR method ) when discussing your problem-solving experiences.
• Tailor your interview answer with the specific skills and qualifications outlined in the job description.
• Provide numerical data or metrics to demonstrate the tangible impact of your problem-solving efforts.

What are Problem Solving Skills? 

Problem-solving is the ability to identify a problem, prioritize based on gravity and urgency, analyze the root cause, gather relevant information, develop and evaluate viable solutions, decide on the most effective and logical solution, and plan and execute implementation. 

Problem-solving encompasses other skills that can be showcased in an interview response and your resume. Problem-solving skills examples include:

• Critical thinking
• Analytical skills
• Decision making
• Research skills
• Technical skills
• Communication skills
• Adaptability and flexibility

Why is Problem Solving Important in the Workplace?

Problem-solving is essential in the workplace because it directly impacts productivity and efficiency. Whenever you encounter a problem, tackling it head-on prevents minor issues from escalating into bigger ones that could disrupt the entire workflow. 

Beyond maintaining smooth operations, your ability to solve problems fosters innovation. It encourages you to think creatively, finding better ways to achieve goals, which keeps the business competitive and pushes the boundaries of what you can achieve. 

Effective problem-solving also contributes to a healthier work environment; it reduces stress by providing clear strategies for overcoming obstacles and builds confidence within teams. 

Examples of Problem-Solving in the Workplace

• Correcting a mistake at work, whether it was made by you or someone else
• Overcoming a delay at work through problem solving and communication
• Resolving an issue with a difficult or upset customer
• Overcoming issues related to a limited budget, and still delivering good work through the use of creative problem solving
• Overcoming a scheduling/staffing shortage in the department to still deliver excellent work
• Troubleshooting and resolving technical issues
• Handling and resolving a conflict with a coworker
• Solving any problems related to money, customer billing, accounting and bookkeeping, etc.
• Taking initiative when another team member overlooked or missed something important
• Taking initiative to meet with your superior to discuss a problem before it became potentially worse
• Solving a safety issue at work or reporting the issue to those who could solve it
• Using problem solving abilities to reduce/eliminate a company expense
• Finding a way to make the company more profitable through new service or product offerings, new pricing ideas, promotion and sale ideas, etc.
• Changing how a process, team, or task is organized to make it more efficient
• Using creative thinking to come up with a solution that the company hasn’t used before
• Performing research to collect data and information to find a new solution to a problem
• Boosting a company or team’s performance by improving some aspect of communication among employees
• Finding a new piece of data that can guide a company’s decisions or strategy better in a certain area

Problem-Solving Examples for Recent Grads/Entry-Level Job Seekers

• Coordinating work between team members in a class project
• Reassigning a missing team member’s work to other group members in a class project
• Adjusting your workflow on a project to accommodate a tight deadline
• Speaking to your professor to get help when you were struggling or unsure about a project
• Asking classmates, peers, or professors for help in an area of struggle
• Talking to your academic advisor to brainstorm solutions to a problem you were facing
• Researching solutions to an academic problem online, via Google or other methods
• Using problem solving and creative thinking to obtain an internship or other work opportunity during school after struggling at first

How To Answer “Tell Us About a Problem You Solved”

When you answer interview questions about problem-solving scenarios, or if you decide to demonstrate your problem-solving skills in a cover letter (which is a good idea any time the job description mentions problem-solving as a necessary skill), I recommend using the STAR method.

STAR stands for:

It’s a simple way of walking the listener or reader through the story in a way that will make sense to them. 

Start by briefly describing the general situation and the task at hand. After this, describe the course of action you chose and why. Ideally, show that you evaluated all the information you could given the time you had, and made a decision based on logic and fact. Finally, describe the positive result you achieved.

Note: Our sample answers below are structured following the STAR formula. Be sure to check them out!

EXPERT ADVICE

Dr. Kyle Elliott , MPA, CHES Tech & Interview Career Coach caffeinatedkyle.com

How can I communicate complex problem-solving experiences clearly and succinctly?

Before answering any interview question, it’s important to understand why the interviewer is asking the question in the first place.

When it comes to questions about your complex problem-solving experiences, for example, the interviewer likely wants to know about your leadership acumen, collaboration abilities, and communication skills, not the problem itself.

Therefore, your answer should be focused on highlighting how you excelled in each of these areas, not diving into the weeds of the problem itself, which is a common mistake less-experienced interviewees often make.

Tailoring Your Answer Based on the Skills Mentioned in the Job Description

As a recruiter, one of the top tips I can give you when responding to the prompt “Tell us about a problem you solved,” is to tailor your answer to the specific skills and qualifications outlined in the job description. 

Once you’ve pinpointed the skills and key competencies the employer is seeking, craft your response to highlight experiences where you successfully utilized or developed those particular abilities. 

For instance, if the job requires strong leadership skills, focus on a problem-solving scenario where you took charge and effectively guided a team toward resolution. 

By aligning your answer with the desired skills outlined in the job description, you demonstrate your suitability for the role and show the employer that you understand their needs.

Amanda Augustine expands on this by saying:

“Showcase the specific skills you used to solve the problem. Did it require critical thinking, analytical abilities, or strong collaboration? Highlight the relevant skills the employer is seeking.”  

Interview Answers to “Tell Me About a Time You Solved a Problem”

Now, let’s look at some sample interview answers to, “Give me an example of a time you used logic to solve a problem,” or “Tell me about a time you solved a problem,” since you’re likely to hear different versions of this interview question in all sorts of industries.

The example interview responses are structured using the STAR method and are categorized into the top 5 key problem-solving skills recruiters look for in a candidate.

1. Analytical Thinking

Situation: In my previous role as a data analyst , our team encountered a significant drop in website traffic.

Task: I was tasked with identifying the root cause of the decrease.

Action: I conducted a thorough analysis of website metrics, including traffic sources, user demographics, and page performance. Through my analysis, I discovered a technical issue with our website’s loading speed, causing users to bounce. 

Result: By optimizing server response time, compressing images, and minimizing redirects, we saw a 20% increase in traffic within two weeks.

2. Critical Thinking

Situation: During a project deadline crunch, our team encountered a major technical issue that threatened to derail our progress.

Task: My task was to assess the situation and devise a solution quickly.

Action: I immediately convened a meeting with the team to brainstorm potential solutions. Instead of panicking, I encouraged everyone to think outside the box and consider unconventional approaches. We analyzed the problem from different angles and weighed the pros and cons of each solution.

Result: By devising a workaround solution, we were able to meet the project deadline, avoiding potential delays that could have cost the company $100,000 in penalties for missing contractual obligations.

3. Decision Making

Situation: As a project manager , I was faced with a dilemma when two key team members had conflicting opinions on the project direction.

Task: My task was to make a decisive choice that would align with the project goals and maintain team cohesion.

Action: I scheduled a meeting with both team members to understand their perspectives in detail. I listened actively, asked probing questions, and encouraged open dialogue. After carefully weighing the pros and cons of each approach, I made a decision that incorporated elements from both viewpoints.

Result: The decision I made not only resolved the immediate conflict but also led to a stronger sense of collaboration within the team. By valuing input from all team members and making a well-informed decision, we were able to achieve our project objectives efficiently.

4. Communication (Teamwork)

Situation: During a cross-functional project, miscommunication between departments was causing delays and misunderstandings.

Task: My task was to improve communication channels and foster better teamwork among team members.

Action: I initiated regular cross-departmental meetings to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding project goals and timelines. I also implemented a centralized communication platform where team members could share updates, ask questions, and collaborate more effectively.

Result: Streamlining workflows and improving communication channels led to a 30% reduction in project completion time, saving the company $25,000 in operational costs.

5. Persistence 

Situation: During a challenging sales quarter, I encountered numerous rejections and setbacks while trying to close a major client deal.

Task: My task was to persistently pursue the client and overcome obstacles to secure the deal.

Action: I maintained regular communication with the client, addressing their concerns and demonstrating the value proposition of our product. Despite facing multiple rejections, I remained persistent and resilient, adjusting my approach based on feedback and market dynamics.

Result: After months of perseverance, I successfully closed the deal with the client. By closing the major client deal, I exceeded quarterly sales targets by 25%, resulting in a revenue increase of $250,000 for the company.

Tips to Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills

Throughout your career, being able to showcase and effectively communicate your problem-solving skills gives you more leverage in achieving better jobs and earning more money .

So to improve your problem-solving skills, I recommend always analyzing a problem and situation before acting.

 When discussing problem-solving with employers, you never want to sound like you rush or make impulsive decisions. They want to see fact-based or data-based decisions when you solve problems.

Don’t just say you’re good at solving problems. Show it with specifics. How much did you boost efficiency? Did you save the company money? Adding numbers can really make your achievements stand out.

To get better at solving problems, analyze the outcomes of past solutions you came up with. You can recognize what works and what doesn’t.

Think about how you can improve researching and analyzing a situation, how you can get better at communicating, and deciding on the right people in the organization to talk to and “pull in” to help you if needed, etc.

Finally, practice staying calm even in stressful situations. Take a few minutes to walk outside if needed. Step away from your phone and computer to clear your head. A work problem is rarely so urgent that you cannot take five minutes to think (with the possible exception of safety problems), and you’ll get better outcomes if you solve problems by acting logically instead of rushing to react in a panic.

You can use all of the ideas above to describe your problem-solving skills when asked interview questions about the topic. If you say that you do the things above, employers will be impressed when they assess your problem-solving ability.

More Interview Resources

• 3 Answers to “How Do You Handle Stress?”
• How to Answer “How Do You Handle Conflict?” (Interview Question)
• Sample Answers to “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

About the Author

Biron Clark is a former executive recruiter who has worked individually with hundreds of job seekers, reviewed thousands of resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and recruited for top venture-backed startups and Fortune 500 companies. He has been advising job seekers since 2012 to think differently in their job search and land high-paying, competitive positions. Follow on Twitter and LinkedIn .

Read more articles by Biron Clark

About the Contributor

Kyle Elliott , career coach and mental health advocate, transforms his side hustle into a notable practice, aiding Silicon Valley professionals in maximizing potential. Follow Kyle on LinkedIn .

About the Editor

Hayley Jukes is the Editor-in-Chief at CareerSidekick with five years of experience creating engaging articles, books, and transcripts for diverse platforms and audiences.

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How To Use The STAR Method In A Job Interview (With Examples)

• Interview Preparation Checklist
• Star Method For Answering Questions
• Star Interview Questions
• Words To Use In An Interview
• Mock Interview Preparation
• How To Make A Good Impression
• Bring Writing Samples
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• How To Ace Your Interview For A Remote Job
• Good Weaknesses For A Job Interview
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• Talk About Being Laid Off
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• How Early Should You Arrive For An Interview

Find a Job You Really Want In

Using the STAR method when answering interview questions can help you impress your interviewer and help you land the job. The STAR method helps you answer behavioral and situational interview questions so it’s important to know how to use it.

If you have an interview coming up and want to use this method in your answers, we’ll go over how to use the STAR method in a job interview, provide some example answers using this method, and we’ll go over some mistakes to avoid when answering.

Key Takeaways:

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result.

The STAR method is an efficient and effective way to highlight your skills through experience when answering interview questions.

The STAR method is particularly useful for behavioral questions as well as certain situational questions.

Be as specific as possible in your answers to make the most of the STAR method.

How to use the STAR method when answering interview questions

Example questions and answers using the star method, 14 common behavioral interview questions that require the star method, how to prepare for an interview using the star method, common star method mistakes to avoid, situational interview questions and the star method, star method faq.

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STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. The STAR method can help you stay on track and answer behavioral interview questions quickly and thoroughly. Here is a breakdown of each step:

Situation. Set the scene for your story — discuss who was involved and what was going on. Your answer won’t work unless you can come up with an appropriate anecdote to discuss. Make sure you really listen to the interviewer’s question so you don’t start telling an irrelevant story.

Here is an example of how your answer should look:

“In my last role, my team and I were facing a significant challenge with declining customer satisfaction scores. We were tasked with finding a solution to improve these scores and retail more customers.”

Task. Next, state what your responsibility was in this situation. It might have been a task you were given or an initiative you took on your own. Often, you can combine the situation and task to fit in one sentence.

“My task was to identify and implement strategies that would lead to a measurable increase in customer satisfaction within a three-month period.”

Action. This is the meat of your answer. Discuss what actions you took along with your thought process and reason for choosing that approach. Make that your direct impact is obvious in the context of the story.

“I decided to propose a new customer feedback system that would allow us to gather real-time feedback and identify areas of improvement. To do this I gathered information and collected data to support my proposal. I also scheduled one-on-one meetings with team members and I addressed any of their concerns and listened to their feedback. I also made sure to keep open communication and provide regular updates throughout the process.”

Result. Wrap up your story with a positive result that clearly shows how your actions created a better situation. Even if the question is about a negative topic, like making a mistake, be sure to finish with positivity — lessons learned and improvements made since then.

“As a result of these efforts, we were able to implement the new customer feedback which led to a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores within the first three months.”

Answering behavioral or situation questions with the STAR method will help you keep your responses focused and give the interviewer the information they’re looking for in a concise way. Think of STAR as a framework that you can use to stay on track and ease the nervousness of not knowing what to say in an interview.

Here are some common behavioral interview questions with example answers using the STAR method to help you get an understanding of how to answering using it:

Tell me about a time you made a mistake . How did you fix the situation?

Situation: At the beginning of my career I was responsible for collecting the week’s sales figures from sales team leaders and compiling them for my supervisor . One week, I forgot to get figures from a few of the teams, resulting in skewed data to present to my supervisor. Task: I had to fix the situation quickly before my supervisor’s big monthly meeting so she could accurately present the company’s sales figures. Action: I quickly called, emailed, and checked in on all the sales team leaders to make sure I had all of the correct information. I had to track down one team leader who was out of the office for the day, but luckily his assistant knew the figures for the week. Result: I was able to remedy my mistake within an hour and provide my supervisor with all the correct data in time for her meeting.

Can you tell me about a time when you boosted monthly sales figures for your team?

Situation: I led a sales team at my previous company and I was responsible for making sure we reached the sales goals my supervisor set. Task: We were meeting our goals, but I wanted to surpass the expectations so I implemented a “check back” policy. Action: I asked everyone on my team to begin checking back with leads that went cold. We began reaching back out to people who asked for more information about our services but never followed up. Result: We were able to convert 50% of those dead leads just by checking back in and seeing if the customer wanted to resume our conversation, bringing us $15,000 above our usual sales goal for the month.

When have you demonstrated leadership skills?

Situation: As a consultant , I worked on various different teams to complete projects. One time, our designated team leader was suddenly reassigned to a new project so I stepped up and offered to lead our team. Task: We had a few days to research, compile, and present our recommendations to a client so I had to manage the team to make sure we were all completing our work and staying within the guidelines the client provided. Action: This meant that I had to balance both my own work for the proposal as well as fielding questions from teammates and overseeing the occasional disagreement. Acting as a mediator , I better understood the recommendations my teammates were proposing and helped them come to an agreement. Result: We successfully pitched our proposal to the client, resulting in an ongoing partnership with them. I was also recognized as a strong leader and became a designated group leader for future projects.

Have you had a time when you disagreed with your boss? How did you handle it?

Situation: We were given a small budget to run paid advertising campaigns for a new product that the company was launching. My boss thought that the money would be better spent on a Google Search Ad, but I wanted to spend it on a social media campaign. Task: I had to convince her that an ad on social media would have a higher ROI than a Google Search Ad, so I had to calculate costs and results for both campaigns to show her why a social media ad made more sense for our budget and goals. Action: I researched and compiled information about what we could expect to gain from these two different ads with our budget. I presented the findings to my boss to convince her to start a paid social media campaign. Result: My work convinced her that we would ultimately see more conversion from a highly targeted social media ad than a Google Search Ad, so I became the person in charge of the project. I oversaw the creation of the content, the targeting, and more, and by the end, we saw a much higher conversion rate than we usually did.

Share an example of when you had to deliver bad news to a coworker.

Situation: As a sales manager , I had to make sure that everyone on my team was meeting their weekly and monthly sales goals. There was one month when a man on my team was barely meeting the goal or did not reach it for four weeks. Our company policy was that after a month of inconsistent performance, we had to have a serious talk with the employee. Task: I had to ask this employee about his work performance and inform him that if his sales remained low for another two weeks, he would be let go. Action: Instead of approaching the situation as a chance to blame him for low sales or scare him about his future, I wanted to understand his point of view. We had a productive conversation about his work and what he was doing to improve his performance so it became a working discussion instead of a chance for me to talk down to him for not meeting our goals. Result: After our conversation, I saw the suggestions he made come to life and I watched his sales numbers rise. Luckily, he improved before the two weeks were up and he became one of my best sales associates after that.

Can you share a time when you successfully persuaded a team or individual to adopt your ideas or recommendations?

Situation: In my previous role at XYZ Inc. we were dealing with a challenge with declining sales. My team was struggling to find a solution and it was impacting our performance. Task: I decided to analyze the situation, come up with a new strategy to boost sales, and convince the team to adopt this new strategy. Action: To create this new strategy, I started by conducting a comprehensive analysis of our sales data to identify any sales trends or customer preferences. Based on this research, I developed a detailed proposal that outlines a new market approach, a revised product positioning, and targeted promotional campaigns. I made sure to meet with key team members one-on-one to communicate this and address any of their concerns. Once everyone agreed to this new strategy, I created a detailed implementation plan with clear milestones, responsibilities, and timelines. Result: As a result of our collaborative efforts and adoption of the new strategy, we saw a significant turnaround in our sales figures. Within six months, our sales in the target product category increased, exceeding our initial goals.

Behavioral questions are easy to identify since they are meant to gather specific information about a task you performed or a goal you achieved in a previous job. If the question starts with something along the lines of “ tell me about a time you… ” or “describe an experience where…” then the interviewer is looking to get concrete examples of how you complete tasks and achieve goals.

Here are some common behavioral interview questions that require the STAR method:

Tell me about a time you had to complete a project with a short deadline.

Can you tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker? How did you resolve it?

Is there a time when you had to set a goal and meet it?

Tell me about a situation where you failed to meet a specific goal. How did you deal with it?

Have you had to make an unpopular decision?

Can you explain a time when you were under a lot of pressure at work? How did you handle it?

Have you ever worked with multiple departments to complete a project? How did it go?

What do you do when you need to motivate your coworkers?

Have you been in a situation where one of your coworkers refused to complete their work?

Tell me about a time you showed initiative in a professional setting.

Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult coworker or team member. How did you handle the situation?

Tell me about a situation where you had to handle a dissatisfied customer or client. How did you address their concerns and ensure their satisfaction?

Describe a moment when you demonstrated strong problem-solving skills. What was the problem, and how did you approach it?

Can you share an experience where you had to provide constructive feedback to a colleague or subordinate? How did you deliver the feedback, and what was the outcome?

To prepare for an interview using the STAR method, the best way to do it is to review common behavioral and situational questions and practice your answers. The more you practice with the format of the STAR method, the better you’ll be at using it during an interview.

Start by writing out your answer to a behavioral question so you can read it back and make sure it sounds like a good answer. You should also answer the questions aloud to practice how you’ll organize your thoughts on the spot. You can do this alone or ask a friend to listen to your responses and help you fine-tune them.

The great thing about behavioral interview questions is that they can be broken down into categories. Consider the following common topics:

Adaptability

Problem-solving

Attention to detail

Customer-focused

Communication

Decision-making

Goal-setting

Taking initiative

Interpersonal skills

Time management

Negotiation

Conflict management

Most of these examples will overlap in some way or another, which will help you when it comes to coming up with an answer.

For example, if you have a story about a time you helped an angry customer reach a positive conclusion, that covers stress, problem-solving, customer interaction, communication, interpersonal skills , and conflict management.

As long as you have a number of stories that cumulatively cover all of the above topics, you should be plenty prepared for your interview. Just be sure to review the job description before heading into your interview, to make sure that all of your stories paint yourself as the ideal candidate the hiring manager is looking for.

You should avoid making your answer sound rehearsed or robotic and being too vague with your answers when using the STAR method. Here are some more mistakes to avoid when using the STAR method:

Sounding rehearsed. It’s good to prepare and practice your answers, but you don’t want to sound like a robot. In order to avoid this, we recommend writing bullet points instead of full answers. That way, you’re sure to hit all the key parts of your story, but your phrasing will sound more natural.

Telling stories that make you look bad. All the stories you tell using the STAR method should end on a positive note. And if the interviewer asks you about a time you made a mistake, don’t bring up the time you cost your former employer hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Being vague. It’s important that your direct impact is super evident in your story. It’s good to talk about team efforts, but make sure that your specific contribution is what’s highlighted.

If you can, use numbers whenever possible. Hiring managers won’t know about your various company policies, but they know that a 10% increase in revenue is always a good thing.

Not being prepared. Coming up with your story on the spot can have you leaving out details or dragging on your answers. There’s also a chance that you could forget to include relevant skills or miss a step in your answers. Being prepared with knowing each step and knowing what you want will help you answer smoothly.

Lying. It’s better to admit you don’t have a great example story rather than make one up. But don’t just flat out say “I don’t know, that never happened to me.” Instead, turn the behavioral interview question into a situational one. Imagine how you would behave in that circumstance, and apply the STAR method as normal.

Situational interview questions are very similar to behavioral questions, except they ask about a hypothetical scenario instead of a real one. These questions start with phrases like “What would you do if…” and “How would you respond when…”

The great news is that the STAR method works just as well for situational interview questions as behavioral ones. After all, the hiring manager or recruiter will be thrilled to hear about a real example that relates to their hypothetical situation.

Even if you don’t have a concrete example for a situational question, you can still use the STAR method to format your answer into a neat and coherent narrative.

What is the STAR method when interviewing?

When interviewing, the STAR method means your answer will address a Situation, what your Task was, what Action you took, and what was the final Result. The STAR method is a great way to neatly organize your answer in such a way that shows how your skills result in success. This helps the interviewer see that you understand the question and have the ability to effectively communicate a relevant answer.

How do you use the STAR technique?

Use the STAR technique by following each step in order. Start with a situation that is appropriate for the question. Then describe what your task or role was to resolve the situation. After, explain what actions you took to fulfill your task. Finally, in a positive manner, describe what were the results of your actions.

Is the STAR method a good technique?

Yes, the STAR method is a good technique for interviews. The STAR method follows a logical progression of your involvement. It gives context, shows skills in actions, and provides results. These are all bits of information the interviewer can use to learn about you and see how you are a great candidate.

When should you use the STAR method in interviews?

You should use the STAR method when answering behavioral interview questions. The STAR method allows you to answer behavioral interview questions with a story or example from your past. This helps the interviewer see how you are as an employee.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Using the STAR method for your next behavioral interview

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Employment Interviewing: Seizing the Opportunity and the Job

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Amanda is a writer with experience in various industries, including travel, real estate, and career advice. After taking on internships and entry-level jobs, she is familiar with the job search process and landing that crucial first job. Included in her experience is work at an employer/intern matching startup where she marketed an intern database to employers and supported college interns looking for work experience.

Denise Bitler has 30+ years of HR experience working in various industries and with all level of employees from hourly through C-suite, as well as company Board Members.She is the founder of Resume-Interview Success, LLC and is an expert in best practices related to resume, cover letter, and Executive bio writing, LinkedIn Profile optimization, job search strategies, and interview coaching.

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How to use the STAR technique for interviews

By Rob Jones & Firaz Hameed August 3, 2023

Updated June 24, 2024

What is the STAR interview technique?

The STAR interview method is a technique job seekers can use to answer behavioral and situational interview questions.

In the realm of job interviews, a traditional question-and-answer format is often followed by hiring managers. However, there is a growing trend of incorporating behavioral interview questions, which prompt candidates to provide specific examples such as "Tell me about a time..." or "What do you do when..." or "Give me an example of...".

These behavioral interviews are designed to evaluate a candidate's suitability for the role by assessing their past performance, as it serves as a strong indicator of future success.

Facing a barrage of questions in an interview can be daunting, particularly when dealing with behavioral and situational inquiries. Luckily, the STAR method can help you in preparing for and responding to these types of questions.

In this article, we'll delve deep into the STAR interview response method, explaining its use and how job candidates can apply it to confidently navigate and ace their upcoming interview.

The acronym STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result

The STAR method is designed to help you create a cohesive story with a clear outline of how you handled and resolved a problem. In other words, your answer for each behavioral question should follow the same basic pattern.

Here is what each step in the STAR acronym represents:

Think of the STAR technique as a mental outline that helps you to stay on track when responding to behavioral interview questions. By following the outline, your answers will be more coherent, concise, and impressive to your interviewer.

Why is the STAR technique useful?

Breaking down your answer into four parts can provide the interviewer with a deeper understanding of your communication skills, leadership abilities, flexibility, and ability to handle difficult situations.

Here are some of the ways the STAR interview method can be useful to job seekers

• It allows you to provide compelling answers to each question in a logical, easy-to-understand way.
• It enables you to demonstrate any technical and soft skills, qualities, and work experience to the interviewer by means of concrete, "bite-sized" examples from your past.
• It also helps you to engage your interviewer more fully by describing your qualifications within a narrative framework. In other words, it allows you to become a teller of your own story.
• Not only, is STAR useful for interviews, but it can also help you prepare cover letters and job applications in a way that highlights your strengths

How to answer interview questions using the STAR method?

Using STAR answers is extremely versatile. No matter what question the interviewer throws at you, you can almost always frame your response in terms of the STAR method. Here's just one concrete example of how you can put it all together.

Let's use "Tell me about a time when you had to use your management skills in order to complete a project on time." as an example of a STAR behavioral interview question.

In this instance, you could respond by relating the answer to a specific work situation by following the structure in the table below:

As you can see, applying the STAR interview approach doesn't have to be too complicated. However, it does require some forethought.

Here are some helpful tips to effectively answer STAR interview questions:

Provide relevant examples.

Use examples that are directly relevant to the skills and qualities the employer is looking for. Customize your answers to showcase your fit for the role.

Prepare in advance

Thoroughly review your resume and think about past experiences that align with the job requirements for the role you're interviewing for. Practice answering some common interview questions with a friend in a mock interview session. 

While having a storytelling element is important and can make your responses more memorable, be weary or straying away from the point. Stay focused and avoid providing unnecessary detail. 

Share measurable results

Whenever possible, include quantifiable outcomes to demonstrate the effect of your actions and enhance the credibility of your responses.

If needed, seek clarification

If there is any confusion about a question, it is advisable to ask the interviewer for clarification before attempting to answer.

Using the STAR format in your next interview

The STAR approach to answering interview questions is a great way to mentally outline your responses to behavioural interview questions. It allows you to demonstrate your skills and experiences, qualifications, and abilities within the framework of a story.

Here are some examples of STAR method interview questions you might be asked:

Describe a time when you had to deal with a difficult team member. How did you handle it and what was the outcome?

Describe a situation where you had to meet a tight deadline. What steps did you take to ensure you completed the task on time, and what was the result?

Can you share an example of a problem you encountered at work and how you went about solving it? What were the actions you took, and what impact did your solution have?

Have you ever faced a challenging situation with a customer? How did you handle it, and what was the end result?

Tell me about a time when you had to lead a team through a major change or transition. How did you approach the situation, and what were the outcomes?

Describe a successful negotiation you were involved in. What was your approach, and how did you ensure a positive outcome for all parties?

Have you ever had to deal with a conflict between team members? How did you address the situation, and what steps did you take to resolve it?

Tell me about a situation where you had to work with a diverse group of colleagues to accomplish a shared goal. How did you collaborate, and what were the outcomes?

Describe a time when you had to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. How did you prioritise and manage your time and what were the results?

Have you ever faced a setback or failure in a project? How did you react?

For more tips on finding a job, check out our jobseekers' guide.

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20 STAR interview questions and answers for hiring expert talent

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The STAR method is a popular interview technique that allows candidates to answer questions in greater detail. It requires them to share work experiences by structuring responses into four parts: the situation, task, action, and results achieved. 

Answers containing these four components have a stronger narrative that helps you better understand the candidate’s level of expertise. 

Many recruiters incorporate the STAR method into behavioral questions, to prompt candidates to provide an example and detailed reason in their answers. And before you conduct these interviews, you can send candidates a  Critical Thinking test  to evaluate their thought processes in more depth. 

But if you’re at the stage where you need to prepare for candidate interviews, keep reading this guide to discover 20 STAR method interview questions and answers. We have provided sample answers that follow the STAR format for each question.

Table of contents

1. tell me about a time when you faced a challenge. how did you solve it, 2. how do you usually resolve conflict at work, 3. talk me through the process of meeting a tight deadline. , 4. how do you deal with team members who aren’t contributing to a project, 5. how do you overcome sudden changes in the workplace, 6. tell me about a time your team wasn’t listening to your ideas. , 7. what is your process for fixing mistakes at work, 8. what is your process for fixing mistakes at work, 9. how do you use communication skills to lead a group presentation, 10. describe a time when you had to make quick changes to a project. how did you manage it, 11. how do you set long-term career goals, 12. have you ever had to develop new skills in a job, 13. tell me how you would resolve a disagreement with your boss., 14. describe a time you failed to meet your goals. how did you handle it, 15. how would you manage multiple priorities when other team members can’t, 16. how do you handle pressure during a large project, 17. tell me about a time when you had to share bad news with team members., 18. how would you collaborate with other departments, 19. how do you motivate others on the team, 20. talk me through the steps needed to start a project., at which stage of the hiring process should you use star interview questions, hire top talent using star method interview questions and skills assessments .

This question deliberately sets up an answer that follows the  STAR method . Candidates should think of challenges they faced in previous jobs and what they did to overcome them. When responding, candidates should focus on tasks and actions that demonstrate their best skills. 

Situation:  A challenge could involve tight deadlines on a team project. 

Task:  Focusing on time management and organization ensures your candidates prioritize the right deadlines for the company. 

Action:  Listed top-priority deadlines and focus on completing those before doing smaller tasks that require less time.

Result: The team completed all projects without missing a day. This result made the client extremely satisfied. 

Your applicant should emphasize their problem-solving and communication skills when answering this question. They can explain the conflict and provide examples that illustrate how they resolved it with other team members. 

Consider sending candidates a  Problem-Solving test  before the interview. This assessment enables you to evaluate their responses to complex situations in the workplace. 

Situation : A team member disagreed with an idea for the project and started expressing negative emotions. 

Task : Talk to the team member and negotiate potential ideas that suit everyone. 

Action : Arranged a 10-minute meeting to discuss the conflict. The team member listened and shared their thoughts on the project. Both parties made a plan that turned all ideas into one final proposition. 

Result: The team felt more comfortable now that the conflict was over, meaning everyone could get started on the project. 

Candidates will have unique responses depending on their thought processes and work style. Starting the question with “talk me through” ensures the candidate states each step clearly in their answer. When providing an answer, they should describe how they dealt with a pressing deadline in a previous job.

Using the  Time Management test  to evaluate your candidates’ organizational skills and ability to execute tasks efficiently is worthwhile if you require extra data for candidate assessment. 

Situation : A long-term client suddenly brings a project deadline forward. 

Task : To meet the tight deadline, team members must split duties evenly and prioritize the project above other tasks. 

Action : Each team member used company resources and group meetings to speed up project development and meet the new deadline. 

Result: The company delivered a high-quality project to the client without delays.

In response to this question, interviewees should be honest about their thoughts and attitudes toward other team members who aren’t putting in the effort. They might focus on how communication skills helped them express their opinions without being negative. 

Send them a  Communication Skills test  before the interview for more insight into the candidate’s abilities. With data-driven results, you can assess their written and verbal communication. 

Situation : One team member on the marketing team isn’t doing much research for the project. 

Task : Arrange a meeting with the team member to discuss their tasks and ask if they need support. 

Action : Talked to the team member about their lack of contribution and whether they require guidance from a manager. They also had an opportunity to express any concerns regarding the project. 

Result: Once the team completed more tasks to the highest standard, all team members were more motivated and productive.

A candidate who can adapt to change is more likely to succeed during company or industry developments. For example, transitioning to another software program can be challenging for some, but adaptable workers quickly learn how to use the new technology. Research also suggests that recruiters are  24% more likely  to employ candidates with adaptability skills.

Ask this question to determine whether candidates can adapt to new processes in a work environment.

Situation:  The company implemented a new payroll system that HR professionals had to learn quickly. 

Task:  Watch training videos on the new system and attend meetings to learn about payroll technology. 

Action:  Employees used practical examples and conversed with technical professionals on how to use basic features. They also attended instructor-led classes to test more advanced components of the software. 

Result:  Team members in HR could efficiently administer payroll through the new software program. 

Candidates who feel confident voicing their ideas will contribute more to a project. They may want to share their creativity with others and bring something new to the table. Even if some candidates don’t have experience dealing with distant team members, they can still provide an example of what they would do in that situation. 

Send your candidates a  Verbal Reasoning test  to determine how they express their ideas to other team members. This assessment is suitable for candidates with strong communication skills. 

Situation:  Team members weren’t taking ideas on board when negotiating concepts during project planning. 

Task:  Arrange a meeting with the team members to ensure everyone gets heard. 

Action:  Explained the reasoning behind specific ideas and created a plan that allowed all team members to contribute. 

Result:  Every team member voiced their opinion, which produced better results in the final project. 

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To be able to improve, need to learn how to fix mistakes in every job. They should have a clear and consistent thought process that helps them to resolve human errors and prevent them from reoccurring. 

The best responses will provide clear examples and explain successful outcomes from the action.

Situation:  A written project included the wrong spelling of a brand.

Task:  Go through the project and resolve these mistakes. Once the brand name is correct, let another team member check it. 

Action:  Corrected the mistakes in the written project and enhanced the article quality to ensure the client was satisfied. The company also provided more grammar-related software programs to prevent this mistake from reoccurring. 

Result:  The client was happy with the outcome, and the company didn’t experience similar mistakes again. 

By creating strategic plans, individuals are more likely to achieve their goals. With a plan prepared, candidates have a clear idea of how to accomplish the company’s objectives. 

You could send each candidate a  16 Types Personality test  to understand their personal work style and how they create strategies to achieve goals. 

Situation:  One short-term goal is to meet 60,000 words a month for a project. 

Task:  Focus on setting small daily goals and practice time management to boost the word count. 

Action:  Completed 3,000 words a day while taking regular breaks. This approach eliminated bad habits like zoning out and procrastinating during work hours. 

Result:  Completed 60,000 words in the month and finished the project a few days before the deadline. 

Candidates need strong communication skills to succeed in a team-based role. They should know about several  communication types  regarding efficient collaboration in the workplace. Their answer will be unique depending on how they lead presentations and interact with the entire team. 

Studies prove that nearly half of employees feel  less productive due to ineffective communication . Therefore, candidates with good workplace communication skills are a big advantage.

Situation:  The presentation is about new project ideas. Every team member needs to express their thoughts to the managerial department. 

Task:  Arrange meetings with the team members beforehand to determine who leads the presentation and how they want to communicate ideas. 

Action:  Took the lead on the main content to ensure the presentation was cohesive and coherent. Other team members maintained the same tone of voice throughout the project pitch. 

Result:  In response to the presentation, the manager accepted the team’s new ideas.

Candidates should expect sudden changes in a job. Industries are constantly changing and many organizations introduce new technology in line with the latest trends. If they already have experience with similar developments, it’s worth questioning applicants further. 

You could ask how they adapted to sudden changes and what skills they used to complete the project efficiently. 

Situation:  A client requested a word-count increase for their latest project. 

Task:  Figure out how many words to write each day to meet the word count. Talk with other team members about their ideas. 

Action:  Prioritized the project above anything else and dedicated a few hours daily to increasing the word count. The entire team contributed some words to ensure the project met the highest standard. 

Result:  The client was pleased with the new content and extended their contract with the company. 

Personal development goals  enable candidates to improve their workplace and interpersonal skills. With their goals established, individuals can think about what they wish to achieve and how they will reach specific objectives. 

In response to this question, some candidates might talk you through their process of setting career objectives, while others may provide examples of common or regular goals they like to set. 

Situation:  One goal is to gain leadership experience for future jobs. 

Task:  Find volunteer work in local communities or organize mentoring sessions with current team members to test leadership skills. 

Action:  Volunteered in community development to help guide new principles. Everyone listened to a range of intriguing ideas that could improve local neighborhoods.

Result:  Gained leadership experience and felt more comfortable seeking leader-based positions in the company.

Self-improvement means the candidate is eager to constantly learn new skills and gain relevant experience. Since developing new skills makes projects easier, gauge whether candidates have considered how they can improve.

Whether they take training courses or request advice from senior team members, there are many methods your interviewee may discuss. Candidates’ answers should provide real examples of how they learn new skills to support efficient task completion. 

If you’re doing  skills-based hiring , this is an important question. You can search for specific competencies among candidates. 

Situation:  New software programs in the company require team members to have strong technical skills. 

Task:  Join on-the-job training or take online courses to gain technical knowledge. 

Action:  Completed training sessions with the manager and read online materials on how to use the latest software. 

Result:  All team members can efficiently use the software with their new technical skills. 

Disagreements are bound to happen at work, but candidates should always know how to resolve them without causing unnecessary conflict. Their answers should include a realistic scenario and a step-by-step solution showing how they overcame conflict professionally. 

New research has revealed that  over 36% of employees and managers  have to deal with conflict often, so it’s important to hire a candidate who takes an active approach to preventing and resolving these disagreements.

Send candidates a  Negotiation test  to see how they resolve disagreements. This skill is vital for settling differences in the workplace. 

Situation:  The manager disagreed on how to help a customer with their product. 

Task:  Arrange a meeting with the manager in private to discuss alternative options and put forward new ideas. 

Action:  In a private meeting, the manager agreed with alternative solutions for supporting customers. They maintained honest communication while negotiating other potential solutions. 

Result:  Both the customer and manager were satisfied. There was no conflict or further disagreement on the subject. 

When responding to this question, candidates should be honest about what goals they have failed to achieve and how they learned from failure to maintain self-improvement. Evaluating their thought processes and determination to continuously strive for more is important because it helps you determine whether they will be productive team members. 

Situation:  The team failed to reach the monthly word count for specific projects. 

Task:  Each team member writes the goal down again for the next month and finds ways to manage their time better. 

Action:  Prioritized projects with higher word counts and set more daily goals to ensure everyone produced work efficiently. 

Result:  Every team member contributed to a higher overall word count the next month. The learning process helped employees increase their productivity levels. 

Workers who can take on more tasks in a role may often show leadership traits. They are confident and ready to complete necessary duties for individual projects. The ideal candidate will talk you through their process and explain how they would handle a heavy workload.

Use a  Leadership and People Management test  to locate potential leaders. You can determine whether candidates can complete more tasks in the vacancy. 

Situation:  Two team members who have fast-approaching deadlines are off sick. 

Task:  Get familiar with their projects and study what they’ve done so far to ensure no team members make unnecessary mistakes before the deadline. 

Action:  Completed the two team members’ projects in time for the deadline by limiting outside distractions and prioritizing them above anything else. 

Result:  Team members delivered two high-quality projects on time. The client was happy with the outcome and praised the company for their hard work. 

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Dealing with and preventing stress is essential in a job, and resilient team members will retain composure under pressure. Candidates may have multiple methods to handle the pressure of significant projects. 

For example, they might complete tasks in their own time by sitting in a quiet room and excluding distractions from team members. Their answer should give a detailed example of how they approach pressure in the workplace. 

Situation:  Demanding performance expectations that make team members feel pressured. 

Task:  Arrange a meeting with the manager to discuss employee performance. Use this time to ask questions about how to improve current work processes. 

Action:  Communicated concerns with the manager about how the performance expectations were too high. This professional meeting helped the manager to lower workplace pressure and provide more internal support. 

Result:  All team members had better mental health and could perform their duties without stress. 

This question focuses on communication and empathy. Candidates who can communicate bad news and reassure other team members may encourage them to achieve their goals despite setbacks. When reviewing responses, consider if your candidates know how to communicate negative news clearly and compassionately. 

Situation:  A long-term client ended the contract after a failed project. 

Task:  Schedule a private meeting with team members to break the news and explain more about the situation. 

Action:  Completed a successful meeting with the team. They understood why the client left and discussed ideas for improving future projects. Everyone felt disappointed, but they were determined to carry on. 

Result:  All team members felt more confident to improve. 

Effective collaboration ensures all departments can contribute to a project. Candidates must understand how to interact with different teams and use consistent communication. Over  35% of employees  report a lack of teamwork in the workplace, but you have an opportunity to change that by hiring collaborative candidates.

You could send candidates a personality test like  Big 5  to determine their openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. This test indicates how each candidate would approach new situations and people. 

Situation:  A product launch requires all departments to participate and work together. 

Task:  Become acquainted with the other departments and create a plan that enables all teams to utilize their strengths during product development. 

Action:  Collaborated with several other departments to make a final product. Everyone was friendly and knew what to do through big team meetings and group presentations. 

Result:  Every department feels comfortable working on projects together and conversing with new people. This result also improves overall company culture, which boosts employee morale. 

Supporting others on the team can raise productivity levels, increase morale, and boost client satisfaction as teams complete projects efficiently. The ideal candidate should have the motivation to guide others and become a mentor. Even if they lack some experience, they can still discuss the steps they would take to reinforce positivity. 

Check out the  Motivation test  for screening your candidates on this quality. Candidates will answer questions about their personality and job expectations. 

Situation:  Some team members are feeling low because of a challenging project. 

Task : Arrange a social event to boost their happiness and encourage them to be more productive when overcoming challenges. 

Action:  The entire team was able to de-stress after the social event and discuss any problems. Certain team members also requested additional support to ensure they met deadlines. 

Result:  Employee morale was high and the team picked up their pace to complete the complex project. 

This final question allows candidates to explore more of their thought processes. You can take a deeper look into their cognitive ability and evaluate their ability to think fast in the workplace. Candidates should take the time to think about their responses, especially if they plan on going through each step in more detail. 

Situation:  The entire team has to start and finish a significant project in one week. 

Task:  Schedule team meetings, make a to-do list, prioritize important tasks, and converse with the client about guidelines. 

Action:  All team members completed their studies for the project by holding regular meetings and communicating problems in advance. A to-do list also stopped smaller tasks from getting lost. 

Result:  The team delivered a high-quality project that didn’t require an extension. 

You should use STAR method interview questions after sending candidates applicable skill assessments. This approach means that instead of searching through a pile of resumes, you can use our data-driven tests to  identify top talent , avoid mis-hiring, and remove unsuitable candidates who don’t have relevant experience. 

For example, hiring a sales assistant means you can use a  Customer Service  test. Just send it to several candidates to evaluate their communication and problem-solving skills. Each role may require a different skill assessment comprised of different tests. 

If you’re hiring a software engineer, for instance, you may require a  QA Skills  assessment that contains general knowledge and execution methods. 

Once you have narrowed down your list of candidates, you can use these STAR interview questions and answers to hire suitable talent. 

Before interviewing your candidates, make sure you search for suitable skill tests in TestGorilla’s extensive  test library . You can search for personality, language, situational judgment, programming, software, and cognitive ability tests that will help you eliminate unsuitable job applicants. 

Once you have studied the results and chosen a group of candidates, prepare for the interviews using these STAR method interview questions and answers. The ideal candidate will spark an engaging conversation that makes them stand out.

Sign up for your free-forever plan with TestGorilla, or book a free live demo with a member of our team who can show you the benefits of skills testing.

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5 problem-solving questions to prepare you for your next interview

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What is problem-solving, and why do hiring managers care so much about it?

How to answer problem-solving questions

Common problem-solving questions and answers, things to avoid when answering problem-solving questions, how to prepare for problem-solving interview questions, problem solved.

“How would you approach telling a manager that they’ve made a mistake ?” 

Hard problem-solving questions like these can catch you off guard in a job interview. They’re hard to prepare for if you don’t know they’re coming, and you might not even see why they’re relevant to the job.

Even the most experienced interviewees might feel like they’re giving a bad interview if they stumble on questions like these.

Preparing and practicing hard questions is one way to ease your fears. Learn to dissect what a hiring manager is really asking and answer problem-solving questions with confidence. 

What is problem-solving, and why do hiring managers care so much about it? 

Problem-solving is holistically understanding a problem, determining its cause, and identifying creative solutions . Many, if not most, job descriptions ask for problem-solving skills because regardless of industry, they’re an asset in the workplace.

Startups and tech companies like Google famously pose critical thinking and problem-solving questions in job interviews . But hiring managers from all industries use unique questions like these to understand your problem-solving skills. It’s not about the answer you give, or whether it’s correct, but the way you come to that conclusion.

In job interviews, problem-solving questions pose a potential problem or situation typical to the job you’re interviewing for. Your response shows your ability to respond to common problems, even on the spot. Depending on the question, it can also indicate other skills like:

Critical thinking

Communication

Dependability

Behavioral competency

Soft skills

Decision-making

The average business spends $4,700 hiring one new worker , so it wants to make sure you’re the right fit for the job. Even if you have the right skills and experience on paper, hiring managers need a comprehensive idea of what kind of worker you are to avoid choosing the wrong candidate.

Like standard behavioral interview questions , problem-solving questions offer interviewers a more well-rounded view of how you might perform on the job. 

Problem-solving questions encourage you to give answers about your past experiences, decision-making process , and ability to arrive at creative solutions . Learning how to answer questions in an interview means learning how to tell a good story , so your answer should have a clear structure, unique topic, and compelling journey to demonstrate your competencies.

The STAR method is a common technique for answering problem-solving interview questions clearly and thoughtfully. The acronym stands for situation, task, action, and result. It provides a simple structure that gives your response a smooth beginning, middle, and end.

Here’s how to use the STAR method to describe past on-the-job experiences or hypothetical situations: 

Situation: Start with a problem statement that clearly defines the situation. 

Task: Explain your role in the situation. What is, or would be your responsibility?

Action: Recount the steps or problem-solving strategies you used, or would use, to overcome the problem.

Result: Share what you achieved or would hope to resolve through your problem-solving process.

Every job requires problem-solving on some level, so you can expect at least one job interview question to ask about those skills. Here are a few common problem-solving interview questions to practice:

1. Give us an example of when you faced an unexpected challenge at work. What did you do to face it?

What’s a hiring manager really asking? Employers want to know that your problem-solving has a process. They want to hear you break down a problem into a set of steps to solve it.

Sample answer: I was working in sales for a wholesale retailer. A regular client wrongly communicated the pricing of a unit. I realized this immediately, and rather than pointing out the error, I quickly double-checked with my supervisor to see if we could respect the price.

I informed the client of the error and that we were happy to keep the price he was given. It made him feel like he'd gotten a fair deal and trusted my authority as a sales rep even more. The loss wasn't significant, but saving face in front of the client was.

2. How would you manage a frustrated client?

What’s a hiring manager really asking? They want to gauge your ability to stay cool and be patient in stressful situations, even when dealing with difficult people . Keep your answer professional, and don't use the opportunity to bad-mouth a past client. Show that you can stay respectful even if someone isn’t respecting you. 

Sample answer: I've had plenty of experience dealing with unhappy clients. I've learned two important things: their frustration isn’t a personal attack against me, and we have the same goal to solve the problem. Knowing that helps me stay calm, listen carefully to the client's situation, and do my best to identify where the situation went astray.

Once we identify the problem, if I can handle it myself, I communicate exactly what we’ll do for the client and how. What steps we’ll take depend on the client, but I always start by proposing solutions to show I care about a path forward, and then keep them updated on my progress to implementing that fix. 

3. Describe a time you made a mistake at work. How did you fix it?

What’s a hiring manager really asking? No one is above making an error. Employers want to know that you own up to and learn from your mistakes instead of getting frustrated and walking away from the problem.

Sample answer: My first managerial position was at a public relations agency. When I was promoted to work on client outreach, I struggled to learn to delegate my old responsibilities, which were writing social media copy. I was afraid to let go of control, and I was micromanaging . One day, I wrote out some copy, sent it out, and quickly realized I was using the wrong style guide in my haste.

The client noticed, and we had to work to regain their trust, which put a strain on the entire team. I took full responsibility and used that moment to understand that I wasn't trusting my team's abilities. I apologized to my team for overstepping boundaries and worked to let go of my old role completely.

4. Have you ever had a difficult time working with a team member? How did you deal with the situation?

What’s a hiring manager really asking? Even the most independent job requires some teamwork, whether it’s communicating with clients or other team members. Employers want to know that you can solve interpersonal problems, know when to escalate and help maintain a positive work environment.

Sample answer: At my last job, we were fully remote. I had a coworker that wasn't very communicative about their process, which led to redundancies in our work and miscommunications that set us behind. I asked them to have a one-on-one meeting with me so we could analyze where we were failing to communicate and how to improve.

It wasn't a comfortable process, but we developed a better practice to collaborate and improve our ability to work as a team , including weekly meetings and check-ins.

5. Tell me about a time you created an innovative solution with limited information or resources.

What’s a hiring manager really asking? They want to test your resourcefulness, which is a valuable soft skill. Using a “ Tell me about a time” question lets you demonstrate out-of-the-box thinking and shows that you don't quit when things get difficult. 

Sample answer: I worked in project management for a software developer. We were frequently going over budget and needed to limit spending. I instituted a new workflow app across departments and made everyone track every step of their process. We ended up finding information silos between design, sales, and product development.

They were all using different platforms to communicate the status of the same project, which meant we were wasting time and money. We centralized communication and improved operational efficiency, solved our budget problems, and increased productivity by 30%.

Problem-solving questions offer deep insights into the kind of worker you are. While your answer is important, so is your delivery. Here are some things to avoid when trying to answer problem-solving questions:

Don’t clam up: It's okay to take your time to reflect, but never abstain from answering. An interviewer will understand if you need to pause and think. If you’re really stumped, you can ask to return to that question later in the interview. 

Avoid generic answers: Generic answers show a lack of creativity and innovation . Use the opportunity to explain what makes you and your problem-solving process unique. 

Don’t lose confidence: How you answer is as important as what you answer. Do your best to practice confident body language, like eye contact and strong posture. Practicing ahead of time can help alleviate pressure while you’re answering.

Try not to rush: Rushing through an answer could make it unclear or incoherent, which might reflect poorly on your ability to keep a level head. Practice mindful breathing and pace yourself. Answer slowly and deliberately.

Preparing for an interview will make you feel more comfortable and confident during the hiring process. Rather than thinking of answers on the spot, you can pull from different responses you're already familiar with. Here are some tips for practicing and improving your answers:

Create a list of problem-solving examples from throughout your career. Consider varied past experiences that play into important skills, like time management, project management, or teamwork, to show that you're a well-rounded candidate.

Whenever possible, give metrics to show results. For example, if you improved productivity, share percentages. If you upped sales, share numbers.

Carefully study the job description and connect the skills you find with specific ways you’ve used them.

Identify what you’re good at and choose experiences that play to your strengths.

When talking about mistakes or errors, always finish with the lesson you learned and how you plan on avoiding the same mistake.

Provide details that a hiring manager can recognize within the position they’re hiring for.

It’s normal to feel nervous about a job interview, especially if you’re expecting difficult questions. Learning how to overcome that challenge is the perfect way to put your problem-solving skills to the test.

Like everything else in your career, practice makes perfect, and learning to answer tough problem-solving questions is no different. Take the time to recall moments in your career when you overcame challenges, and practice telling those stories. Craft an answer that hiring managers will be excited to hear.

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

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Problem-Solving

Use our free ai roleplay tool to practice common problem-solving behavioral interview questions. the ai will ask you a question and help you develop answers using the star method. press start to begin the next recommended question..

Questions take 3-5 minutes to complete, and can be paused and resumed whenever.

Interview question list updated: June 26, 2024

Start with these three questions to get going:

Complete the next five questions to be well prepared:

Tackle these remaining questions for thorough preparation:

Problem-Solving Interview Questions & Answers

• Updated July 13, 2023
• Published March 9, 2020

A job interview is a great moment for interviewers to evaluate how candidates approach challenging work situations . They do this by asking problem-solving questions. These types of questions are commonly asked during interviews since problem-solving skills are essential in most jobs. In any workplace, there are challenges, and when hiring new personnel, hiring managers look for candidates who are equipped to deal with this.

Problem-solving questions are so-called behavioral interview questions . Behavioral interview questions are strategic type of questions that require you to provide an answer that includes an example situation that you experienced in your career. These questions focus on specific work situations that you experienced and how you responded.

A basic example of a behavior question about problem-solving is ‘ tell me about a time you solved a problem at work .’ As you can see, the interviewer is looking for you to explain a situation and how you approach it, and how you solved it. Furthermore, the interviewer is interested in what you learned from that experience. Answering behavioral questions requires some work because you need to provide the interviewer with a strong answer to convince them that you’re the right person for the job.

The rationale behind asking problem-solving questions is to discover how you approach complex and challenging situations and if you can provide an effective solution. Interview questions about your past behavior might sound challenging, but they are actually a great opportunity for you to show that you’re a fit for the position. With the right preparation, you can use your answers to problem-solving questions to your advantage.

What Are Problem-solving Interview Questions?

Basically, problem-solving skills relate to your ability to identify problems, issues, obstacles, challenges, and opportunities and then come up with and implement effective and efficient solutions. However, this is a broad definition of problem-solving abilities. Depending on the position and field you’re applying for a position in the interviewer can focus on different aspects of problem-solving.

Examples of problem-solving competencies are:

Taking initiative.

Taking initiative means that you step up to the plate when needed and that you take action without being asked to do so. People who take the initiative demonstrate that they can think for themselves and take action whenever necessary. Furthermore, you actively look for opportunities to make a difference in the workplace.

Creative thinking

Creative thinking means that you’re able to look at something in a new way to find a solution. People who are creative have the ability to come up with new ways to carry out their tasks, solve problems, and meet challenges. Creative people are original thinkers and are able to bring unorthodox perspectives to their work.

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome challenges in your work. Furthermore, people who are resourceful are original in their ways of thinking to overcome challenges.

Analytical thinking skills

These skills refer to the ability to gather data, break down a complex problem, weigh pros and cons, and make logical decisions. People who possess analytical thinking skills help the company overcome challenges and are able to spot potential issues before they become actual problems.

Determination

Determination can be described as the firmness of purpose or resoluteness. Specifically, people who are determined are persistent and do not give up easily or when they have a setback. Determination gives these people the motivation to push through and keep moving forward.

Results-oriented

People who are result-oriented have their full focus on getting to the desired outcome.

Problem-solving behavioral interview questions

As discussed in the introduction, problem-solving questions fall into the behavioral category of interview questions . These questions ask you to provide specific examples of past work experiences. For interviewers, understanding your past professional performance is the best way to gauge your future job performance.

Behavioral questions are focused on the desired skills or competency area, such as in this case, problem-solving. Other common competency areas for which behavioral questions are used are teamwork , communication , time management , creative thinking skills , leadership , adaptability , conflict resolution , etc.

Behavioral job interview questions usually start with the following:

• Give me an example of
• Tell me about a time when you
• What do you do when
• Describe a situation where

Examples of problem-solving behavioral interview questions:

• Give me an example of a time you had to solve a difficult problem at work.
• Tell me about a time when you identified and fixed a problem before it became urgent.
• What was the best idea you came up with at your last position?
• Describe a situation where you find a creative way to overcome an obstacle.

As you can see, the questions mentioned above require you to discuss your past behavior in a professional work environment. The reason for asking behavioral job interview questions instead of just asking traditional ones is that the most accurate predictor of future performance is your past performance in similar situations .

The interviewer wants to discuss previous work situations and wants you to elaborate on them to get to know you better. Solid interview preparation will help you give the answers that the interviewer is looking for. This starts with doing your research and thoroughly reviewing the job description . Doing so can help you understand what type of problem-solving skills are required to successfully perform the job you’re interviewing for.

By preparing example scenarios to questions you expect based on your research , you can give exactly the information that he or she is looking for. In other words, you need to relate your answers to the job requirements and company culture of the organization where you’re applying for a position.

To answer behavioral questions about your problem-solving skills, you need to ensure that you provide the interviewer with specific details about the situation you were in, your task in that situation, the action you took, and the specific results that came out of those actions. In short, this is called the STAR-method of providing an answer. The STAR method is discussed in more detail later on in this article.

Why Interviewers Ask Problem-solving Interview Questions

Problem-solving skills are required in most job positions. This means that a lot of hiring managers will try to assess your problem-solving skills during your interview. The main reason for asking you about situations in which you used your problem-solving skills is to get an understanding of how you work.

The interviewers want to get questions answered, such as:

• Are you results-oriented, and are you proactively involved in your work?
• Do you look for different ways to contribute?
• Are you an individual that others can count on to increase team performance?
• Are you a self-starter, or do you need someone to give you instructions?

Most likely, the interviewers look for a self-starting person with general problem-solving skills that can be used in different situations. A proven track record of solving problems such as those required in the position you’re interviewing for will definitely help convince the interviewer. Therefore, make sure you prepare answers to questions you expect in advance.

For example, someone who works as a customer service representative should be able to deal with a frustrated or angry customer . They need to be able to solve these problems and know how to handle such situations. Other examples of positions where problem-solving skills are essential are, for instance, accounts or project managers. They need to be flexible in their approaches and should be able to handle a change in deadlines. Another example is, for instance, a logistic manager who should be able to fix an inefficient logistics process.

The Interviewers’ Goal When Assessing Your Problem-solving Skills

There are several underlying reasons why interviewers use behavioral questions to assess your problem-solving skills. The main one, of course, is that they want to hire a person who’s able to perform the job.

Instead of hiring the person that they ‘like’ they need something better to figure out which candidate is the right fit for the job. By analyzing your behavior in past situations that are similar to the ones that are required in the role that you’re applying for, they try to do just that. Below we discuss a couple of important elements employers consider when making a hiring decision.

Costs of making a bad hiring decision

Employers want to make sure that they hire the right person for the job. For a company, making a bad hiring decision is not only about losing money, but it can also lead to a decrease in productivity and morale. Hiring a bad candidate could lead to leaving a bad impression on customers/clients, but also with coworkers.

Furthermore, time will be lost if the company needs to search for another candidate after a bad hire. Therefore, employers do everything to avoid such situations. Behavioral questions are regarded as a preventative way to make sure that the right person with the right fit for the company is hired .

Specific details of your behavior

By asking behavioral questions about your problem-solving skills, the interviewers try to uncover specific details of your behavior. They want to find out if you are able to clearly identify a problem and if you are able to come up with an efficient and effective solution when needed.

Of course, they got your resume already and maybe even a motivational letter or letter of recommendation . Still, the interviewer can only assess your hard skills and educational levels based on these documents.

Essential soft skills , such as problem-solving, are easier to assess during job interviews with the help of behavioral interview questions. Therefore, include real-life work scenarios in your answers that demonstrate how you have used the skills required for the position that you’re interviewing for. The interviewer wants to assess if you possess the skills required to perform the day-to-day tasks and deal with challenges that you will encounter in the workplace.

Your (past) behavior as a predictor of your future job performance

Questions about your problem-solving skills and the answers you give are used to determine the chances of your future success in the job that you’re interviewing for.

Specific behavioral problem-solving questions such as ‘ tell me about a time you had to solve a problem at work. What steps did you take before deciding on how to solve the problem, and why? ‘ give the interviewer more insight into your professional behavior and in turn, your future job performance .

Another way to assess your behavior is by asking hypothetical questions. If you, for instance, do not have certain experience yet, the interviewer could ask you a question along the lines of ‘ What would you do if you were caught off-guard by a problem that you had not foreseen? Which steps would you take to address the problem? ‘. As you can see, this question is hypothetical in nature. The interviewer wants to hear which steps you would take to address a possible complexity in your work. Based on your answer, the interviewer will assess if your approach is suitable for the position for which you’re interviewing.

It’s therefore important that you prepare for frequently asked interview questions that you can expect during your interview. By preparing the right example answers on how you have solved problems in your previous jobs and how you would solve problems in the job you’re applying for, you can provide a concise answer without missing important details.

Avoid making a wrong hiring decision

Questions that gauge your professional behavior help employers assess your future job performance. In other words, this helps them make a better hiring decision. A perfect resume or cover letter is not enough to impress seasoned interviewers.

By asking behavioral problem-solving questions, the interviewer tries to uncover your previous work patterns. The information in your answers gives them more insight into your approach to critical situations and if this approach matches the ones required for the position you’re applying for.

By preparing the right way, you can make sure that your example answer situations include aspects of the most important job requirements. Of course, the interviewer is looking for candidates that fit the job description , so make sure that your answers relate to the job requirements.

What Interviewers Look for in Successful Candidates

In short, interviewers look for candidates who have the right work approach to succeed within their company and in that particular position. This is also why we can’t emphasize the importance of being able to demonstrate your skills through solid example scenarios enough .

The right preparation will help you get there. Your goal is to demonstrate that you are capable of taking on the day-to-day tasks required for the position and have the potential to grow . For example, if you are able to work in and deal with transitions in fast-paced environments such as financial markets . And can you handle the complex situations that you will encounter? Are you able to deal with such transitions effectively? In this case, you need to show adaptability and problem-solving skills through example scenarios of how you did so in the past.

Problem-solving behavioral questions are used to get insights into how you approach problems at work, if you take the initiative, and if you possess the right creative and critical thinking skills . Basically, the interviewers want to get the following questions answered:

• Do you take the initiative?
• Can you communicate effectively?
• Are you able to adequately respond to problems or issues that occur during your work?
• Can you perform in stressful and unexpected situations?
• Are you able to adjust to changing work environments?
• Can you assist your coworkers or team when needed?
• Are you flexible in your approaches to situations at work?

Red Flags for Interviewers Assessing Your Problem-solving Skills

When answering questions about your problem-solving skills, there are certain things you need to look out for. Below we discuss a couple of warning signs that interviewers consider when you answer their questions. Ensure that you avoid these at all costs to avoid making the wrong impression.

1. Not answering the question or not providing enough detail

If you answer a question with ‘I can’t recall a situation where I encountered such a problem ,’ this is considered a red flag. This could mean that you did not prepare well and that you’re not taking the interview seriously. Furthermore, the interviewer could interpret such an answer as you may avoid dealing with challenging situations.

If you cannot provide specific details or examples about what you claim in your resume or cover letter, this can be considered a red flag too. If you, for instance, claim that you have successfully solved problems and used critical thinking skills in your work, you need to make sure you’re able to back this up through clear examples of times you did so. Failing to do so could lead to a quick elimination of your candidacy for the position. If the interviewer has trouble verifying your employment history, this is considered a warning sign.

2. Canned responses to questions

Preparing answers is key to success for any interview. However, this means preparing original, effective, and relevant answers that are related to the position you’re interviewing for.

Generic answers to behavioral problem-solving questions such as ‘ tell me about a time you had to solve an issue with a customer ‘ are considered warning signs. An example of a generic answer to that particular question is ‘t his one time I had to deal with an angry customer who had complaints about the pricing of a product. I calmed her down and made the sale ‘. As you can see, this answer does not provide much insight into your problem solving skills, thought process, and how you approach the situation.

If you give a generic answer, you can expect more follow-up questions from the interviewer. However, it’s better to prepare strong answers to impress the interviewer that you actually possess the required skills for the job.

3. Answers that focus on problems, not solutions

The reason for asking specific behavioral-problem solving questions is to assess how you approach and solve problems. It’s, therefore, important that your answers focus on the solution, not the problem . Of course, it’s important that you are able to spot and identify problems, but finding a solution is essential. If your answers focus on problems too much, you can come across as too negative for the job.

Negativity, in any form, in your answers, is considered a red flag. This can be talking negatively about a problem you had to solve but also talking inappropriately about previous employers or co-workers. Negative undertones never impress interviewers the right way. Therefore, focus on how you solve problems and put yourself in the best light possible.

4. Too stressed or uncomfortable during an interview

Interviewers know that almost everybody is slightly uncomfortable when put on the spot during a job interview. However, when you’re too stressed to provide a good answer, this can be viewed as an indicator that you do not handle stressful situations well. Of course, remaining calm under pressure while still being able to solve problems is essential for positions in which problem-solving skills are required.

5. Failing to respond effectively

Failing to respond effectively to interview questions comes across weak. It’s therefore important that you prepare for your interview by thoroughly analyzing the job description and try to understand what kind of problems you will be solving in the position that you applied for. This research will help you choose the right examples from your past that are most likely to impress the interviewer.

Therefore, research the job and organization and make notes of the required skills and experiences you think the company values. This allows you to tailor your answers to your situation.

Also, think about possible follow-up questions the interviewer might ask you. Because you already know what examples you will use in your answers to questions you expect , if you prepare the right way, you can figure out which follow-up questions are likely to be asked. For instance, if you’re preparing for the interview question, ‘ tell me about a time you solved a problem at work ,’ you can expect the interviewer to follow up with, ‘ what steps did you take to solve the situation?’.

6. Not taking responsibility or minimizing the significance of a problem

When a problem is identified but not addressed, this could quickly escalate into a bigger problem. Employees who do not take responsibility or those who leave things for later might not be result-oriented and engaged in their work.

Another way of taking responsibility is to show self-awareness. It’s common for interviewers to ask you about a time that you failed, especially in situations where you needed to solve problems. They are interested in what went wrong in a work situation, if you took responsibility for your actions, and what you learned from that situation. Not taking responsibility for, for instance, a  project that may have failed , is considered a warning sign.

Self-awareness and being to reflect on situations is an important characteristic to possess in the workplace. Interviewers want to hire candidates that can admit errors or who made thoughtful mistakes trying to solve problems in the past and tried to fix them. Employers know that candidates are human and make mistakes, just like everybody else. It’s important that your answers show that you take responsibility for situations and describe the actions you took to repair any problems or challenges.

Frequently Asked Problem-solving Interview Questions

Below you can find commonly asked behavioral problem-solving questions . These questions are divided into regular questions and hypothetical questions. Learn everything you need to know about common interview questions that are frequently asked during job interviews .

Problem-solving interview questions:

• Tell me about a time you faced an unexpected challenge at work and how you dealt with it.
• Describe a time a customer approached you with a problem or concern. How did you respond?
• Tell me about a time you had to change your planned course of action at the last moment. How did you re-evaluate your priorities?
• What was the best idea you came in in your last position?
• Tell me about a time you had to solve a difficult problem.
• What’s the most significant improvement that you have made in the last year?
• Tell me about the most innovative new idea that you have implemented in the workplace.
• Have you ever improved the workflow of a project based on your analysis? How did you do this?
• Describe a situation in which you anticipated a potential problem and applied preventive measures.
• Tell me about a time you faced a significant obstacle you had to overcome to succeed in a project.
• When you’re working on several projects, it’s tricky to deliver excellent service to all of them. How do you go about prioritizing the needs of a client?
• Describe a situation in which you had to analyze information and make a recommendation.
• What do you consider your greatest achievement in the workplace? Why?
• Describe a situation in which you needed to motivate others to get something done.

Hypothetical problem-solving interview questions:

• How would you approach a situation in which you had to analyze information to make a recommendation to a client?
• Tell me how you would handle a situation in which you have a deadline you cannot meet.
• How would you handle a conflict with a co-worker?
• A frustrated client calls you to discuss a problem. How do you deal with such a situation?
• How would you handle a situation in which you would need to convince someone to change their decision?

Preparing Answers to Problem-solving Interview Questions

There are several steps that you can take to prepare for problem-solving questions. Here you can find a job interview checklist . To get started, you can consider the following steps.

Step 1: Research

Before your interview, it’s important that you thoroughly research the position and company. Read the job description carefully to find specific skills that a candidate needs to possess to successfully perform the job. Think of skills such as adaptability , communication , and problem-solving. Also, read the company website to get more information about their mission statement and who their main clients are. Furthermore, check their LinkedIn pages and other content/news related to the company.

Your research will help you identify the required skills, qualities, and experience for the position. In turn, you can use this information to make an educated guess about what kind of interview questions you can expect .

Step 2: Write down the required skills, competencies, and experience

Behavioral questions such as those about problem-solving skills are a great opportunity for you to show why you’re the perfect candidate for the job. Based on the skills and competencies that you have identified during your research, you can start preparing answers. Rank the skills on importance in relation to the requirements for the position.

Step 3: Create a list of past work experiences related to the position’s requirements

Everybody knows that it’s hard to come up with strong answers when you’re put on the spot during an interview. Therefore, come up with strong examples to questions you expect ahead of your interview.

Create a list of past work experiences and tailor them to the required skills and competencies for the job—highlight successful situations where you demonstrated behavior related to these required skills and competencies . Focus on delivering a concise and to-the-point answer.

Step 4: Prepare successful and challenging answer examples

Effective problem-solving skills are essential in the workplace. Therefore, your answers must demonstrate that you have successfully identified problems, proposed solutions, evaluated several options, and finally implemented a solution. However, it’s also likely that the interviewer will ask you about a time you have failed to solve a problem . Interviewers ask you about failures to assess whether or not you learn from your mistakes and if you’re self-aware enough to acknowledge times you failed. Also, it helps them identify if you take calculated and smart risks.

Step 5: Use the STAR method to structure your answers

The STAR method allows you to concisely provide the interviewer an answer by logically walking them through the situation. STAR is an acronym that stands for a situation ( S ), your task ( T ) in that situation, the actions ( A ) you took, and what results ( R ) you got based on your actions. These are the basic steps you take in your walkthrough.

Below we discuss the STAR interview technique in more detail.

STAR Interview Technique For Problem-Solving Interview Questions & Answers

By using the STAR method, you can give an answer that includes exactly what the interviewer is looking for. Below, the STAR acronym is broken down into each step.

Start your answer by explaining the situation that you faced. The start of your answer ‘story’ should answer questions such as:

• What was the situation/problem?
• Who was involved?
• Why did the situation happen at that time?

It’s important to provide context around what problem needed to be solved. Furthermore, make sure to provide relevant details.

Next, explain your specific role in the task ahead. Include important details, such as specific responsibilities. Focus on giving the interviewer an understanding of your task in solving the problem. This part of your answer should answer questions such as:

• Why were you involved in that specific situation?
• What’s the background story?

After you describe your task, it’s time to specifically discuss the actions you took to solve the problem. Give the interviewer a step-by-step description of the actions you took. This part of your answer should answer questions such as:

• What steps did you take to resolve the situation you were in?
• Why did you choose to complete your tasks this way?

Finish your answer by discussing the results you got from your actions. Detail the outcomes of your actions and ensure to highlight your strengths . Also, make sure to take credit for your behavior that led to the result. Focus on positive results and positive learning experiences. This part of your answer ‘story’ should answer questions such as:

• What exactly happened?
• What did you accomplish?
• How did you feel about the results you got?
• What did you learn from the situation?
• How did this particular situation influence who you are as a professional today?

Sample Answers to Problem-solving Questions

Below you will find some example questions. The examples are already written in STAR format so that you can clearly see how you can structure your answers. However, these are ‘general’ examples. Do not forget to structure your own answers in a way that includes enough detail to convince the interviewer that you’re the right person for the job!

Problem-Solving Example 1: ‘ Tell me about a time you had to resolve a disagreement with a coworker.’

‘Personally, I believe that communication is essential in such a situation to find a way that works for both of us. Finding a compromise is the main goal to get the work done to the best of our ability.

Task & Action

In my current position as a financial consultant, I encountered such a situation recently. A colleague disagreed with the way I wanted to handle an issue that we encountered along the way. To address this issue, I scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the situation. I asked him about his points of view and how he thought we should go about the project.

Even though we had differences in the way we felt like how the project should be approached, we quickly came to the conclusion that our goal was the same; providing our client with a high-quality final product within the set deadline.

We talked about the project and the specific aspect about which we had a difference. I explained my point of view and that I had already encountered a similar issue in the past. Ultimately, my colleague agreed to tackle the issue using my proposed method. His insights gave me a good suggestion which we incorporated into the project. After that, we successfully worked together and finalized the project in time and according to the quality level that we both were proud of.’

Why this is a strong answer:

• The provided example is concise and relevant to the workplace where problem-solving skills are important
• This answer shows important skills such as being proactive, problem-solving, persuasion, and adaptability .
• The answer shows that you’re a team player as well and that you listen to the input of others for the better of a project’s result.

Note : There’s always a chance that interviewers ask you follow-up questions about how you convinced your colleague. Make sure that you are able to answer those questions as well.

Problem-Solving Example 2: ‘ Tell me about a time you had to solve a challenging problem at work .’

‘In my position as a business development manager at ABC Software, I’m responsible for organizing all client events and conferences. ABC Software is a major player in the IT market, and during our events, we invite industry experts to speak on market developments. These events are used to attract new clients but also to maintain our relationship with our existing ones.

Over the last two years, we analyzed our attendee data and found that our event attendance dropped by almost 10%. Furthermore, we discovered that the retention rate of our clients also decreased. When we had to plan the next event, my team and I knew that we had to get our attendance levels back up in order for the events to stay successful. The goal was to get our networking event popular and recurring again.

I had an idea why the attendance levels dropped but to get more information, I interviewed several sales consultants as well. The main feedback was that we should focus more on attracting new clients through social media channels. I communicated this with our marketing team, and we decided to also reach out to our client base and ask them what they would like to see on our future events. This led to interesting new insights on topics and speakers that we could invite, plus we also received input on how to improve networking possibilities during our events. Based on our research and feedback, I created a new plan of action to market our events through our social media channels to increase exposure.

After launching our marketing campaign, we immediately gained online traction, leading to an increase in advance registrations. For that specific event, we saw a total increase in attendance of 20% in comparison to the previous year. An online survey showed that the attendees were happy with how the way the new event was structured, and 80% of respondents said that it would be likely that they would recommend our events within their network.

My approach to increasing attendance at our events did not go unnoticed. I was asked by my department director to make a presentation about how I tackled this problem and present this to the board.’

• This example shows that you can identify issues and understand your responsibility to address them.
• The provided example is related but also relevant to the workplace. It’s also concise, which is perfect.
• This answer shows important skills, such as being proactive, teamwork , adaptability , problem-solving skills, and creativity .
• Taking responsibility to find out why the event attendance dropped and subsequently taking action turned out successful gives more weight to the situation.

Problem Solving Example 3: ‘Describe a time a customer approached you with a problem or concern. How did you respond?’

‘In one instance, a customer came to me with an issue. She had recently purchased a product from our store, which broke shortly after she got it home. She was understandably upset and wanted to know what could be done.

In response, I apologized for any inconvenience and asked her to explain what had happened. After hearing her story, I promised to help her as much as possible. Next, I checked the item’s warranty status in our system.

I was able to offer her a replacement or a refund since the product was still under warranty , and I helped her find an identical item in our store and processed the exchange for her. The customer decided she wanted a replacement, so I explained our return policy to her in case this ever happened again in the future.

My customer thanked me for my help and seemed more satisfied at the end of the transaction; I was glad I was able to turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one.’

• This example shows that you understand what great customer service is.
• The provided example is concise and to the point; it describes a situation and the actions you took to resolve it.
• This answer shows essential skills, such as being proactive, customer service, and problem-solving skills.

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• 27 Supervisor Interview...

27 Supervisor Interview Questions (and Great Answers)

15 min read · Updated on October 23, 2023

From employee to supervisor – a major career milestone

Before you can take charge in a new supervisor role, you have to get through the interview - and the best way to prepare for your upcoming supervisor interview is to practice answering these 27 supervisor interview questions. We've prepared some great, job-winning answers that you can use as inspiration and tweak with your own career experience. 

The role of a supervisor

As you can expect, with such a major career transition comes a whole host of new responsibilities. As a supervisor, you'll play a pivotal role in making sure your team works the way they're supposed to and that company goals are met. You may find yourself wearing a lot of hats, including planner, motivator, communicator , and problem solver. This is especially true considering that you're the bridge that closes the gap between upper management and staff. 

Get ready for your interview

Before you can walk into the interview room, you have to prepare yourself. The interviewer will be on the lookout for key information that proves you have the knowledge and experience to succeed, but they'll also be watching for your ability to present yourself confidently and professionally. Here are a few things you need to do in advance of your supervisor interview:

Research the company to get to know about its culture and values

Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses

Get your opening statement ready

Practice your responses to boost your confidence

Develop some strategies, like taking deep breaths and positive affirmations, to handle the stress and calm your nerves

Participate in some mock interviews to get some feedback on your presentation

Check your body language – eye contact, firm handshake, and projecting confidence

27 Supervisor Interview Questions and Answers

Now that we've covered what to do before you step inside the interview room, it's time to dive into some sample interview questions for a supervisor role. 

Behavioral questions

Behavioral interview questions are the ones where the interviewer wants you to “tell me about a time when….” These are the open-ended questions that you can to use the STAR method to answer.

1. Describe a situation where you had to resolve a conflict among team members

“At ABC Company, I worked in a team of 10 people and three of them were constantly having conflicts. I sat down with them individually to find out what was going on and then had a group meeting to discuss company values and policies. In that group meeting, we hashed out some compromises that put the problems the three were having to bed. It was great because getting them to work together again without all the hostility improved the morale of the entire team.”

2. How do you handle underperforming employees, and can you provide an example?

“Of course, the first step is to find out why they are underperforming. It does no good to reprimand and threaten someone for underperforming if the root of the problem isn't fixed. While I'm not a Psychologist, I would try to help the employee to find a centered, more balanced approach to doing the work. Outside of that, I've found that setting clear goals and even providing additional training have helped a lot.”

3. Share an experience when you successfully implemented a new process or procedure

“When I worked at XYZ Corp, there were a lot of manual processes – from taking customer orders to purchasing. It was a pen-and-paper type of environment. I did some research and found an ERP system that allowed us to automate a lot of those processes. Team morale sky-rocketed, because jobs became easier, and we saved about $10K a month because purchasing was more accurate.”

4. Give an example of how you've motivated your team to achieve a specific goal

“Once we had that ERP system in place at XYZ Corp, I wanted to help the team get used to using it. So, I implemented a little friendly competition. Basically, whoever used the system the most, and did so with the fewest errors, would win a half day off work. This forced everyone to take the time to learn the system - some even did research about it on their own time.” 

5. Discuss a time when you had to make a tough decision under pressure

“Early in my career, there was an equipment failure that almost stopped production in its tracks. Of course, that would've meant major revenue loss. I got the team together to discuss the resources everyone had, based on their role in production, so I could figure out how to reallocate very limited funds to get the problem fixed without sacrificing safety or further damage to the machinery. The team and I came up with some temporary fixes while we waited for the repairs to be completed, which meant we were able to keep up with customer demand and minimize losses. The quick decisions I made got everything back up and running three days in advance of the deadline set by leadership.”

Leadership and management questions

Of course, you can expect that there will be some role-specific supervisor interview questions where the hiring manager wants to make sure that you know what will be required of you.

6. What is your leadership style, and how does it benefit your team?

“I've learned that the transformational leadership style serves me well. In the past, I've found that leading by example and building open relationships with staff has inspired them to strive for excellence. They want to know that they're being asked to do something that leadership does, too. It's also been a great way to inspire innovation, which leads to employees feeling a sense of ownership in the work they perform. This has, of course, had a profound impact on productivity and team morale.”

7. How do you handle a demanding boss or difficult situations with higher management?

“Through open communication, respect, and delicacy. A lot of it comes down to having well-researched and articulated solutions to issues that are causing the boss to be demanding. I analyze the situation and provide data and evidence to support any recommendations I make. I also take the time to highlight my team's achievements and contributions, so that higher management can feel assured that they're making the right decisions to remedy whatever is causing them to be demanding.”

8. What is the biggest responsibility of a supervisor regarding safety?

“It all comes down to the culture I create with my staff, so that they understand how important things like safety training and protocols are to maintaining safety. While I maintain the final decision on what constitutes a safe environment, I allow them to have some input on what they can do to make things safer. This gives them ownership and they're more likely to follow procedures.”

9. Differentiate between the roles of a supervisor and a manager

“As a supervisor, I understand that I'll have the duty of overseeing daily activities. I know I have to offer guidance and support to ensure that what needs to be done gets done. On the other hand, the managers are the ones who make the long-term plans and upper-level decisions that affect the broader aspects of achieving company goals.”

10. Provide an example of how you've fostered a culture of continuous improvement in the past and how productivity or efficiency was affected

“When I worked at XYZ Inc., our project team was running into a lot of bottlenecks in the project delivery process. So, I held a team meeting and encouraged them to challenge the status quo by brainstorming solutions. While some tried to adopt the this-is-the-way-we've-always-done-it mentality, others came up with ideas to streamline processes. We ended up adopting new software that automated some of the steps. The team members who helped to brainstorm the idea had an infectious attitude toward embracing the change, that brought the status quo folks over to the new way of doing things. In the end, we increased productivity by around 40%.”

Self-development questions

Continuous development is a big deal in today's work world. These questions will tell the interviewer if you're committed to the role and where you stand on keeping up with the times, going with the flow, and adapting to change.

11. How do you continuously improve your supervisory skills?

“I firmly believe in learning something new every day. It's the only way to keep up with the rapid changes occurring in this industry. I attend workshops and seminars and subscribe to industry newsletters. I keep in touch with people in my network, too. That's ultimately been my best source of new information.” 

12. What qualities do you believe an ideal supervisor should possess?

“The best supervisor leads by example. I don't feel it's right to ask someone else to do something I'm not willing to do myself. On top of that, fairness and empathy are also critical to building strong team morale. When the people who report to you feel like you're on their side, they're willing to work harder and are better at adapting to any changes that come down the pipeline.”

13. What makes you a good fit for the supervisor position?

“I have a history of motivating and guiding teams. In my previous roles, I received numerous accolades for the positive work environments I built. Those environments fostered a culture of innovation through strategic planning and open communication that facilitated future-facing problem-solving. I can certainly repeat that here.”

14. How do you handle stress, and what strategies do you use to stay calm under pressure?

“Mostly through deep breathing exercises. I know that most stress comes from within, so I take a moment to center myself before tackling major projects or problems. Once I find my zen, I approach situations with strategy – find out what's going on, brainstorm ways to fix the problem, and communicate the steps to my team. I've found that my ability to practice mindfulness has helped my team members to reduce their stress, too.”

15. What's your greatest weakness, and how do you manage it to be an effective supervisor?

“I have a tendency to be overly critical of myself. It's part of the reason that I've developed calming strategies and analytical tactics that help me to get through issues that come up. When I first realized I was too critical of myself, I sought out constructive feedback from peers and learned to set realistic expectations. This way, I shifted my focus to self-improvement and away from perceived shortcomings .”

16. Discuss your strengths as a supervisor

“I am really good at motivating my team. In fact, I've been able to guide lackadaisical staff members, who were only at work to collect a paycheck, to a place where they had a stronger sense of ownership in their role. This strength comes into play through my ability to set clearly defined goals and a vision for higher standards. I also encourage open communication and transparency that promotes a positive work culture .”

17. How has your supervision style changed over time?

“When I first started as a supervisor, I focused a lot on managing tasks. I learned that the best way to do that was to have a properly motivated team. Now, I place greater emphasis on open communication, feedback, and inclusion. This has allowed my teams to blossom into cohesive groups of people who take pride in their work and achieve objectives through collaboration.”

Personal questions

You can't do a job well unless you're passionate about it. Personal supervisor interview questions will take you on a journey through what makes you want the role. 

18. Why do you aspire to be a supervisor and what drives your interest in this role?

“I believe that a good supervisor is also a mentor and I am genuinely passionate about making a positive impact on the members of my team and the company as a whole. I love watching team members grow in their roles and, when I get to be a part of that by guiding them and inspiring them to be the best versions of themselves, I get a feeling of immense satisfaction.”

19. What are the three essential qualities of a supervisor and how do you exemplify them?

“It's simple, really. A good supervisor needs to know how to communicate effectively, they should be adaptable, and they should be able to motivate a team. The transformational leadership style that I've adopted during my career allows me to encourage innovation and provide opportunities for growth, which leads to team members feeling valued. That in and of itself increases productivity.” 

20. How do you make a strong impression as a supervisor?

“I can give you a one-word answer for this question – enthusiasm. I've found that enthusiasm is highly contagious. So, when I meet new team members, I make sure that they get a sense that I'm passionate about being their supervisor and welcome the opportunity to take them under my wing to help them grow professionally and personally.”

21. What are your salary requirements?

“While compensation is important, I'm more focused on aligning my skills with the requirements of the role. With that said, the research I've performed indicates that people with my skills and achievements earn $X per year. Online reviews indicated that your company offers a range of $Y-$Z for this position, is that right?”

Handling challenging scenarios

Can you handle stress ? Of course you can! Here are some pretty tough supervisor interview questions that you'll need to be ready to answer to prove it to the hiring manager.

22. What is your strategy for resolving issues with employees who resist change?

“By understanding that change can actually be scary for some people. The best course of action is to find out what's making the person resist the change. This involves open and empathetic communication to understand their concerns. After that, I give data-backed reasons for the change and talk about the benefits. If they need extra training to support their transition, then I make that available to them, too.”

23. How do you ensure effective communication within your team?

“When I worked at ABC Company, I started using Slack for digital collaboration. It was a great tool that allowed team members to engage in open communication – whether they were in the office or not – and gave me the opportunity to keep up with the status of ongoing projects. It ended up improving efficiency, because there were fewer emails to dig through and people could get answers to questions more quickly.”

24. What is your approach to performance evaluations and feedback?

“I believe feedback should be frequent and specific. Evaluations that are only done once per year are often seen as a chore for supervisors but, when you engage in regular feedback, problems are addressed quicker and staff members learn what they're doing right as projects progress. More frequent feedback also encourages accountability. When team members know that reviews are coming more often than annually, they tend to be more productive.”

25. How do you motivate underperforming team members?

“The most impactful method I've used to increase motivation is friendly competitions. I've also used brag boards that allow team members to gain recognition for work well done. No matter which method I use, though, I make sure that it's constructive because the overall goal is to improve confidence. When their confidence increases, their ability to perform goes up, too.”

26. How do you onboard new staff members?

“I have a very structured approach to welcoming new staff members to my team. It starts with introductions and an overview of expectations. I show how those expectations are aligned with company values and goals and make sure they have the tools they need to excel in their role. When I was at XYZ Inc., I created a mentorship program. It was highly successful, because it helped team members get to know each other and it shortened the learning curve for new staff. Plus, they felt supported and were ready to contribute from day one.”

27. Have you ever had to fire an employee?

“Yes, I've had to make the tough decision to let a staff member go. It wasn't an easy task, but I've learned that it's sometimes necessary, especially as it relates to the well-being of the team and the organization. I made sure to maintain a high level of empathy and respect, while following the company's established procedures. I also provided clear reasons for the termination and offered support to the team during the transition. At the end of the day, I was able to maintain a positive work environment and ensured that the team understood the importance of accountability and performance.”

Passionate about leadership

When you're passionate about being a good supervisor, your answers to supervisor questions will come easily. Especially if you remember that the focus should be on building relationships with team members, meeting company expectations and communicating effectively. 

Do you know how to articulate your leadership skills to answer supervisor interview questions? TopInterview can help you out and even run some mock interviews with you. 

Recommended reading:

How to Interview for a Management Position Without Experience

How to Prepare for a Promotion Interview

13 Great Interview Questions to Ask a Hiring Manager

Related Articles:

How to Prepare for a Software Engineering Job Interview

27 Financial Analyst Interview Questions (with Great Answers)

7 Common Interview Questions for an Executive Director and How to Answer Them

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• Data Science Interview Questions

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Introduction:

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that mines raw data, analyses it, and comes up with patterns that are used to extract valuable insights from it. Statistics, computer science, machine learning, deep learning, data analysis, data visualization, and various other technologies form the core foundation of data science.

Over the years, data science has gained widespread importance due to the importance of data. Data is considered the new oil of the future which when analyzed and harnessed properly can prove to be very beneficial to the stakeholders. Not just this, a data scientist gets exposure to work in diverse domains, solving real-life practical problems all by making use of trendy technologies. The most common real-time application is fast delivery of food in apps such as Uber Eats by aiding the delivery person to show the fastest possible route to reach the destination from the restaurant. 

Data Science is also used in item recommendation systems in e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart, etc which recommend the user what item they can buy based on their search history. Not just recommendation systems, Data Science is becoming increasingly popular in fraud detection applications to detect any fraud involved in credit-based financial applications. A successful data scientist can interpret data, perform innovation and bring out creativity while solving problems that help drive business and strategic goals. This makes it the most lucrative job of the 21st century.

In this article, we will explore what are the most commonly asked Data Science Technical Interview Questions which will help both aspiring and experienced data scientists.

Data Science Interview Questions for Freshers

Data science interview questions for experienced, frequently asked questions, data science mcq, 1. what is data science.

An interdisciplinary field that constitutes various scientific processes, algorithms, tools, and machine learning techniques working to help find common patterns and gather sensible insights from the given raw input data using statistical and mathematical analysis is called Data Science.

The following figure represents the life cycle of data science.

• It starts with gathering the business requirements and relevant data.
• Once the data is acquired, it is maintained by performing data cleaning, data warehousing, data staging, and data architecture.
• Data processing does the task of exploring the data, mining it, and analyzing it which can be finally used to generate the summary of the insights extracted from the data.
• Once the exploratory steps are completed, the cleansed data is subjected to various algorithms like predictive analysis, regression, text mining, recognition patterns, etc depending on the requirements.
• In the final stage, the results are communicated to the business in a visually appealing manner. This is where the skill of data visualization, reporting, and different business intelligence tools come into the picture. Learn More .

2. Define the terms KPI, lift, model fitting, robustness and DOE.

• KPI: KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator that measures how well the business achieves its objectives.
• Lift: This is a performance measure of the target model measured against a random choice model. Lift indicates how good the model is at prediction versus if there was no model.
• Model fitting: This indicates how well the model under consideration fits given observations.
• Robustness: This represents the system’s capability to handle differences and variances effectively.
• DOE: stands for the design of experiments, which represents the task design aiming to describe and explain information variation under hypothesized conditions to reflect variables.

3. What is the difference between data analytics and data science?

• Data science involves the task of transforming data by using various technical analysis methods to extract meaningful insights using which a data analyst can apply to their business scenarios.
• Data analytics deals with checking the existing hypothesis and information and answers questions for a better and effective business-related decision-making process.
• Data Science drives innovation by answering questions that build connections and answers for futuristic problems. Data analytics focuses on getting present meaning from existing historical context whereas data science focuses on predictive modeling.
• Data Science can be considered as a broad subject that makes use of various mathematical and scientific tools and algorithms for solving complex problems whereas data analytics can be considered as a specific field dealing with specific concentrated problems using fewer tools of statistics and visualization.

The following Venn diagram depicts the difference between data science and data analytics clearly:

4. What are some of the techniques used for sampling? What is the main advantage of sampling?

Data analysis can not be done on a whole volume of data at a time especially when it involves larger datasets. It becomes crucial to take some data samples that can be used for representing the whole population and then perform analysis on it. While doing this, it is very much necessary to carefully take sample data out of the huge data that truly represents the entire dataset.

There are majorly two categories of sampling techniques based on the usage of statistics, they are:

• Probability Sampling techniques: Clustered sampling, Simple random sampling, Stratified sampling.
• Non-Probability Sampling techniques: Quota sampling, Convenience sampling, snowball sampling, etc.

5. List down the conditions for Overfitting and Underfitting.

Overfitting: The model performs well only for the sample training data. If any new data is given as input to the model, it fails to provide any result. These conditions occur due to low bias and high variance in the model. Decision trees are more prone to overfitting.

Underfitting: Here, the model is so simple that it is not able to identify the correct relationship in the data, and hence it does not perform well even on the test data. This can happen due to high bias and low variance. Linear regression is more prone to Underfitting.

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6. differentiate between the long and wide format data..

The following image depicts the representation of wide format and long format data:

7. What are Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues?

Eigenvectors are column vectors or unit vectors whose length/magnitude is equal to 1. They are also called right vectors. Eigenvalues are coefficients that are applied on eigenvectors which give these vectors different values for length or magnitude.

A matrix can be decomposed into Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues and this process is called Eigen decomposition. These are then eventually used in machine learning methods like PCA (Principal Component Analysis) for gathering valuable insights from the given matrix.

8. What does it mean when the p-values are high and low?

A p-value is the measure of the probability of having results equal to or more than the results achieved under a specific hypothesis assuming that the null hypothesis is correct. This represents the probability that the observed difference occurred randomly by chance.

• Low p-value which means values ≤ 0.05 means that the null hypothesis can be rejected and the data is unlikely with true null.
• High p-value, i.e values ≥ 0.05 indicates the strength in favor of the null hypothesis. It means that the data is like with true null.
• p-value = 0.05 means that the hypothesis can go either way.

9. When is resampling done?

Resampling is a methodology used to sample data for improving accuracy and quantify the uncertainty of population parameters. It is done to ensure the model is good enough by training the model on different patterns of a dataset to ensure variations are handled. It is also done in the cases where models need to be validated using random subsets or when substituting labels on data points while performing tests.

10. What do you understand by Imbalanced Data?

Data is said to be highly imbalanced if it is distributed unequally across different categories. These datasets result in an error in model performance and result in inaccuracy.

11. Are there any differences between the expected value and mean value?

There are not many differences between these two, but it is to be noted that these are used in different contexts. The mean value generally refers to the probability distribution whereas the expected value is referred to in the contexts involving random variables.

12. What do you understand by Survivorship Bias?

This bias refers to the logical error while focusing on aspects that survived some process and overlooking those that did not work due to lack of prominence. This bias can lead to deriving wrong conclusions.

13. What is a Gradient and Gradient Descent?

Gradient: Gradient is the measure of a property that how much the output has changed with respect to a little change in the input. In other words, we can say that it is a measure of change in the weights with respect to the change in error. The gradient can be mathematically represented as the slope of a function.

Gradient Descent: Gradient descent is a minimization algorithm that minimizes the Activation function. Well, it can minimize any function given to it but it is usually provided with the activation function only. 

Gradient descent, as the name suggests means descent or a decrease in something. The analogy of gradient descent is often taken as a person climbing down a hill/mountain. The following is the equation describing what gradient descent means:

So, if a person is climbing down the hill, the next position that the climber has to come to is denoted by “b” in this equation. Then, there is a minus sign because it denotes the minimization (as gradient descent is a minimization algorithm). The Gamma is called a waiting factor and the remaining term which is the Gradient term itself shows the direction of the steepest descent. 

This situation can be represented in a graph as follows:

Here, we are somewhere at the “Initial Weights” and we want to reach the Global minimum. So, this minimization algorithm will help us do that.

14. Define confounding variables.

Confounding variables are also known as confounders. These variables are a type of extraneous variables that influence both independent and dependent variables causing spurious association and mathematical relationships between those variables that are associated but are not casually related to each other.

15. Define and explain selection bias?

The selection bias occurs in the case when the researcher has to make a decision on which participant to study. The selection bias is associated with those researches when the participant selection is not random. The selection bias is also called the selection effect. The selection bias is caused by as a result of the method of sample collection.

Four types of selection bias are explained below:

• Sampling Bias: As a result of a population that is not random at all, some members of a population have fewer chances of getting included than others, resulting in a biased sample. This causes a systematic error known as sampling bias.
• Time interval: Trials may be stopped early if we reach any extreme value but if all variables are similar invariance, the variables with the highest variance have a higher chance of achieving the extreme value.
• Data: It is when specific data is selected arbitrarily and the generally agreed criteria are not followed.
• Attrition: Attrition in this context means the loss of the participants. It is the discounting of those subjects that did not complete the trial.

16. Define bias-variance trade-off?

Let us first understand the meaning of bias and variance in detail:

Bias: It is a kind of error in a machine learning model when an ML Algorithm is oversimplified. When a model is trained, at that time it makes simplified assumptions so that it can easily understand the target function. Some algorithms that have low bias are Decision Trees, SVM, etc. On the other hand, logistic and linear regression algorithms are the ones with a high bias.

Variance: Variance is also a kind of error. It is introduced into an ML Model when an ML algorithm is made highly complex. This model also learns noise from the data set that is meant for training. It further performs badly on the test data set. This may lead to over lifting as well as high sensitivity.

When the complexity of a model is increased, a reduction in the error is seen. This is caused by the lower bias in the model. But, this does not happen always till we reach a particular point called the optimal point. After this point, if we keep on increasing the complexity of the model, it will be over lifted and will suffer from the problem of high variance. We can represent this situation with the help of a graph as shown below:

As you can see from the image above, before the optimal point, increasing the complexity of the model reduces the error (bias). However, after the optimal point, we see that the increase in the complexity of the machine learning model increases the variance.

Trade-off Of Bias And Variance: So, as we know that bias and variance, both are errors in machine learning models, it is very essential that any machine learning model has low variance as well as a low bias so that it can achieve good performance.

Let us see some examples. The K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm is a good example of an algorithm with low bias and high variance. This trade-off can easily be reversed by increasing the k value which in turn results in increasing the number of neighbours. This, in turn, results in increasing the bias and reducing the variance.

Another example can be the algorithm of a support vector machine. This algorithm also has a high variance and obviously, a low bias and we can reverse the trade-off by increasing the value of parameter C. Thus, increasing the C parameter increases the bias and decreases the variance.

So, the trade-off is simple. If we increase the bias, the variance will decrease and vice versa.

17. Define the confusion matrix?

It is a matrix that has 2 rows and 2 columns. It has 4 outputs that a binary classifier provides to it. It is used to derive various measures like specificity, error rate, accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and recall.

The test data set should contain the correct and predicted labels. The labels depend upon the performance. For instance, the predicted labels are the same if the binary classifier performs perfectly. Also, they match the part of observed labels in real-world scenarios. The four outcomes shown above in the confusion matrix mean the following:

• True Positive: This means that the positive prediction is correct.
• False Positive: This means that the positive prediction is incorrect.
• True Negative: This means that the negative prediction is correct.
• False Negative: This means that the negative prediction is incorrect.

The formulas for calculating basic measures that comes from the confusion matrix are:

• Error rate : (FP + FN)/(P + N)
• Accuracy : (TP + TN)/(P + N)
• Sensitivity = TP/P
• Specificity = TN/N
• Precision = TP/(TP + FP)
• F-Score  = (1 + b)(PREC.REC)/(b2 PREC + REC) Here, b is mostly 0.5 or 1 or 2.

In these formulas:

FP = false positive FN = false negative TP = true positive RN = true negative

Sensitivity is the measure of the True Positive Rate. It is also called recall. Specificity is the measure of the true negative rate. Precision is the measure of a positive predicted value. F-score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall.

18. What is logistic regression? State an example where you have recently used logistic regression.

Logistic Regression is also known as the logit model. It is a technique to predict the binary outcome from a linear combination of variables (called the predictor variables). 

For example , let us say that we want to predict the outcome of elections for a particular political leader. So, we want to find out whether this leader is going to win the election or not. So, the result is binary i.e. win (1) or loss (0). However, the input is a combination of linear variables like the money spent on advertising, the past work done by the leader and the party, etc. 

19. What is Linear Regression? What are some of the major drawbacks of the linear model?

Linear regression is a technique in which the score of a variable Y is predicted using the score of a predictor variable X. Y is called the criterion variable. Some of the drawbacks of Linear Regression are as follows:

• The assumption of linearity of errors is a major drawback.
• It cannot be used for binary outcomes. We have Logistic Regression for that.
• Overfitting problems are there that can’t be solved.

20. What is a random forest? Explain it’s working.

Classification is very important in machine learning. It is very important to know to which class does an observation belongs. Hence, we have various classification algorithms in machine learning like logistic regression, support vector machine, decision trees, Naive Bayes classifier, etc. One such classification technique that is near the top of the classification hierarchy is the random forest classifier. 

So, firstly we need to understand a decision tree before we can understand the random forest classifier and its works. So, let us say that we have a string as given below:

So, we have the string with 5 ones and 4 zeroes and we want to classify the characters of this string using their features. These features are colour (red or green in this case) and whether the observation (i.e. character) is underlined or not. Now, let us say that we are only interested in red and underlined observations. So, the decision tree would look something like this:

So, we started with the colour first as we are only interested in the red observations and we separated the red and the green-coloured characters. After that, the “No” branch i.e. the branch that had all the green coloured characters was not expanded further as we want only red-underlined characters. So, we expanded the “Yes” branch and we again got a “Yes” and a “No” branch based on the fact whether the characters were underlined or not. 

So, this is how we draw a typical decision tree. However, the data in real life is not this clean but this was just to give an idea about the working of the decision trees. Let us now move to the random forest.

Random Forest

It consists of a large number of decision trees that operate as an ensemble. Basically, each tree in the forest gives a class prediction and the one with the maximum number of votes becomes the prediction of our model. For instance, in the example shown below, 4 decision trees predict 1, and 2 predict 0. Hence, prediction 1 will be considered.

The underlying principle of a random forest is that several weak learners combine to form a keen learner. The steps to build a random forest are as follows:

• Build several decision trees on the samples of data and record their predictions.
• Each time a split is considered for a tree, choose a random sample of mm predictors as the split candidates out of all the pp predictors. This happens to every tree in the random forest.
• Apply the rule of thumb i.e. at each split m = p√m = p.
• Apply the predictions to the majority rule.

21. In a time interval of 15-minutes, the probability that you may see a shooting star or a bunch of them is 0.2. What is the percentage chance of you seeing at least one star shooting from the sky if you are under it for about an hour?

Let us say that Prob is the probability that we may see a minimum of one shooting star in 15 minutes.

So, Prob = 0.2

Now, the probability that we may not see any shooting star in the time duration of 15 minutes is = 1 - Prob

1-0.2 = 0.8

The probability that we may not see any shooting star for an hour is: 

= (1-Prob)(1-Prob)(1-Prob)*(1-Prob) = 0.8 * 0.8 * 0.8 * 0.8 = (0.8)⁴   ≈ 0.40

So, the probability that we will see one shooting star in the time interval of an hour is = 1-0.4 = 0.6

So, there are approximately 60% chances that we may see a shooting star in the time span of an hour.

22. What is deep learning? What is the difference between deep learning and machine learning?

Deep learning is a paradigm of machine learning. In deep learning,  multiple layers of processing are involved in order to extract high features from the data. The neural networks are designed in such a way that they try to simulate the human brain. 

Deep learning has shown incredible performance in recent years because of the fact that it shows great analogy with the human brain.

The difference between machine learning and deep learning is that deep learning is a paradigm or a part of machine learning that is inspired by the structure and functions of the human brain called the artificial neural networks. Learn More .

1. How are the time series problems different from other regression problems?

• Time series data can be thought of as an extension to linear regression which uses terms like autocorrelation, movement of averages for summarizing historical data of y-axis variables for predicting a better future.
• Forecasting and prediction is the main goal of time series problems where accurate predictions can be made but sometimes the underlying reasons might not be known.
• Having Time in the problem does not necessarily mean it becomes a time series problem. There should be a relationship between target and time for a problem to become a time series problem.
• The observations close to one another in time are expected to be similar to the ones far away which provide accountability for seasonality. For instance, today’s weather would be similar to tomorrow’s weather but not similar to weather from 4 months from today. Hence, weather prediction based on past data becomes a time series problem.

2. What are RMSE and MSE in a linear regression model?

RMSE: RMSE stands for Root Mean Square Error. In a linear regression model, RMSE is used to test the performance of the machine learning model. It is used to evaluate the data spread around the line of best fit. So, in simple words, it is used to measure the deviation of the residuals.

RMSE is calculated using the formula:

• Yi is the actual value of the output variable.
• Y(Cap) is the predicted value and,
• N is the number of data points.

MSE: Mean Squared Error is used to find how close is the line to the actual data. So, we make the difference in the distance of the data points from the line and the difference is squared. This is done for all the data points and the submission of the squared difference divided by the total number of data points gives us the Mean Squared Error (MSE).

So, if we are taking the squared difference of N data points and dividing the sum by N, what does it mean? Yes, it represents the average of the squared difference of a data point from the line i.e. the average of the squared difference between the actual and the predicted values. The formula for finding MSE is given below:

• Yi is the actual value of the output variable (the ith data point)
• Y(cap) is the predicted value and,
• N is the total number of data points.

So, RMSE is the square root of MSE .

3. What are Support Vectors in SVM (Support Vector Machine)?

In the above diagram, we can see that the thin lines mark the distance from the classifier to the closest data points (darkened data points). These are called support vectors. So, we can define the support vectors as the data points or vectors that are nearest (closest) to the hyperplane. They affect the position of the hyperplane. Since they support the hyperplane, they are known as support vectors.

4. So, you have done some projects in machine learning and data science and we see you are a bit experienced in the field. Let’s say your laptop’s RAM is only 4GB and you want to train your model on 10GB data set.

What will you do have you experienced such an issue before.

In such types of questions, we first need to ask what ML model we have to train. After that, it depends on whether we have to train a model based on Neural Networks or SVM.

The steps for Neural Networks are given below:

• The Numpy array can be used to load the entire data. It will never store the entire data, rather just create a mapping of the data.
• Now, in order to get some desired data, pass the index into the NumPy Array.
• This data can be used to pass as an input to the neural network maintaining a small batch size.

The steps for SVM are given below:

• For SVM, small data sets can be obtained. This can be done by dividing the big data set.
• The subset of the data set can be obtained as an input if using the partial fit function.
• Repeat the step of using the partial fit method for other subsets as well.

Now, you may describe the situation if you have faced such an issue in your projects or working in machine learning/ data science.

5. Explain Neural Network Fundamentals.

In the human brain, different neurons are present. These neurons combine and perform various tasks. The Neural Network in deep learning tries to imitate human brain neurons. The neural network learns the patterns from the data and uses the knowledge that it gains from various patterns to predict the output for new data, without any human assistance.

A perceptron is the simplest neural network that contains a single neuron that performs 2 functions. The first function is to perform the weighted sum of all the inputs and the second is an activation function.

There are some other neural networks that are more complicated. Such networks consist of the following three layers:

• Input Layer: The neural network has the input layer to receive the input.
• Hidden Layer: There can be multiple hidden layers between the input layer and the output layer. The initially hidden layers are used for detecting the low-level patterns whereas the further layers are responsible for combining output from previous layers to find more patterns.
• Output Layer: This layer outputs the prediction.

An example neural network image is shown below:

6. What is Generative Adversarial Network?

This approach can be understood with the famous example of the wine seller. Let us say that there is a wine seller who has his own shop. This wine seller purchases wine from the dealers who sell him the wine at a low cost so that he can sell the wine at a high cost to the customers. Now, let us say that the dealers whom he is purchasing the wine from, are selling him fake wine. They do this as the fake wine costs way less than the original wine and the fake and the real wine are indistinguishable to a normal consumer (customer in this case). The shop owner has some friends who are wine experts and he sends his wine to them every time before keeping the stock for sale in his shop. So, his friends, the wine experts, give him feedback that the wine is probably fake. Since the wine seller has been purchasing the wine for a long time from the same dealers, he wants to make sure that their feedback is right before he complains to the dealers about it. Now, let us say that the dealers also have got a tip from somewhere that the wine seller is suspicious of them.

So, in this situation, the dealers will try their best to sell the fake wine whereas the wine seller will try his best to identify the fake wine. Let us see this with the help of a diagram shown below:

From the image above, it is clear that a noise vector is entering the generator (dealer) and he generates the fake wine and the discriminator has to distinguish between the fake wine and real wine. This is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).

In a GAN, there are 2 main components viz. Generator and Discrminator. So, the generator is a CNN that keeps producing images and the discriminator tries to identify the real images from the fake ones. 

7. What is a computational graph?

A computational graph is also known as a “Dataflow Graph”. Everything in the famous deep learning library TensorFlow is based on the computational graph. The computational graph in Tensorflow has a network of nodes where each node operates. The nodes of this graph represent operations and the edges represent tensors.

8. What are auto-encoders?

Auto-encoders are learning networks. They transform inputs into outputs with minimum possible errors. So, basically, this means that the output that we want should be almost equal to or as close as to input as follows. 

Multiple layers are added between the input and the output layer and the layers that are in between the input and the output layer are smaller than the input layer. It received unlabelled input. This input is encoded to reconstruct the input later.

9. What are Exploding Gradients and Vanishing Gradients?

• Exploding Gradients: Let us say that you are training an RNN. Say, you saw exponentially growing error gradients that accumulate, and as a result of this, very large updates are made to the neural network model weights. These exponentially growing error gradients that update the neural network weights to a great extent are called Exploding Gradients .
• Vanishing Gradients: Let us say again, that you are training an RNN. Say, the slope became too small. This problem of the slope becoming too small is called Vanishing Gradient . It causes a major increase in the training time and causes poor performance and extremely low accuracy.

10. What is the p-value and what does it indicate in the Null Hypothesis?

P-value is a number that ranges from 0 to 1. In a hypothesis test in statistics, the p-value helps in telling us how strong the results are. The claim that is kept for experiment or trial is called Null Hypothesis.

• A low p-value i.e. p-value less than or equal to 0.05 indicates the strength of the results against the Null Hypothesis which in turn means that the Null Hypothesis can be rejected. 
• A high p-value i.e. p-value greater than 0.05 indicates the strength of the results in favour of the Null Hypothesis i.e. for the Null Hypothesis which in turn means that the Null Hypothesis can be accepted.

11. Since you have experience in the deep learning field, can you tell us why TensorFlow is the most preferred library in deep learning?

Tensorflow is a very famous library in deep learning. The reason is pretty simple actually. It provides C++ as well as Python APIs which makes it very easier to work on. Also, TensorFlow has a fast compilation speed as compared to Keras and Torch (other famous deep learning libraries). Apart from that, Tenserflow supports both GPU and CPU computing devices. Hence, it is a major success and a very popular library for deep learning.

12. Suppose there is a dataset having variables with missing values of more than 30%, how will you deal with such a dataset?

Depending on the size of the dataset, we follow the below ways:

• In case the datasets are small, the missing values are substituted with the mean or average of the remaining data. In pandas, this can be done by using mean = df.mean() where df represents the pandas dataframe representing the dataset and mean() calculates the mean of the data. To substitute the missing values with the calculated mean, we can use df.fillna(mean) .
• For larger datasets, the rows with missing values can be removed and the remaining data can be used for data prediction.

13. What is Cross-Validation?

Cross-Validation is a Statistical technique used for improving a model’s performance. Here, the model will be trained and tested with rotation using different samples of the training dataset to ensure that the model performs well for unknown data. The training data will be split into various groups and the model is run and validated against these groups in rotation.

The most commonly used techniques are:

• K- Fold method
• Leave p-out method
• Leave-one-out method
• Holdout method

14. What are the differences between correlation and covariance?

Although these two terms are used for establishing a relationship and dependency between any two random variables, the following are the differences between them:

• Correlation: This technique is used to measure and estimate the quantitative relationship between two variables and is measured in terms of how strong are the variables related.
• Covariance: It represents the extent to which the variables change together in a cycle. This explains the systematic relationship between pair of variables where changes in one affect changes in another variable.

Mathematically, consider 2 random variables, X and Y where the means are represented as  μ X {"detectHand":false}  and  μ Y {"detectHand":false}  respectively and standard deviations are represented by  σ X {"detectHand":false}  and  σ Y {"detectHand":false}  respectively and E represents the expected value operator, then:

• covarianceXY = E[(X- μ X {"detectHand":false} ),(Y- μ Y {"detectHand":false} )]
• correlationXY = E[(X- μ X {"detectHand":false} ),(Y- μ Y {"detectHand":false} )]/( σ X {"detectHand":false} σ Y {"detectHand":false} ) so that

Based on the above formula, we can deduce that the correlation is dimensionless whereas covariance is represented in units that are obtained from the multiplication of units of two variables.

The following image graphically shows the difference between correlation and covariance:

15. How do you approach solving any data analytics based project?

Generally, we follow the below steps:

• The first step is to thoroughly understand the business requirement/problem
• Next, explore the given data and analyze it carefully. If you find any data missing, get the requirements clarified from the business.
• Data cleanup and preparation step is to be performed next which is then used for modelling. Here, the missing values are found and the variables are transformed.
• Run your model against the data, build meaningful visualization and analyze the results to get meaningful insights.
• Release the model implementation, and track the results and performance over a specified period to analyze the usefulness.
• Perform cross-validation of the model.

Check out the list of data analytics projects .

16. How regularly must we update an algorithm in the field of machine learning?

We do not want to update and make changes to an algorithm on a regular basis as an algorithm is a well-defined step procedure to solve any problem and if the steps keep on updating, it cannot be said well defined anymore. Also, this brings in a lot of problems to the systems already implementing the algorithm as it becomes difficult to bring in continuous and regular changes. So, we should update an algorithm only in any of the following cases:

• If you want the model to evolve as data streams through infrastructure, it is fair to make changes to an algorithm and update it accordingly.
• If the underlying data source is changing, it almost becomes necessary to update the algorithm accordingly.
• If there is a case of non-stationarity, we may update the algorithm.
• One of the most important reasons for updating any algorithm is its underperformance and lack of efficiency. So, if an algorithm lacks efficiency or underperforms it should be either replaced by some better algorithm or it must be updated.

17. Why do we need selection bias?

Selection Bias happens in cases where there is no randomization specifically achieved while picking a part of the dataset for analysis. This bias tells that the sample analyzed does not represent the whole population meant to be analyzed.

• For example, in the below image, we can see that the sample that we selected does not entirely represent the whole population that we have. This helps us to question whether we have selected the right data for analysis or not.

18. Why is data cleaning crucial? How do you clean the data?

While running an algorithm on any data, to gather proper insights, it is very much necessary to have correct and clean data that contains only relevant information. Dirty data most often results in poor or incorrect insights and predictions which can have damaging effects.

For example, while launching any big campaign to market a product, if our data analysis tells us to target a product that in reality has no demand and if the campaign is launched, it is bound to fail. This results in a loss of the company’s revenue. This is where the importance of having proper and clean data comes into the picture.

• Data Cleaning of the data coming from different sources helps in data transformation and results in the data where the data scientists can work on.
• Properly cleaned data increases the accuracy of the model and provides very good predictions.
• If the dataset is very large, then it becomes cumbersome to run data on it. The data cleanup step takes a lot of time (around 80% of the time) if the data is huge. It cannot be incorporated with running the model. Hence, cleaning data before running the model, results in increased speed and efficiency of the model.
• Data cleaning helps to identify and fix any structural issues in the data. It also helps in removing any duplicates and helps to maintain the consistency of the data.

The following diagram represents the advantages of data cleaning:

19. What are the available feature selection methods for selecting the right variables for building efficient predictive models?

While using a dataset in data science or machine learning algorithms, it so happens that not all the variables are necessary and useful to build a model. Smarter feature selection methods are required to avoid redundant models to increase the efficiency of our model. Following are the three main methods in feature selection:

• These methods pick up only the intrinsic properties of features that are measured via univariate statistics and not cross-validated performance. They are straightforward and are generally faster and require less computational resources when compared to wrapper methods.
• There are various filter methods such as the Chi-Square test, Fisher’s Score method, Correlation Coefficient, Variance Threshold, Mean Absolute Difference (MAD) method, Dispersion Ratios, etc.

• These methods need some sort of method to search greedily on all possible feature subsets, access their quality by learning and evaluating a classifier with the feature.
• The selection technique is built upon the machine learning algorithm on which the given dataset needs to fit.
• Forward Selection: Here, one feature is tested at a time and new features are added until a good fit is obtained.
• Backward Selection: Here, all the features are tested and the non-fitting ones are eliminated one by one to see while checking which works better.
• Recursive Feature Elimination: The features are recursively checked and evaluated how well they perform.
• These methods are generally computationally intensive and require high-end resources for analysis. But these methods usually lead to better predictive models having higher accuracy than filter methods.

• Embedded methods constitute the advantages of both filter and wrapper methods by including feature interactions while maintaining reasonable computational costs.
• These methods are iterative as they take each model iteration and carefully extract features contributing to most of the training in that iteration.
• Examples of embedded methods: LASSO Regularization (L1), Random Forest Importance.

20. During analysis, how do you treat the missing values?

To identify the extent of missing values, we first have to identify the variables with the missing values. Let us say a pattern is identified. The analyst should now concentrate on them as it could lead to interesting and meaningful insights. However, if there are no patterns identified, we can substitute the missing values with the median or mean values or we can simply ignore the missing values. 

If the variable is categorical, the common strategies for handling missing values include:

• Assigning a New Category: You can assign a new category, such as "Unknown" or "Other," to represent the missing values.
• Mode imputation: You can replace missing values with the mode, which represents the most frequent category in the variable.
• Using a Separate Category: If the missing values carry significant information, you can create a separate category to indicate missing values.

It's important to select an appropriate strategy based on the nature of the data and the potential impact on subsequent analysis or modelling.

If 80% of the values are missing for a particular variable, then we would drop the variable instead of treating the missing values.

21. Will treating categorical variables as continuous variables result in a better predictive model?

Yes! A categorical variable is a variable that can be assigned to two or more categories with no definite category ordering. Ordinal variables are similar to categorical variables with proper and clear ordering defines. So, if the variable is ordinal, then treating the categorical value as a continuous variable will result in better predictive models.

22. How will you treat missing values during data analysis?

The impact of missing values can be known after identifying what type of variables have missing values.

• If the data analyst finds any pattern in these missing values, then there are chances of finding meaningful insights.
• In case of patterns are not found, then these missing values can either be ignored or can be replaced with default values such as mean, minimum, maximum, or median values.
• Assigning a new category: You can assign a new category, such as "Unknown" or "Other," to represent the missing values.
• Using a separate category : If the missing values carry significant information, you can create a separate category to indicate the missing values. It's important to select an appropriate strategy based on the nature of the data and the potential impact on subsequent analysis or modelling.
• If 80% of values are missing, then it depends on the analyst to either replace them with default values or drop the variables.

23. What does the ROC Curve represent and how to create it?

ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curve is a graphical representation of the contrast between false-positive rates and true positive rates at different thresholds. The curve is used as a proxy for a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity.

The ROC curve is created by plotting values of true positive rates (TPR or sensitivity) against false-positive rates (FPR or (1-specificity)) TPR represents the proportion of observations correctly predicted as positive out of overall positive observations. The FPR represents the proportion of observations incorrectly predicted out of overall negative observations. Consider the example of medical testing, the TPR represents the rate at which people are correctly tested positive for a particular disease.

24. What are the differences between univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis?

Statistical analyses are classified based on the number of variables processed at a given time.

25. What is the difference between the Test set and validation set?

The test set is used to test or evaluate the performance of the trained model. It evaluates the predictive power of the model. The validation set is part of the training set that is used to select parameters for avoiding model overfitting.

26. What do you understand by a kernel trick?

Kernel functions are generalized dot product functions used for the computing dot product of vectors xx and yy in high dimensional feature space. Kernal trick method is used for solving a non-linear problem by using a linear classifier by transforming linearly inseparable data into separable ones in higher dimensions.

27. Differentiate between box plot and histogram.

Box plots and histograms are both visualizations used for showing data distributions for efficient communication of information. Histograms are the bar chart representation of information that represents the frequency of numerical variable values that are useful in estimating probability distribution, variations and outliers. Boxplots are used for communicating different aspects of data distribution where the shape of the distribution is not seen but still the insights can be gathered. These are useful for comparing multiple charts at the same time as they take less space when compared to histograms.

28. How will you balance/correct imbalanced data?

There are different techniques to correct/balance imbalanced data. It can be done by increasing the sample numbers for minority classes. The number of samples can be decreased for those classes with extremely high data points. Following are some approaches followed to balance data:

• Specificity/Precision: Indicates the number of selected instances that are relevant.
• Sensitivity: Indicates the number of relevant instances that are selected.
• F1 score: It represents the harmonic mean of precision and sensitivity.
• MCC (Matthews correlation coefficient): It represents the correlation coefficient between observed and predicted binary classifications.
• AUC (Area Under the Curve): This represents a relation between the true positive rates and false-positive rates.

For example, consider the below graph that illustrates training data:

Here, if we measure the accuracy of the model in terms of getting "0"s, then the accuracy of the model would be very high -> 99.9%, but the model does not guarantee any valuable information. In such cases, we can apply different evaluation metrics as stated above.

• Under-sampling This balances the data by reducing the size of the abundant class and is used when the data quantity is sufficient. By performing this, a new dataset that is balanced can be retrieved and this can be used for further modeling.
• Over-sampling This is used when data quantity is not sufficient. This method balances the dataset by trying to increase the samples size. Instead of getting rid of extra samples, new samples are generated and introduced by employing the methods of repetition, bootstrapping, etc.
• Perform K-fold cross-validation correctly: Cross-Validation needs to be applied properly while using over-sampling. The cross-validation should be done before over-sampling because if it is done later, then it would be like overfitting the model to get a specific result. To avoid this, resampling of data is done repeatedly with different ratios. 

29. What is better - random forest or multiple decision trees?

Random forest is better than multiple decision trees as random forests are much more robust, accurate, and lesser prone to overfitting as it is an ensemble method that ensures multiple weak decision trees learn strongly.

30. Consider a case where you know the probability of finding at least one shooting star in a 15-minute interval is 30%. Evaluate the probability of finding at least one shooting star in a one-hour duration?

So the probability is 0.8628 = 86.28%

31. Toss the selected coin 10 times from a jar of 1000 coins. Out of 1000 coins, 999 coins are fair and 1 coin is double-headed, assume that you see 10 heads. Estimate the probability of getting a head in the next coin toss.

We know that there are two types of coins - fair and double-headed. Hence, there are two possible ways of choosing a coin. The first is to choose a fair coin and the second is to choose a coin having 2 heads.

P(selecting fair coin) = 999/1000 = 0.999 P(selecting double headed coin) = 1/1000 = 0.001

Using Bayes rule,

So, the answer is 0.7531 or 75.3%.

32. What are some examples when false positive has proven important than false negative?

Before citing instances, let us understand what are false positives and false negatives.

• False Positives are those cases that were wrongly identified as an event even if they were not. They are called Type I errors.
• False Negatives are those cases that were wrongly identified as non-events despite being an event. They are called Type II errors.

Some examples where false positives were important than false negatives are:

• In the medical field: Consider that a lab report has predicted cancer to a patient even if he did not have cancer. This is an example of a false positive error. It is dangerous to start chemotherapy for that patient as he doesn’t have cancer as starting chemotherapy would lead to damage of healthy cells and might even actually lead to cancer.
• In the e-commerce field: Suppose a company decides to start a campaign where they give $100 gift vouchers for purchasing $10000 worth of items without any minimum purchase conditions. They assume it would result in at least 20% profit for items sold above $10000. What if the vouchers are given to the customers who haven’t purchased anything but have been mistakenly marked as those who purchased $10000 worth of products. This is the case of false-positive error.

33. Give one example where both false positives and false negatives are important equally?

In Banking fields: Lending loans are the main sources of income to the banks. But if the repayment rate isn’t good, then there is a risk of huge losses instead of any profits. So giving out loans to customers is a gamble as banks can’t risk losing good customers but at the same time, they can’t afford to acquire bad customers. This case is a classic example of equal importance in false positive and false negative scenarios.

34. Is it good to do dimensionality reduction before fitting a Support Vector Model?

If the features number is greater than observations then doing dimensionality reduction improves the SVM (Support Vector Model).

35. What are various assumptions used in linear regression? What would happen if they are violated?

Linear regression is done under the following assumptions:

• The sample data used for modeling represents the entire population.
• There exists a linear relationship between the X-axis variable and the mean of the Y variable.
• The residual variance is the same for any X values. This is called homoscedasticity
• The observations are independent of one another.
• Y is distributed normally for any value of X.

Extreme violations of the above assumptions lead to redundant results. Smaller violations of these result in greater variance or bias of the estimates.

36. How is feature selection performed using the regularization method?

The method of regularization entails the addition of penalties to different parameters in the machine learning model for reducing the freedom of the model to avoid the issue of overfitting. There are various regularization methods available such as linear model regularization, Lasso/L1 regularization, etc. The linear model regularization applies penalty over coefficients that multiplies the predictors. The Lasso/L1 regularization has the feature of shrinking some coefficients to zero, thereby making it eligible to be removed from the model.

37. How do you identify if a coin is biased?

To identify this, we perform a hypothesis test as below: According to the null hypothesis, the coin is unbiased if the probability of head flipping is 50%. According to the alternative hypothesis, the coin is biased and the probability is not equal to 500. Perform the below steps:

• Flip coin 500 times
• Calculate p-value.
• p-value > alpha: Then null hypothesis holds good and the coin is unbiased.
• p-value < alpha: Then the null hypothesis is rejected and the coin is biased.

38. What is the importance of dimensionality reduction?

The process of dimensionality reduction constitutes reducing the number of features in a dataset to avoid overfitting and reduce the variance. There are mostly 4 advantages of this process:

• This reduces the storage space and time for model execution.
• Removes the issue of multi-collinearity thereby improving the parameter interpretation of the ML model.
• Makes it easier for visualizing data when the dimensions are reduced.
• Avoids the curse of increased dimensionality.

39. How is the grid search parameter different from the random search tuning strategy?

Tuning strategies are used to find the right set of hyperparameters. Hyperparameters are those properties that are fixed and model-specific before the model is tested or trained on the dataset. Both the grid search and random search tuning strategies are optimization techniques to find efficient hyperparameters.

• Here, every combination of a preset list of hyperparameters is tried out and evaluated.
• The search pattern is similar to searching in a grid where the values are in a matrix and a search is performed. Each parameter set is tried out and their accuracy is tracked. after every combination is tried out, the model with the highest accuracy is chosen as the best one.
• The main drawback here is that, if the number of hyperparameters is increased, the technique suffers. The number of evaluations can increase exponentially with each increase in the hyperparameter. This is called the problem of dimensionality in a grid search.

• In this technique, random combinations of hyperparameters set are tried and evaluated for finding the best solution. For optimizing the search, the function is tested at random configurations in parameter space as shown in the image below.
• In this method, there are increased chances of finding optimal parameters because the pattern followed is random. There are chances that the model is trained on optimized parameters without the need for aliasing.
• This search works the best when there is a lower number of dimensions as it takes less time to find the right set.

Conclusion:

Data Science is a very vast field and comprises many topics like Data Mining, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and most importantly it is laid on the foundation of mathematical concepts like Linear Algebra and Statistical analysis. Since there are a lot of pre-requisites for becoming a good professional Data Scientist, the perks and benefits are very big. Data Scientist has become the most sought job role these days. 

Looking for a comprehensive course on Data Science: Check out Scaler’s Data Science Course .

Useful Resources:

• Best Data Science Courses
• Python Data Science Interview Questions
• Google Data Scientist Salary
• Spotify Data Scientist Salary
• Data Scientist Salary
• Data Science Resume
• Data Analyst: Career Guide
• Tableau Interview
• Additional Technical Interview Questions

1. How do I prepare for a data science interview?

Some of the preparation tips for data science interviews are as follows:

• Resume Building: Firstly, prepare your resume well. It is preferable if the resume is only a 1-page resume, especially for a fresher. You should give great thought to the format of the resume as it matters a lot. The data science interviews can be based more on the topics like linear and logistic regression, SVM, root cause analysis, random forest, etc. So, prepare well for the data science-specific questions like those discussed in this article, make sure your resume has a mention of such important topics and you have a good knowledge of them. Also, please make sure that your resume contains some Data Science-based Projects as well. It is always better to have a group project or internship experience in the field that you are interested to go for. However, personal projects will also have a good impact on the resume. So, your resume should contain at least 2-3 data science-based projects that show your skill and knowledge level in data science. Please do not write any such skill in your resume that you do not possess. If you are just familiar with some technology and have not studied it at an advanced level, you can mention a beginner tag for those skills.
• Prepare Well: Apart from the specific questions on data science, questions on Core subjects like Database Management systems (DBMS), Operating Systems (OS), Computer Networks(CN), and Object-Oriented Programming (OOPS) can be asked from the freshers especially. So, prepare well for that as well.
• Data structures and Algorithms are the basic building blocks of programming. So, you should be well versed with that as well.
• Research the Company: This is the tip that most people miss and it is very important. If you are going for an interview with any company, read about the company before and especially in the case of data science, learn which libraries the company uses, what kind of models are they building, and so on. This gives you an edge over most other people.

2. Are data science interviews hard?

An honest reply will be “YES”. This is because of the fact that this field is newly emerging and will keep on emerging forever. In almost every interview, you have to answer many tough and challenging questions with full confidence and your concepts should be strong to satisfy the interviewer. However, with great practice, anything can be achieved. So, follow the tips discussed above and keep practising and learning. You will definitely succeed.

3. What are the top 3 technical skills of a data scientist?

The top 3 skills of a data scientist are:

• Mathematics: Data science requires a lot of mathematics and a good data scientist is strong in it. It is not possible to become a good data scientist if you are weak in mathematics.
• Machine Learning and Deep Learning : A data scientist should be very skilled in Artificial Intelligence technologies like deep learning and machine learning. Some good projects and a lot of hands-on practice will help in achieving excellence in that field.
• Programming: This is an obvious yet the most important skill. If a person is good at programming it does mean that he/she can solve complex problems as that is just a problem-solving skill. Programming is the ability to write clean and industry-understandable code. This is the skill that most freshers slack because of the lack of exposure to industry-level code. This also improves with practice and experience. 

4. Is data science a good career?

Yes, data science is one of the most futuristic and great career fields. Today and tomorrow or even years later, this field is just going to expand and never end. The reason is simple. Data can be compared to gold today as it is the key to selling everything in the world. Data scientists know how to play with this data to generate some tremendous outputs that are not even imaginable today making it a great career.

5. Are coding questions asked in data science interviews?

Yes, coding questions are asked in data science interviews. One more important thing to note here is that the data scientists are very good problem solvers as they are indulged in a lot of strict mathematics-based activities. Hence, the interviewer expects the data science interview candidates to know data structures and algorithms and at least come up with the solutions to most of the problems.

6. Is python and SQL enough for data science?

Yes. Python and SQL are sufficient for the data science roles. However, knowing the R programming Language can have also have a better impact. If you know these 3 languages, you have got the edge over most of the competitors. However, Python and SQL are enough for data science interviews.

7. What are Data Science tools?

There are various data science tools available in the market nowadays. Various tools can be of great importance. Tensorflow is one of the most famous data science tools. Some of the other famous tools are BigML, SAS (Statistical Analysis System), Knime, Scikit, Pytorch, etc.

Which among the below is NOT a necessary condition for weakly stationary time series data?

Overfitting more likely occurs when there is a huge data amount to train. True or False?

Given the information that the demand is 100 in October 2020, 150 in November 2020, 350 during December 2020 and 400 during January 2021. Calculate a 3-month simple moving average for February 2021.

Which of the below method depicts hierarchical data in nested format?

Which among the following defines the analysis of data objects not complying with general data behaviour?

What does a linear equation having 3 variables represent?

What would be the formula representation of this problem in terms of x and y variables: “The price of 2 pens and 1 pencil as 10 units”?

Which among the below is true regarding hypothesis testing?

What are the model parameters that are used to build ML models using iterative methods under model-based learning methods?

What skills are necessary for a Data Scientist?

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how do you handle stress interview question

How Do You Handle Stress?' Interview Question with These Proven Techniques

Published on June 30th, 2024

One of the most common and challenging questions you may face in an interview is, "How do you handle stress?" This question is crucial as it provides insight into your ability to manage pressure and maintain productivity under difficult circumstances. It's essential to prepare a well-thought-out answer to showcase your skills and reassure potential employers.

To help you craft the perfect response, we’ve developed a tool that calculates the effectiveness of your answers to stress management questions. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to ace this interview question.

Understanding the Question

Why employers ask this question.

Employers ask, "How do you handle stress?" to gauge your emotional intelligence and ability to remain effective when faced with challenging situations. It helps them understand:

• Your self-awareness regarding stress triggers.
• Your problem-solving skills under pressure.
• Your ability to stay calm and maintain productivity.

What They Are Looking For

Employers look for candidates who can:

• Recognize stress and understand its impact.
• Employ strategies to manage and mitigate stress effectively.
• Maintain a positive attitude and continue performing well despite stress.

Preparing Your Answer

Assessing your own stress management techniques.

Reflect on your past experiences where you successfully handled stress. Consider the strategies you used and how they helped you overcome challenges. This self-assessment will provide a foundation for a compelling answer.

Reflecting on Past Experiences

Think of specific instances where you managed stress effectively. Consider situations from different aspects of your life, such as:

• Work-related stressors.
• Academic pressures.
• Personal challenges.

Structuring Your Answer

The star method: situation, task, action, result.

Using the STAR method ensures your answer is structured and comprehensive:

• Situation: Describe the context of the stressful situation.
• Task: Explain the task or challenge you faced.
• Action: Detail the actions you took to manage the stress.
• Result: Share the outcome of your actions and how it benefited the situation.

Example of a Well-Structured Answer Using the STAR Method

Situation: "In my previous job as a project manager, we faced an unexpected delay in a critical project phase due to a vendor issue."

Task: "I needed to ensure the project stayed on track despite the delay."

Action: "I organized an emergency team meeting, delegated tasks efficiently, and negotiated an expedited timeline with the vendor. I also kept the client informed and managed their expectations."

Result: "We completed the project on time, and the client was impressed with our handling of the situation. This experience strengthened our relationship with the client and highlighted my ability to manage stress effectively."

Tips for a Strong Response

Be honest but positive.

While honesty is crucial, focus on the positive aspects of your stress management. Avoid emphasizing negative emotions or outcomes.

Focus on Specific Examples

Concrete examples make your answer more relatable and credible. Highlighting real-life situations demonstrates your practical experience.

Highlight Your Problem-Solving Skills

Employers value candidates who can think critically and solve problems under pressure. Emphasize your problem-solving abilities in your response.

Show How You Stay Productive Under Pressure

Discuss how you maintain productivity and efficiency even when stressed. This reassures employers that you can deliver results regardless of the circumstances.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Avoiding vague responses.

General statements like "I handle stress well" are not enough. Provide detailed examples to support your claims.

Not Giving Specific Examples

Specificity adds credibility to your answer. Without examples, your response may seem insincere or unconvincing.

Overly Negative or Overly Positive Answers

Avoid focusing too much on the negatives of stress or presenting an unrealistically positive outlook. Balance your answer to reflect a realistic and constructive approach to stress management.

Sample Answers

Example answer for a high-stress situation.

"In my previous role as a customer service manager, we experienced a sudden spike in call volume due to a product recall. I quickly organized a team meeting to prioritize tasks and allocate resources effectively. By implementing a triage system and providing additional training, we managed the increased workload efficiently, maintained customer satisfaction, and met our service targets."

Example Answer for Daily Work Pressures

"Daily work pressures are inevitable, but I handle them by staying organized and maintaining a clear focus on priorities. I use task management tools to keep track of my responsibilities and take short breaks to recharge. This approach helps me stay productive and reduce stress throughout the day."

Example Answer for Unexpected Stressors

"When faced with unexpected stressors, I remain calm and assess the situation objectively. For instance, when a key team member fell ill before a major presentation, I quickly reassigned tasks, adjusted our timeline, and personally took on additional responsibilities to ensure the presentation went smoothly. This experience reinforced my ability to adapt and perform under pressure."

Tailoring Your Answer for Different Roles

Customizing responses for different industries.

Different industries may have unique stressors and expectations. Tailor your answer to reflect the specific challenges and demands of the role you are applying for:

• Nursing: Highlight your ability to manage high-pressure situations and provide quality patient care.
• IT: Focus on problem-solving skills and handling technical issues efficiently.
• Management: Emphasize leadership skills and the ability to maintain team morale under pressure.

Practicing Your Answer

Practicing your answer helps you refine your response and deliver it confidently. Rehearse with a friend or in front of a mirror to ensure you are comfortable and natural.

Our AI Answer Generator tool can help you evaluate and improve your answer to the stress management question. The tool analyzes your response and provides feedback on areas to enhance, ensuring your answer is compelling and effective.

Handling stress effectively is a vital skill in today's fast-paced work environment. By preparing a well-structured and thoughtful answer to the "How do you handle stress?" interview question, you can demonstrate your ability to manage pressure and contribute positively to your future employer. Use the tips and examples provided in this guide to craft your response and leverage our AI Answer Generator tool to perfect it. Good luck with your interview!

Thomas M. A.

A literature-lover by design and qualification, Thomas loves exploring different aspects of software and writing about the same.

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Top 10 Interview Questions to Identify High-Performing Employees

“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.” – Steve Jobs

According to Forbes , the top 5% of employees within an organization produce 26% of the organization’s output—so hiring top-performing employees should be at the top of the list for any organization aiming to achieve its goals and drive growth. But how do you sift through a pool of candidates to find potential employees with high-performance ability?

The key lies in asking the right questions during the interview process. In this blog, we’ll share interviewstream’s top 10 interview questions designed to help you identify high-performing employees. These questions will give you insights into candidates’ skills, experiences, and potential, helping you make the best hiring decisions for your team.

Questions to Identify High-Performing Employees

1. Can you describe a time when you exceeded expectations at work?

Why it’s effective: This question helps you understand a candidate’s drive and ability to surpass goals, indicating a high level of self-motivation and commitment to excellence.

2. How do you prioritize tasks when you have multiple deadlines to meet?

Why it’s effective: High performers are great time managers. This question reveals how candidates organize their work, handle pressure, and make sure projects get done on time.

3. Tell me about a time when you took the initiative to solve a problem. What was the outcome?

Why it’s effective: This question checks a candidate’s problem-solving skills and their willingness to go the extra mile to tackle challenges.

4. How do you handle feedback, especially when it’s critical?

Why it’s effective: Top performers are open to feedback and use it to get even better. This question helps you see if a candidate can take constructive criticism and keep growing.

5. Can you give an example of how you set and achieved a significant goal in your previous job?

Why it’s effective: Setting and achieving goals is a high-performer’s trademark. This question lets you see how candidates plan, get things done, and track their progress on major objectives.

6. Describe a situation where you had to work with a difficult team member. How did you handle it?

Why it’s effective: Conflict resolution is essential, for all team members, especially for high achievers who often drive teams which can limit collaboration. This question checks a candidate’s interpersonal skills and ability to navigate and solve conflicts in a professional way.

7. What strategies do you use to stay up-to-date with industry trends and developments?

Why it’s effective: Top performers are always learning. This question shows if candidates are proactive about gaining knowledge and staying current with industry changes, making them even more valuable to your team.

8. How do you measure your own performance and success in your role?

Why it’s effective: Self-assessment is key to improvement. This question helps you see if candidates set personal goals and strive to meet or exceed them.

9. Tell me about a project you worked on that required significant collaboration. What was your role, and how did you ensure its success?

Why it’s effective: Collaboration is often the key to success. This question reveals a candidate’s teamwork skills, leadership potential, and how they contribute to achieving shared goals.

10. How do you maintain high performance during periods of change or uncertainty?

Why it’s effective: This question checks a candidate’s resilience and ability to stay productive and effective, even in challenging or changing environments.

  Asking the right interview questions is key to finding high-performers for your team! These questions are designed to dig deeper and uncover the qualities that make top performers tick. We’re not just looking for skills (though those are important!), but the drive and adaptability to thrive within an organization.

Ready to Improve Your Interviews?

interviewstream’s video interviewing , interview scheduling , and AI recruiting tools simplify every stage of the hiring process, making it easier for you to identify high performers. Take a look at a quick demo today and see how we can help you build a stronger team!

About The Author

Drew Whitehurst is the Director of Marketing at interviewstream. He's been with the company since 2014 working in client services and marketing. He is an analytical thinker, coffee enthusiast, and hobbyist at heart.

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