Job interviews can be a nerve-racking experience, and the best antidote to those nerves is thorough preparation. However, sometimes it can prove challenging to anticipate what sort of questions will be thrown your way.
If you’ve got an upcoming interview and are seeking some handy tips, employment expert Erin McGoff may have just the ticket for you. The award-winning documentary filmmaker has built up a significant following on TikTok, where she shares her invaluable career advice to over 2.8 million followers.
Addressing the topic of behavioural job interview questions, McGoff explained in a post: “These questions are designed to get a sense of how you’ve handled yourself professionally in difficult or challenging situations.”
She elucidated further: “They usually start out with, ‘Tell me about a time when…’ and are SUPER hard to answer if you aren’t prepared! They’re really difficult to answer because they want a very specific story time right on the spot.”
In her definitive style, she concluded: “They’re not gonna like fact check it they just wanna get a good sense of your character and professionalism. And most of these questions are asking the same thing, which is basically ‘how have you dealt with conflict and difficult situations? ‘ If you’re stuck, just use the S-T-A-R method.”
Explaining the S-T-A-R method for tackling tough interview questions, Erin gives her own example to demonstrate. The acronym stands for ‘situation’, ‘task’, ‘action’ and ‘result’.
Starting with ‘situation’, Erin put it into practice, stating: “Sure! So in my previous role, I was working as a marketing associate for a tech startup and my boss and I had a really great working relationship.”
Moving on to the ‘task’ part, she further described her scenario: “We were working on a marketing campaign for a new product and my boss wanted to take a more traditional approach focusing on advertising, however, I felt that leveraging social media influencers and UGC would be more effective for this product.”
Addressing the ‘action’, she explained how she handled the situation: “So approached my boss, I made my case I showed all the research and data to support my suggestion and in the end, we decided to split the budget and test out both methods.”
Wrapping up her advice with the ‘result’ part of the method, she exclaimed: “We reached a wide audience, we gained a ton of insights and the campaign was a huge success!” She concluded: “Be authentic talk about what was truly challenging to you and how you overcame it. Be humble, be earnest, and be concise. YOU GOT THIS!”
Viewers of Erin’s video were quick to praise her guidance, with one user commenting: “I always write down examples because I know my brain will blank in an interview.”
Meanwhile, another user confessed: “I have made up a story to answer these questions more than once. I tell it true to how I would actually act in a professional setting though.”
