By Debbie Bunch
May 19, 2025
Job interviews are always stressful. But for some people, that stress takes on a new level when the hiring manager starts asking “behavioral interviewing questions” – you know, questions that start out like this:
Give me an example of . . .
Tell me about a time when . . .
Describe a situation that . . .
If these types of questions raise your blood pressure, the STAR Method might help. Designed to guide you through behavioral interviewing questions, the STAR acronym stands for: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Here’s how you can put it to work for you:
Situation: This portion of your answer is aimed at setting up the situation in your example and should take up about 20% of your overall time. Make sure your response is specific to the situation you are asked to talk about and make it short and sweet. For example, if the question is, “Tell me about a time when you had more patients on your schedule than you could handle and what you did to solve the problem,” all you really need to say at the outset is something like this: “I was working the night shift one night in January when two of my coworkers called out and I was left to cover their patients.”
Task: Once the situation is set up, it is time to explain what your role was in that situation. In the above example, you can simply cite how many patients required respiratory care that night and give a brief overview of the treatments you were charged with delivering. You don’t have to explain why that was too many – any RT hiring manager will be able do the math themselves. This part should comprise about 10% of your overall answer.
Action: Here is where you go into a little more detail. Plan to spend about 60% of your time on the actions you took to solve the problem. In the “too many patients, not enough RTs” example, you can list off the things you did to make up for the missing staff, whether that was calling for back-up staff to assist, triaging patients so that those with the highest needs were seen first, skipping your meal break to make up for the lack of staff, or working an hour or so of overtime to reach all the patients who needed your services.
Result: Spend the remaining 10% of your time stating the outcomes of your efforts. In this example, you can simply note that through the actions you took, 100% of the patients scheduled for RT that night received their ordered therapy before you went off duty. Citing quantifiable results like that is the strongest way to convey your results, but this is also a good time to quickly sum up what you learned from the experience, which in this case might be, “This situation taught me how to quickly assess a negative situation and then make the adjustments necessary to ensure positive outcomes for my patients.”
You can read more about the STAR Method here.
