A is for Action (STAR Part 3) 

So far, we’ve talked about the setup/prep part of the STAR story format – the Situation and Task, components necessary to understand the context of the story proper. Now let’s talk about the meat of your story: the Actions you took to accomplish the result you sought. 

In the overall percentage breakdown, Actions should take up roughly 75% of your overall story time. They are your chance to both answer the interviewer’s question (“Tell me about a time when...”), and to sell your overall fitness for the role. In a previous article, I talked about ECCO, the Enthusiasm-Competence-Collaboration-Ownership attributes of an ideal employee. The Actions part of the story should showcase these. 

The Sample Story 

For the rest of this article, we’ll be using a sample, entirely made-up story, as illustration for the points I’m going to make. I’ve put the STAR identifiers in front of parts of the answer for clarity. For now, the exact question being answered by this story isn’t important—we'll get to the questions later on in the article. 

[Situation] Back when I worked for the ACME Corporation, I took over a team working on a keystone project: the addition of a critical customer-requested feature—the ability to send and receive SMS messages from within the app. Following their usual process, the team spent a month in analysis and scoping, and was bogged down in minutiae, with no code set down, and nothing tangible to show for the spent time. The execs were getting antsy, and the pressure on the team was steadily rising. [Task] I was asked to step in and put the project back on track. 

[Actions] I had a conversation with the team lead and quickly saw the frustration he and his teammates were experiencing. I suggested an alternative approach: vertical thin-slicing, an Agile method to reorient project planning toward fast, iterative results. The team resisted at first, because this method flew completely in the face of the “design first, code later” philosophy they followed. I was able to convince them to try an experiment. I then sat down with the team lead, and we thin-sliced the story into 8-dev-hour chunks, starting with the crudest but working prototype, and steadily adding on to that until MVP. (Note, this part is condensed for this article – the real answer would be three times the length, diving deeper into each part of what I mention above.) 

[Result] As a result, the team was able to demo that initial prototype to the execs within a week. Yes, it was just two textboxes and a Send button. But for the execs, seeing something working on-screen went a huge way toward relieving the pressure they felt. They backed off, and the team made steady progress from there on, releasing a working MVP ahead of schedule. 

Active Verbs 

The same rules you learned about resume writing apply here. Use active, direct verbs: 

• I drove… 
• I dove deep to… 
• I analyzed… 
• I delivered… 
• I organized… 
• I convinced… (or, “I was able to convince…”) 

You get the idea. Which verbs should you use? Well, look at the job description of the job you’re applying to. They’re all right there! 

Adapt Actions to fit the question

Any story of decent scope should fit into multiple behavioral question categories. In other words, a significantly scoped story will involve driving something, collaborating, managing stakeholders and partners, dealing with deadlines, and so on, and chances are, your actions will reflect these situations. And while it’s not a good idea to use the same story within one interview loop (across multiple interviewers), you should have multiple stories under your belt that can be adapted to fit the question asked. That adaptation should happen in the Action and Results sections. 

Now, taking the story above, think about what questions the story might answer: 

1. Tell me about a time when you needed to step in to put a project back on track. 
2. Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your team about something. Were you able to convince them? What happened? 
3. Tell me about the most challenging project you led. 
4. Tell me about a time when you had to dive deep in a project to move it forward. 
5. Give me an example of a calculated risk that you have taken where speed was critical. 
6. Give me an example of a change you implemented in your current team or organization to meet the needs of your customers. 

And so on. There are literally dozens of questions the story could align to. A more helpful way of thinking about it is what Leadership Principles (to use Amazon’s way of thinking about it) does the story represent? 

• Ownership 
• Earn Trust 
• Dive Deep 
• Be Right, A Lot 
• Bias for Action 
• Deliver Results 
• Customer Obsession 

You might be asking, “how does this story show Customer Obsession?” Well, in order to prioritize the thin-sliced tasks correctly (so that we could come up with the leanest possible MVP), we had to work with the PM org and the customer to figure out what functionality within the overall feature they most wanted. Note that I didn’t mention this in the story as told above. But I would mention it if the question asked was oriented around Customer Obsession. 

Ditto “Earn Trust.” A common question around that one could have something to do with conflict, like #2 above. If that happened, I’d spend more time on talking about the disagreement I had with the team regarding the change in process, and how I went about convincing them to try my approach. 

Hopefully, you can now see how the substance of the Action part of your answer will change depending on the question asked. It’s the same story, you’re just bringing different parts of it to the foreground and minimizing the other parts. 

Forget “We” 

A common mistake I hear from my clients is using the word “we” in their Action response. For example, “We worked together to drive the prioritization…” etc.  

Don’t do this. 

In fact, eliminate the word “we” from your vocabulary entirely for the duration of the story. The problem with “we” is it obfuscates the part you played in the work. “We” could mean “I was in the room, playing Clash Royale while others did the work,” or it could mean “I did all the work but am just being humble.” As a hiring manager, I have no way of differentiating between the two, unless I ask, and you don’t want me to interrupt the flow of your story to ask. 

So, don’t use “we.” This doesn’t mean you have to take credit for others’ work. But instead of saying “We worked together to drive the prioritization,” you could say “I drove prioritization, collaborating with my colleagues as necessary.” See the difference? 

Conclusion 

The Actions section of STAR should take up most of your storytelling time. Depending on how interesting the story is, this can be 3 minutes, 5 minutes, or 40 minutes. Depending on how technical the interviewer is, and how interested they seem in getting technical, you could draw system diagrams, talk about specific technologies, and so forth. The Actions section is where you show how awesome you are. So, use I statements, use active verbs, and make sure that your answer doesn’t just cover the question asked, but also shows the ECCO framework I mentioned above. Doing this will set your answer above those of other candidates and will make it that much more likely that you will get the job.  

Based on my own experience working with clients, I’ve seen the value of live coaching in interview preparation. This is why I and other members of EIC have started an initiative called InterviewMentors. If you are interested in getting some private or group coaching on your story content and delivery, please check out our bi-weekly webinars, or sign up for coaching here.