At last, we get to the final part of this series, the Result. If you haven’t read the previous parts of this series, you can find them here: Situation, Task, Actions. 

Well... not quite. While the traditional STAR format (the format you should use to answer behavioral interview questions) ends with Results, certain interview questions, especially the negative ones (e.g. “Tell me about a mistake you made that had a tangible business impact.”) should conclude with Learnings – i.e. what you learned from the experience. 

But, for positive questions, that is optional, and so... Result. 

That rug really tied the room together 

Results are the way to end your story with a bang, to tie it all together. It’s the impact of your Actions, the reason you went through all that work. It's also the chance to throw some numbers at your interviewer. Numbers, in interview settings, often speak louder than words. 

When I first started out interviewing, I wondered why citing impact numbers was so important. Was it just a chance to crow, i.e. “Hey, I made the company $10MM.” Would that really matter to the next company I applied to? Or, to put it another way, while specific actions obviously translate between companies/jobs, results often do not. One company’s project may have vastly different results from another company’s. So, then, why are results so important to round out your story? 

The answer may lie in a question: how often do you know the exact impact of your work? In other words, how many folks working in tech know exactly how much business the project they worked on brought in? 

If you’re anything like I was earlier on in my career, the answer is “not often.” Typically, a project is proposed by PM, developed by Tech, then marketed by Marketing and sold by BizDev. In companies that practice “sell first, build later,” this may be reversed, but the upshot is Tech seldom knows the exact impact of their work. 

And that’s a problem, because without understanding impact, how can you make sure you’re making the best decisions for the project at ground level? 

Tying this back to interviewing: one of the main attributes of an exceptional employee is ownership. Ownership means understanding the context and impact of your work. And so by taking the extra step of finding out your project’s impact on the overall business you’re showing ownership. Being able to talk about that impact, then, demonstrates this ownership mentality. 

This is why Results are so important. You’re not merely bragging about all the money you made. You’re showing that you had enough of an ownership mentality behind your work to seek to understand the full context of the business it affected. 

And that’s valuable. 

Conclusion 

So, the Results section of your story should be brief, around 5-10% of the overall story time. It should focus on concrete results and, as much as possible, reference numbers. It should flow logically out of the context you set in Situation and the Task you took on, and it should work to tie up your Actions with a nice bow. 

Want help? 

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.