You will prepare six STAR stories that can answer most behavioural questions between them.
Interviewers can ask hundreds of behavioural questions, from the time you failed to the time you disagreed with your manager or had to learn a system in a week. Trying to prepare an answer for each one is impossible, and people who try end up with a long list of half-remembered scripts.
There is a better way. Prepare a small number of strong stories that, between them, can answer most questions. This exercise builds a bank of six, each written in the STAR format from lesson 6.1, The STAR method for behavioural questions, and tagged so you can find the right one under pressure. The whole exercise takes about forty minutes.
A good bank covers six kinds of story: a success you are proud of, a failure you learned from, and a conflict with a colleague, client or manager. Add a time you led, even without the title, a time you had to learn something fast, and a time you did more than your role asked.
For each type, pick a real example from the last few years. Recent stories are better, because you remember the details and they reflect who you are now. Use work examples where you can. If you are early in your career or switching fields, examples from volunteering, part-time work, school projects or NS are fine, as long as they show the skill.
Arjun's six, as a teacher moving into learning and development, were these. Success: the revision programme other teachers adopted. Failure: a new assessment format he launched that confused students, and how he fixed it. Conflict: a disagreement with a parent over a grade. Led: running the new-teacher workshops. Learned fast: moving his classes online during home-based learning. Beyond his role: building a question bank for the whole department.
Set up a sheet with one row per story and these columns: story name, situation and task, action, result and lesson, skills shown, and questions it answers.
Write each story out in short notes rather than a full script. Keep situation and task to two sentences, give the action the most space, and end with a result and what you learned. Notes are better than scripts because you will tell the story slightly differently each time, depending on the question, and a memorised script sounds stiff.
Give each story a short, memorable name, such as "revision programme" or "parent complaint". Under pressure you will remember a name faster than a description.
Now look at your market sheet from lesson 2.4, Build a market sheet for your target role, because its top ten skills are what employers in your field want to hear about, and note which of them each story shows.
This tells you two things. First, which stories to lead with: the ones that show the most in-demand skills. Second, where the gaps are. If none of your six stories shows a skill that appears in most job ads, swap one story for a better example, or plan to build that experience.
Arjun's market sheet put instructional design, facilitation, working with business leaders and e-learning near the top. The revision programme covered instructional design, the workshops covered facilitation and the home-based learning story covered e-learning. Nothing showed working with senior people outside the classroom, so he swapped his weakest story for one about presenting a new programme to his school's leadership team.
Each story can answer several questions with a different emphasis. The parent complaint story can answer "Tell me about a conflict", "Tell me about a difficult customer" and "Tell me about a time you had to stay calm under pressure". The question changes which part of the story you stress, while the story itself stays the same.
For each story, list three or four questions it could answer in the last column. Then check the common questions against your bank: a failure, a conflict, a time you showed initiative, a time you worked with a difficult person, a time you managed competing priorities. If any common question has no story, fill the gap.
Finally, say the stories out loud. This step feels optional, and it is the one most people skip. Written stories almost always run long when spoken, because writing lets you pack in detail that takes far longer to say than to read.
Record yourself telling two stories on your phone. Time each one. If a story runs past two minutes, look at where the time went. It is usually the set-up. Cut the situation to its bare minimum and try again.
When Arjun recorded his revision programme story, it ran to three and a half minutes, two of them on background about the school's streaming system. He cut that to one sentence and the story came in at just under two minutes.
A finished bank has six stories in STAR notes, each with a name, the skills it shows and the questions it can answer, with every common question covered and at least two stories timed aloud at under two minutes. Build yours in the activity, then record the two stories you are least sure of.
Write six STAR stories in the bank template, tag each with the skills it shows, and record yourself telling two of them.
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