Preparing for interviews involves researching the company, looking at people’s LinkedIn profiles, scanning their social media pages...all the things. Interview prep is also going over the answers to all those nagging, behavioral questions like “tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker” or “what is your greatest accomplishment”.
You’ve probably been advised to answer questions like the ones above using the STAR or CAR technique. STAR stands for situation, task, action, result and CAR stands for challenge, action, results. These are formulas for answering behavioral questions like the ones above. You can pick either one, but basically, career advisors advise you to start with what the situation, challenge or task was, what you did about the situation or to solve the challenge, and what were the results of your actions. Sounds easy enough, but many people get nervous about interviewing. While these formulas help, you gotta have situations, tasks, challenges, actions, and results to use!
Here’s where professional reflection comes in. I would recommend reflecting weekly and monthly, but also before and after a project or some other big task. How many times have you been in an interview and blanked on what situation you can talk about or what were the actions and results. Taking stock of these things as you work from week to week, month to month, or project to project will give you all of those parts. And help you remember them too, whether you write them down or type them up.
It’s much easier to review your reflection notes before an interview for all of your stories than to stress out remembering exactly what happened when.
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