STAR, which stands for situation, task, action, results is a wildly used interview method in the tech industry whether you interviewing for a technical or non-technical role. This method is best used for behavior interviews. Technical interviews will assess your technical skills. Behavioral interviews will assess what the technical interview does not assess, which is your critical thinking, decision making, and interpersonal skills. This will determine if fit the company's culture. Behavioral interviews are just as important as technical interviews.
Answers to STAR interview questions should first paint a picture of a problem needs to be solved. Interviewees can explain how the problem came about and who else was involved.
The Task element of a STAR answer explains the candidate's role in this situation. What were you tasked with doing? Who identified this task? What was the desired result of carrying out this task?
The Action in a STAR answer reveals how the candidate approached that task, and the steps they took to solve the problem introduced in the "Situation" stage of their answer.
This element of STAR should reveal the results of the situation. Did you get the expected results? Why or Why not? If not, why ?
At this time you will want to tell a story, but you want to get straight to the point.
Interviewer: Tell me about a time you were able to automate a process and what was the outcome.
Me: I was consulting for a company named, E-Corp. We were brought in to mature their vulnerability management program. However, due to them being short-staffed some of our consultants were having to help with the monitoring efforts. This caused them to have to split time between monitoring and helping our main objective, which was to mature their vulnerability management program. They were mainly tasked with going to 55 vendor websites weekly to retrieve vulnerability data and manually upload it to their in house tool. This process utilized 2 people and took about 2 hours each person to complete. I noticed that it was an extremely tedious task and their time could be spent doing more meaningful work. I decided to create a python script that would automate this process. A process that would normally take 4+ hours of man power now takes ~3 minutes and fetched the data every week at a specified time.
Consultants were exhausting their bandwidth on manual processes that took time away from projects that would provide more value.
I identified that the process took too much time away from our intended goal. I wanted to create a script that would relieve the other consultants from this process.
I spoke with consultants to understand the process, the requirements for process, and other necessary information regarding the process.
I was able to automate a manual process that required 4+ hours of man power. The process now was completed within a couple of minutes and required no oversight.