Most candidates know how to use the STAR method to answer behavioral interview questions in job interviews. But you can also apply the principles to create a great resume that contextualizes your achievements, work experience, and skills.
The goal of your resume is to get you to the next step in the application process. A STAR method resume shows your value as a candidate and helps you stand out from other job seekers.
Read this article to learn:
- What the STAR method is
- What STAR stands for
- How to construct STAR method answers
- Why you should use the STAR method on your resume
- How to create a resume using the STAR method
- The benefits of using the STAR approach on your resume
What is the STAR method?
The STAR method is a four-part approach to answering behavioral interview questions. Behavioral interview questions (or STAR interview questions) are questioned based on how you acted and applied your skills in a specific situation at a previous job.
When interviewers ask these situational questions, they want to see how you react to stressful situations and whether you have the skills needed for the role. The STAR method encourages job seekers to provide detail about their work experience by discussing the situation, tasks, action, and result.
The STAR interview method is the best way to answer these questions and impress future employers when used well. Employing the STAR framework on your resume allows you to reveal details about a similar situation and help recruiters understand how you've applied your skills to succeed in your past work experience.
Examples of behavioral questions include:
- What can you contribute to this company?
- Tell me about a time when you made a mistake.
- Why do you want to work here?
- Share an example of when you sacrificed short-term productivity for a longer-term goal.
- Tell me about a time when you had to work closely with someone who had a different personality to you.
Related: How to prepare for a behavioral interview
What does STAR stand for?
The STAR acronym stands for situation, task, action, and result:
- Situation: Describe the situation as it forms the basis for the rest of your answer.
- Task: Outline your goals or problems.
- Action: Describe the steps you took to solve the problems or achieve your goals.
- Result: Explain how solving the problems or meeting your goals contributed to the company, then list any important lessons or skills you learned.
Structuring your resume STAR method responses provides a complete description of your experience and shows your value to prospective employers.
In the next section, we'll construct a sample answer to give you a clearer picture of each component of the STAR format.
How to construct STAR method answers
Constructing a suitable STAR method answer allows you to explain your knowledge and capabilities clearly, and helps potential employers understand the situation from your perspective.
Let's walk through the four parts of STAR and how to use them to answer a question. Then we'll go through how to adapt your response to your resume.
1. Situation: What's the context?
Provide the context surrounding the problem goal or project. An excellent place to start is with your role and responsibilities:
"As the Internationalization Lead at Canva, I was responsible for a multilingual, 10-person SEO team, including six direct reports, multiple agencies, 10+ freelancers, and 50+ contributing authors."
While this response is too long for a resume, it'll form the basis of what we include:
Canva – Internationalization Lead (May 2018 - Jan 2022)
Task: What were your responsibilities?
Recruiters need to understand your responsibilities, including why your previous employer hired you. The task part of a STAR response outlines why you were hired and highlights skills relevant to the job description.
Establish your competencies by outlining a specific task:
"Before Canva hired me, the company had strong English-based organic traffic but had yet to scale its international SEO efforts. They didn't have a consistent way of internationalizing their existing content. My task was to find a way to enable and manage our internationalization efforts."
Action: What did you do?
Describe the steps you took to complete your task. Emphasize your ability to drive things forward and get results:
"I led the restructuring of your marketing site to support multiple languages. It was a team effort that included weekly meetings with engineering and product to ensure the migration from a single language site to a multi-language site didn't impact our metrics or end-user experience."
Result: What were the consequences of your actions?
Now it's time to share the results of your actions. Focus on quantifiable outcomes by using metrics to highlight the value you contributed to the company, then list the lessons or skills you learned.
Here's an example answer:
"The restructuring of our marketing site led to vast improvements in our non-English organic traffic. For example, we translated our most important pages and content into Spanish and saw a 500% growth in organic search traffic.
We then repeated this process for other languages. By the time I left, Canva was available in more than 100 languages and had increased its organic traffic to more than 20 million visits per month.
Suffice to say. I learned the impact of translation on organic growth and how to manage a distributed team that speaks different languages, many languages that I don't speak. SEO is one of Canva's most essential growth channels, so I'm pretty proud of this work and the impact I drove."
Why you should use a STAR method resume
A STAR method resume creates a more compelling resume because it shows employers you have:
- A solid understanding of your accomplishments, qualifications, and work history
- Specific, practical experiences that are relevant to the role you're applying for
- The ability to communicate your value concisely and confidently
A STAR method resume achieves all these goals and proves you have the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the position.
Writing your resume with STAR statements also gives you an advantage over job seekers with generic resumes. It shows you put time and effort into personalizing your resume for the role.
How to create a resume using the STAR method
Creating a resume with the STAR technique begins with reading the job description. Choose two or three key behaviors or skills you want to highlight on your resume, then create a verbal answer using the steps above.
Once you have your STAR answer, it's time to use it in place of the key responsibilities you'd usually put under a job on your resume. Use the STAR method to describe each job with your situation, tasks, actions, and results. You can do this in a few bullet points.
Always start your bullet points with action verbs to make your statements descriptive and persuasive.
Canva – Internationalization Lead (May 2018 - Jan 2022)
- Led internationalization effort to grow Canva's organic traffic and product usage in non-English languages
- Restructured marketing site to support internationalization work, liaised with product and engineering teams, proved our initial concept, and set up best practices for future languages
- Led to Canva being available in more than 100 languages and organic traffic growth to more than 20 million visits per month
Or you can condense it into a single point:
Canva – Internationalization Lead (May 2018 - Jan 2022)
- Led the internationalization effort to grow Canva's organic traffic and product usage in non-English languages. I restructured the marketing site to support internationalization work. I set up best practices, which resulted in Canva being available in more than 100 languages and organic traffic growth to more than 20 million visits per month.
As you can see, the condensed response still follows the STAR formula.
STAR method resume example
Here's an example of how you can apply the STAR method to a resume:
Erlich Bachman
GMT-8 | US Citizen | 111-111-1111 | [email protected]
Summary
I am a self-motivated hype man with over a decade of experience investing in and growing tech startups. I incubated TechCrunch Disrupt winner Pied Piper and have worked remotely since 2018.
Professional experience
Chief Evangelism Officer | Pied Piper
Remote | June 2014–Present
- Supervised and managed a team to promote Pied Piper's cloud-based machine learning middle-out compression with an exceptional Weissmann score of 5.2 (Situation and task are combined here)
- Developed social marketing campaigns to drive awareness (Action)
- Social media strategies increased engagement by 90% and caused $1 million of recurring revenue (Result)
Founder | Aviato
San Francisco, California | May 2014–May 2018
- Founded social media aggregation and management software for commercial airlines and the airline booking aggregator Aviato (Situation)
- As the founder, I was responsible for all aspects of the business, including fundraising (Task)
- Built relationships with customers and raised money from proponent investors (Action)
- Frontier Airlines acquired Aviato for low seven figures (Result)
Skills
- Public speaking
- Asynchronous collaboration
- Fundraising
- Time management
- Organization
Education
School of Hard Knocks, Bachelor of Startups
- I did not attend college. Instead, I built startups
Related: How to write your remote job resume (templates + samples included)
Benefits of using a STAR method resume
The main advantages of using a STAR method resume:
- Shows your value: The goal of your resume is to show the value you bring to a potential employer. Using the STAR method in your resume makes it easy for hiring managers to see your worth.
- Presents more detail: Using the STAR approach forces you to provide examples of how you acquired and applied specific skills in specific situations.
- Doubles as interview preparation: Drafting your resume by following the STAR interview technique prepares you for many behavioral interview questions you might encounter.
- Creates a compelling story: Humans love stories. Stories make you more memorable by allowing you to explain how your work experience has formed who you are and how you've been able to develop as an employee and a person.
- It makes it easy to create a resume relevant to the job requirements: Using the STAR method to create a resume forces you to think through the job description and tailor your resume to the employer and role. It shows the potential employer that you're invested in the position and have the skills needed to succeed.
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