[supriyo-biswas]

Also STAR style questions are terrible because of other reasons: usually have one expected answer; one that shows that you’re a person who likes to take initiative, solve problems etc. and you can just come up with an answer that makes you look good on paper without having done any of those things.

I also suspect their general vagueness can be exploited to weed out candidates based on “vibes” while still maintaining the impression that it’s a standardized question they ask everyone.

Just the other day, I was interviewing with a company that posted here in the “who is hiring” thread; and I was asked “Tell me about a time when you challenged a fairness or ethical issue”; I feel like regardless of how this is answered, this is just a way for them to project you as a person without backbone who seemingly goes along with anything, or as a complainer who loves impeding others with objections created out of thin air.

[doodaddy]

This illustrates the issue that I see with STAR-style questioning - the method encourages detail-rich storytelling about situations that don’t happen very often, or are simply a mundane part of work life.

“Tell me about a time when you challenged a fairness or ethical issue.” How many times is something like this expected to come up in a person’s career? And how often will the “issue” - outside of management roles - be of such consequence that you’ll remember all the details? And how often will the true answer be nothing more than “someone asked me to do X. I expressed discomfort over it to my manager while we were getting lunch. X did/didn’t happen”. But that answer, I doubt, will make a very strong impression.

Basically there is misalignment between the method and the line of questioning.