Medical Interview Preparation

The STAR Technique

Competency based questions are a common interview technique that has become popular to use over the last few years. They are questions that look to explore your skills, not by asking you whether you have a given skill, but by asking you to talk about your behaviour in a given situation

Some competency based questions are more cleverly constructed by medical interview panels than others, but you will now also find them commonly used in the ST application form

They will typically be introduced by a command such as

	Describe a time where you...
	Describe an example when you ....
	Describe a situation in which you ...
	Describe a recent example of when you...
	Describe an occasion when you...
	Give a specific example of a time when you...

These questions are relatively easy to attack with a strategy commonly called the "STAR Technique". You can learn about the finer points of this strategy in the online course, but the essence of it is that you structure your answer into the four component parts of the STAR System