What if I don’t have a positive example?

A general tip here is not to volunteer negative information about yourself. However, life is not perfect and sometimes things do go wrong, and you end up in a situation that doesn’t have a neat, positive ending. This is allowed and interviewers will accept this.

What you are expected to do is to show you have learned from the experience, and ideally been able to apply it to a more successful outcome.

One way you can do this is by using an extension to the STAR format – the STAR-L:

• Situation/Task – what the context was, any challenges or constraints
• Action – what you did
• Result - which may be negative, even if this was outside your control
• Learning - what you learnt from this and prevented it happening again, or used this experience to do something differently the next time – to turn it to a positive outcome

So, using our earlier example:

“At Acme Ltd, as Trainee Accountant, I was asked by my manager, towards year end, to make savings from the budget. This was crucial to the business as we were overspending. What I did was to set up a team involving some key people from across the business, such as department heads. I asked people to share their ideas and we then prioritised the best ones. For example, I decided to change our electricity supplier to a lower tariff and reduced our stock levels by 10% which improved our working capital. Overall, I achieved £5k in savings, which was almost 1% of the budget but we missed the year end budget target, and we ended up having to make one member of staff redundant, which was hard to do.

What I learnt from this was two things: 1. To monitor the budget more closely throughout the year and have a month-by-month projection below budget to aim for, 2. To be more radical in some of my ideas, so for example I should have changed the gas and water suppliers too. In fact, I did do that this year, and I’ve been able to save a further £15k which my manager is really pleased with.