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Career Coach: Behavioral Questions

CHICAGO (CBS)-- CBS 2 is Working For Chicago by working with a career coach every week to give you advice on looking for and landing a job during the pandemic.

This week the CBS 2 career coach is helping you answer behavioral questions during an interview.

"There's an actual method, a formula you can use to answer these behavioral questions and it's called the STAR method," Lynee Alves, president of Interview Like An Expert, said. "The 'S' stands for situation, what's the situation you were in at the time. 'T' is the task or the goal or the challenge. 'A' is the action you took and 'R' is the results you got."

Alves says that star method helps answer the popular behavioral questions that employers are asking to get specific stories about how you handled situations in previous jobs.

These questions sound like, "tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker and how you resolved it" or "tell me about a time when you were a member of a team and what your role was."

"You don't want to provide too much detail. You still have to keep your answers short and to the point," Alves said. "Ideally these answers should be no longer than say 30 seconds to a minute. "Really the interviewer is more interested in the results you achieved."

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