How do I answer behaviour questions with STAR?

Civil Service jobs are assessed with Success Profiles, the framework every department uses for recruitment. It can test five things: behaviours, strengths, ability, experience and technical skills. Your job advert says which of these the job uses, and whether they're tested in the written application, at interview, or both.

Behaviours are nine named ways of working: Seeing the Big Picture, Changing and Improving, Making Effective Decisions, Leadership, Communicating and Influencing, Working Together, Developing Self and Others, Managing a Quality Service, and Delivering at Pace. An advert usually picks a handful of them. Each one is described differently for each grade, so the same behaviour asks for more at Senior Executive Officer (SEO) than at Administrative Officer (AO).

Your written application is often scored first, in a stage called the sift: someone reads it, scores it, and decides who gets an interview. At interview, a small panel asks one question per behaviour and scores each answer.

The panel can only score what you tell them you did. A vague answer (“I'm good with people”) gives them nothing to score. A specific one, with steps, a problem you handled and a number at the end, does. That's what STARR is for.

Give yourself about 20 minutes. Write one line for every moment from your working life you can remember. Don't worry about spelling, and don't worry yet about which behaviour it fits. Aim for 12 or more.

Messy is fine. It only has to make sense to you. For example: “bank, lady's money going missing, found it, card froze, rent”. Or “bank, 50 accounts in 3 weeks, people cancelled, done early”. Or “care, resident not eating, nurse busy, infection”. Each of those lines later became a full answer on this page.

Stories don't have to be big. Panels at most grades are looking for ordinary work done well: a customer helped properly, a deadline met when it got hard, a mistake put right. Volunteering, caring and study count too.

Give yourself about 10 minutes. Open your job advert and find the behaviours it lists for the interview. Then go down your list of stories and write the number of your best story next to each behaviour.

Here are five behaviours that adverts test often, in plain words. If your advert lists others, read their description on GOV.UK and put it in one plain sentence for yourself the same way: Seeing the Big Picture is roughly “you understood how your work fitted the wider goal”, Leadership is “you took ownership and treated people fairly”, Working Together is “you helped others get the job done”, and Developing Self and Others is “you learned something, or helped someone else learn”.

One story can work for two behaviours. Just tell it from a different angle. The missing-money story below is Managing a Quality Service, but the same day also involved a quick decision with your manager, which could lead a Making Effective Decisions answer. If you have enough stories, give each behaviour its own one.

Pick one story. Answer six questions in order, and that's your answer. Give yourself about 20 minutes per story.

Situation: where were you and what was happening? One or two sentences. Task: what did you need to do? One sentence. Action: what did you do, step by step? Say “I”. This is the longest part, because it's the part the panel scores.

Snag: what went slightly wrong, and how did you adapt? This sits inside the Action. Panels like it because it shows you thinking, not just following a plan. Result: what happened in the end? Use a number if you can. Reflection: what did you learn, or what would you do differently?

Each answer below is written in full STARR. The snag is marked inside the Action so you can see where it goes. Read them for the shape, then write your own. These are example stories for this guide, not real people.

Why it works: the customer's real need was bigger than the fraud case. Spotting the rent problem and solving it the same day is exactly what Managing a Quality Service means. The update call 2 days later shows you kept her informed.

Why it works: it shows planning (4 a day), removing blockers (the document checklist), tracking progress, and recovering from a setback without dropping quality. Saying none came back with errors answers the worry that fast means sloppy.

Why it works: it shows choosing the right way to reach people (a one-page summary, huddles at shift change) and changing approach when the first one didn't land. Meeting managers one to one and listening is the influencing part.

Why it works: a good decision isn't always doing it yourself. Checking the facts, knowing the limit of your role, and getting it to the right person quickly is the decision. It also shows you recorded it.

Why it works: it starts by asking the people affected, tests the change before rolling it out, and changes it again when it isn't used. The result shows the improvement spread beyond your own shifts.

After your answer, the panel will often ask a follow-up question: “What would you have done if your manager had said no?” or “How did you know it had worked?” This isn't a trap. It's them checking the story is yours. If you lived it, you'll know the answer, so take a breath and tell them.

If you can't remember a detail, say so honestly and give what you do know. Making up a number to fill a gap is riskier than saying “I don't remember the exact figure, but it was roughly half”.

Tonight: do step 1. Write 12 lines, messy, in about 20 minutes. Then do step 2 and put a story number next to each behaviour in your advert.

This week: write up one story a day in STARR, starting with the behaviour you feel least sure about. Check each one against the list above.

Before the interview: say each answer out loud at least twice. Reading it in your head is not the same as saying it. Plum's AI interview panel asks the behaviour question, asks a follow-up like a real panel, and tells you how your answer landed.