Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, presents the S.H.E.A.R. method as a better alternative to STAR for interview answers. S.H.E.A.R. adds a hurdle (the conflict) and reflection (what you learned), which shows emotional intelligence. STAR answers come out bland; S.H.E.A.R. tells a story that makes you memorable.
One of the tricky parts of giving answers to interview questions is figuring out some kind of a formula for actually structuring your response. You know, you're going to be talking about dozens, if not hundreds, of different situations you faced in your career if you go on enough job interviews. And one of the things that's tricky is like, how do I structure my answer so that I'm always giving the right parts of these experiences to show off my best attributes but something that I don't have to think too hard about. And for that, I'm gonna share with you an approach called the S.H.E.A.R. method, S-H-E-A-R, and it's an easy formula for keeping every one of your interview answers robust, showing off your best attributes, but also very easy to remember in the heat of the moment in a real-life interview. I'm Mark Murphy, I'm the founder of Leadership IQ, I'm a New York Times bestselling author, and my most recent book is called Never Say These Words in a Job Interview: The words and phrases that win or lose you the job. So the S.H.E.A.R. method works like this. Anytime you get asked an interview question, you're going to describe the situation, the hurdle that you had to overcome. Every good story, every good response needs a bit of drama. You have to overcome something. That's what makes this interesting. So the situation, here's what I faced. Here's the hurdle, here's the challenge I had to overcome. Here's the end game. How I overcame those hurdles, and then my reflection. I'm going to reflect on this situation, show what I learned, and show how I grew as a result. Now, before I give you a real-life example, let me talk briefly about the other very common approach for answering interview questions, and it is what's known as the STAR approach. The STAR approach has been around for decades now, and the STAR approach says when you answer an interview question, you should give the situation and the task, the action you the result. Okay, very straightforward, right? So if I'm asked the interview question, "Could you tell me about a time you faced a tough deadline?" you might answer, "I was responsible for launching a marketing campaign." Okay, that's the situation and the task. "I created a detailed plan and delegated tasks efficiently to meet the deadline." That was my action. "And the campaign was launched successfully and on time." That's the result. Okay, now it's not horrible, it's not egregiously bad, but there's nothing super interesting about that, right? There's nothing that's really going to cause an interviewer, a hiring manager, a recruiter to actually pay attention to your response. The response doesn't show your emotional intelligence. It doesn't show that you have any great insight. It just— yeah, I had this situation, here's what I did, and it turned out okay. Boom, done. Not super interesting, not really captivating. Now let's take the same question but answer it with the SHARE approach. Okay, in my role as a marketing manager, I was spearheading a crucial campaign. That's the situation. However, we faced a tight deadline coupled with unexpected budget cuts. Hurdle. Ooh, now there's a little bit of drama there. To overcome this, I prioritized tasks, reallocated resources creatively, and streamlined communications. That's the endgame. That's what I actually did. The situation made me adept at resource management and instilled the sense of proactive planning in me, which I've applied in all subsequent projects. That's the reflection. And the The reflection is really the piece that gets missed in all of the other approaches for answering interview questions because the reflection shows why you're more emotionally intelligent, why you're smarter, why you're more innovative than other candidates because this is how you grew. You learned something here. So your response is more interesting 'cause you actually faced a hurdle. There's a dose of drama in there. And so, yeah, this is a little more captivating as a story., but the reflection shows, ooh, this is a person that actually learns and grows. This person is pretty emotionally intelligent. And given how big a characteristic that is for companies to hire for these days, showing that you can reflect and actually learn something, ugh, it just sets you apart from pretty much every other candidate out there. So anytime you're thinking about answering an interview question, just remember, Here's the situation, here's the hurdle. I need a dose of drama. There's no point to this answer if I don't have something that I overcame. Then share what you did. That's the end game. But then the reflection— show what you learned, how you grew from this, and it will absolutely set you apart from the vast majority of other candidates. I hope you check out my latest book, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview. There are a ton of good and bad answers in these interview— in these chapters showing you How to respond to a wide variety of interview questions.
