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20-second career tip

How to use the STAR method on your resume

About Rohan

Hey, I’m Rohan!

I write thoughts about life and career strategy a few times a month.

I run Coached, the behavioral science lab, and Resume Worded, the best software for job seekers.

A good place to start is our free 3‑minute, science-backed personality test.

You might have come across the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. It's usually known as an effective framework for answering interview questions. 

But it's also effective to use when writing your resume. I'll break down what it means, as well as give you an example of how to use it in practice.

First, here's what STAR stands for...

  • Situation: What was the context of the problem?

  • Task: What was the task that needed to be solved?

  • Action: What exactly did you do?

  • Result: What was the outcome? 

When writing your resume's bullet points, you should aim to touch on as many as you can. It's clearer with a real example:

  • Designed an email toolkit and style guide to enable teams to quickly build mobile-responsive emails and maintain visual consistency; led to time savings of 5+ hours per week

Let's break down how it uses the STAR approach:

  • Situation/Task: Enable teams need to build responsive emails.

  • Action: Created design components like a toolkit.

  • Result: Saved time!

Because bullet points need to be concise, the situation and task, or the action and result, might both be the same thing.

🎯  You should use a tool like Score My Resume to find out if your resume is effective enough. It'll analyze each line on your resume, plus the Magic Write feature will write bullet points for you that use the STAR method.

It’ll also give you ideas on how to quantify your bullet points, even if you haven't worked in a sales role or don't have access to numbers.

Illustration of Rohan Mahtani
Written by Rohan Mahtani
From Coached Weekly, issue 320.

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This is Coached Weekly, my career notes where I share the tiny % of ideas that actually work in real careers. It takes 5 minutes to read, but could speed up your career by years. I write this myself (no AI). —Rohan Mahtani (LinkedIn)

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