In this lecture, I would like to share with you an example of how you can apply the start approach when you are addressed with a situation, a behavior or a competency based question. Now, all these questions are more or less very similar in case of a situation, the interviewer will ask you about a particular situation and how you will perform in that situation. At the same time, a behavioral question, like I mentioned earlier is something that the interviewer will ask because he or she wants to determine how you behaved in a situation that you had actually experienced. So, you have to give a relevant example from your recent past. And then finally, you have the competency based questions which are also very similar, where you will be addressed with a certain competency and you have to prove how you applied that competency in that particular situation.

For example, if you are a freshman and you have no experience behind you, in this case, I would recommend that you share some of the examples or the experience that you had while you were performing or you were undergoing different projects. What was your role in that role? What was your team's role in that project? And how you overcame that situation or that challenge? And what was the final result? At the same time, if you have experience, then I would recommend that you share a relevant example from your professional experience when you were addressed with a certain task in your working environment.

So it this is something that can be asked both if you are a fresh graduate with zero experience, and also with someone who has 10 years of experience, using this approach will help you give an answer which is concrete by using an example where you went through that situation, and were able to perform and give results. Now, for example, if I'm taking your interview, I will ask you a question about stress. Let's talk about stress. So the question will go something like this. As you know, the job that you have applied for has a lot of stress and you have to operate under strict timelines. Can you share an example with me where you encountered stress and how you overcame that situation?

Now this is a situational based question. Also a behavioral question. And also a competency based question. Like I said, there is not much difference between the three, when you are thinking or making the structure of your answer. Think of an example, where you encountered stress. If you are a fresh graduate, think of a project, which was very stressful for you.

Or maybe when you were working in a project and your exams were coming up how you overcame that stressful situation. If you have experience, try to relate it with your professional experience. So give an example where you were working as a team, and you were given an assignment as a team, or maybe as an individual, and you had to deliver within strict timeline. Moving on, let's assume that you are a fresh graduate and you don't have any experience behind you. In that case, you can share a project which for example, you were working in a project where you had to probably go do a survey with different organizations with regards to the gender diversity. Hypothetically speaking, this was a project that was given to you and you had three more individuals working with you as a team.

So in total, you were four individuals. You can start off by saying There's yes that I can recall an instance where we were given a project where we had to calculate the gender diversity in the market. And for that we had to visit various organizations in order to determine what diversity level they were operating in. And collectively, we had to submit a report after one month about the overall situation in the market with regards to gender diversity. So in this case, what we did was that we assigned different responsibilities to all the team members, my responsibility was to coordinate and ensure that they were all following timelines. Since I was responsible for this coordination part, it was my responsibility to visit three organizations.

At the same time, the other team members were given four organizations each. So in total we were targeting and we were hoping that we can cover at least 10 organizations and provide appropriate data to our university management in a span of 30 days. So over here, as you can see, that you have explained the situation and the task that you have at hand, then comes the action part. Then you can start with Sharing that after conducting two meetings, we nominated different organizations to all individuals. In my domain, I was responsible for A, B and C organization. And I decided that I will try to look for contacts who were preferably working in those organizations.

This was the same strategy that was adopted by the remaining team members as well. In the next five or six days, we used all our references and our contacts. And we were able to identify individuals who are working in those organizations. Then the next week, what we decided was that we started visiting those organizations. And we'd conducted a very brief survey for about five minutes. And we try to collect as much data as we can in the next two weeks.

Once we had appropriate data, and we were able to visit all the organizations that we decided our target was that we will visit at least 10 organizations. But in the end, we were able to overachieve our target and we managed to collect data for more than 15 organizations. Having said that, in the last week, we decided that we start compiling the data so that we can present the report to the management. That was a challenging task because we had very short timelines and the raw data coming in from different sources. It was a difficult task to compile everything and make a consolidated report. However we work together.

And my role as a project coordinator was that I ensured that keeping all personal and university commitments in mind, I made sure that all the team members were available so that we can collectively work on the report. In the end, after about 28 days, we were able to compile the report. And we gave a presentation to the university management, which was again a collective effort where all the team members came on stage and presented and we were able to secure a good grade in this particular project. Now, why I say this was a stressful situation for me especially was because I had to coordinate with three other individuals and try to ensure that all of them were available. And this was a difficult task because while we were working on this project, my other team members were also engaged in various other projects, and our final exam was due in a matter months.

So this was something that was stressful. However, sticking to strict timelines, and ensuring that all of us were available and keeping our priorities straight, we were able to achieve this task before the given timelines. So as you can see that this answer has a whole body and has an overall structure to it. So you started off by explaining the situation, then the overall tasks, the responsibilities that you shared while conducting this survey, and then the actions where you visited the organization's compiled all the data. And then after about three weeks, you sat down and started working on the report. And then the final result, as I mentioned, that you were able to achieve this in 28 days and the university management appreciated our collaborative effort, and we were able to secure XYZ grid