Insights
Beyond STAR: Why You Need to Tell Great Stories to Get Great Jobs
May 26, 2026
My friend Carl is a senior lawyer here in Basel, near the top of his field. He wears a Casio — black plastic, about fifteen francs, and it keeps better time than watches costing a thousand times more. He also has no LinkedIn, no profile, no online presence of any kind. None of it has cost him a thing, because everyone who needs to know what Carl is worth already does. His reputation travels hand to hand. He does not tell his story; other people tell it for him.
My oldest friend, Rob — forty years now — [makes watches by hand] in a room built a thousand years ago in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral. He made me one ten years ago. It is worth more to me than anything with a famous name on the dial, and not for its specification — it keeps worse time than Carl’s Casio. I wear it because Rob made it, for me, by hand, in that ancient room; and because it is the kind of thing you look after and hand on, rather than merely own.
Two friends, two watches, two answers to the only question that really matters: what is a thing actually worth? Hold on to that question, because it is also the one every interview is asking about you. And most senior candidates answer it like a Casio — accurate, reliable, forgettable — because they have been trained to, by a framework with a friendly acronym and a great deal to answer for: STAR.
STAR is not wrong. It is just built for a different job than the one you are now trying to get.
STAR Makes You Sound Operational — Which Is Fine, Until It Isn't
Situation, Task, Action, Result. It is a tidy way to answer a question, and at junior and mid levels it works well, because at those levels the job genuinely is a well-defined box. The task is clear. The success criteria are clear. “Here was my situation, here was my task, here is what I did, and here is the clean result” is exactly the right shape of answer, because that is exactly the shape of the work.
The problem is what happens as you move up. The more senior you become, the more your actual job is everything *outside* the box. The ambiguity. The competing priorities. The politics. The call you had to make with half the information and none of the time. There is no tidy box any more — managing the absence of one *is* the job.
STAR has no room for any of that. It flattens a complex, judgement-heavy situation into four obedient steps and leaves the most valuable part — how you saw the problem and how you decided — in the drafts folder. So a senior leader answering in STAR sounds like a highly competent operator describing tasks, at the precise moment the panel is trying to work out whether you can navigate the mess that has no checklist.
You sound like someone who executes. They are trying to hire someone who decides.
Hiring Managers Don't Discover Your Value. They Construct It
Here is one of my favourite findings in behavioural science. In a 2005 study published in the *Journal of Marketing Research*, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely gave people an energy drink said to boost mental sharpness, then set them puzzles to solve. One group paid full price. The other got the identical drink at a discount. The full-price group solved noticeably *more* puzzles — from the same drink. The price had not changed the liquid. It had changed the person drinking it.
The lesson is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure: **value is not discovered. It is constructed.** Our brains build a story that justifies the choice and protects us from the indignity of feeling foolish. (Neuroscientists have since watched this happen in real time — identical wine rated more pleasant when it’s labelled expensive, with the brain’s pleasure centre genuinely lighting up to match.)
Hiring runs on exactly this machinery. As I have written before, most hiring managers cannot articulate precisely what they want — but they know it when they see it. Translated: they *feel* the decision first, then assemble the reasons afterwards. The reasons are for HR. The feeling is the verdict.
This is the part candidates miss. A STAR answer hands the panel a spec sheet. A story hands them the raw material to build the case *for you* — the version they will repeat to their colleagues the moment you have left the room. That retelling, the one you are never present for, is where most jobs are genuinely won or lost. You cannot sit in on that conversation. But you can write its script.
A Story Is an Identity Marker
The watch Rob made me is not on my wrist for its accuracy. It is there for what it says — who made it, what I value, the friendship behind it. People ask about it, and every time there is a story. It is not telling the time. It is telling them something about me.
Your best stories do precisely the same work. “I delivered the programme on time and under budget” is a fact about a task. It is a Casio. Who you were when that programme caught fire at week three — the call you made when the data came back wrong, the thing you protected when everyone wanted to cut it — that is identity. That is what makes a hiring manager think, *I want this person in the building.*
A result is something you achieved. A story is evidence of how you operate. People do not hire achievements. They hire the person they believe will behave well when it is their name on the decision.
What a Great Story Is Actually Made Of
Here is the practical part, and it is far simpler than the framework you are replacing. Two ingredients do almost all the work — and a result is not the headline, it is the footnote.
**Context — the superpower.** This is the single biggest thing STAR throws away. Not “the situation” as a flat one-liner, but the situation *behind* the situation: what was really at stake, why it was genuinely hard, the constraint nobody else could see, the political weather in the room. Senior people are paid to read context. Showing a hiring manager that you saw all of it — before you did anything about it — is the most senior signal you can send. It is the difference between “there was a difficult stakeholder” and “the difficult stakeholder controlled the budget, distrusted my predecessor, and was three weeks from walking.”
**Your thinking — the decision process.** Once they can see the real context, show them how you moved through it. The fork in the road. What you weighed. The option you rejected and why. The judgement you made with incomplete information. They are not hiring your hands; they are hiring your head. Let them watch it work.
Everything else is support: what it cost you, what it took, and — in one closing line — how it turned out. Tell the whole thing in ninety seconds, out loud, like a person rather than a candidate. By the time you reach the result, it is almost beside the point, because they have already decided how they feel about you.
The Good News (and There's Rather a Lot of It)
Here is where the watches come back.
A great career story is Rob’s watch. Not a spec sheet — that is the Casio, and the Casio is STAR. Not the off-the-shelf version, either — the CV polished until it sounds like every other CV in the pile. Rob’s watch is the only kind that is truly yours: not the cheapest, not the most prestigious, but the most *true* — one of a kind, made for you, vouched for by people who know you. That is the version that gets repeated in the room you will never sit in.
And the genuinely good part is that this asks nothing of you that you do not already have. You are not being asked to invent anything, or become anyone. You lived these stories. The fire at week three actually happened. The context you read, the option you rejected, the thing you protected — all of it is already yours. The only thing missing is permission to tell it as the human moment it was, instead of flattening it into four obedient initials.
Storytelling is not a dark art, and it is certainly not a personality you have to fake. It is a craft, it is learnable, and — unlike rehearsing STAR bullets at the bathroom mirror — it is rather good fun. Do enough of it, for long enough, and one day you get to be Carl: a Casio, no LinkedIn, and a phone that does not stop.
The watch on my wrist — the one Rob made — keeps worse time than a Casio. It has never once worried about it. It knows exactly what it is.
So might you. If your stories are in there somewhere but they keep coming out as a spec sheet, that’s usually a forty-minute problem, not a forty-year one. Let’s talk it over.
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