Why adjectives fall flat in an interview
The question about your strengths is not a knowledge question. It is a question of proof, and most people answer it with a list of words.
An adjective cannot be checked
Anyone can say "resilient", including people who are not. For the person across the table that is not information, it is a claim they would now have to verify themselves. Which is exactly why the follow-up comes: "Tell me about a situation where ..."
Under pressure, nothing comes to mind
You have lived through the right situation, more than one. It is just not there when you need it. What is missing is not the experience but access to it: a finished version you have already put into words once.
Every application starts from scratch
The same three or four stories carry you across all your applications. You still think them through from the beginning every time, because they are written down nowhere. Once they are, they become material you reuse instead of retrieving from memory.
- An adjective cannot be checked
- Under pressure, nothing comes to mind
- Every application starts from scratch
The question about your strengths is not a knowledge question. It is a question of proof, and most people answer it with a list of words.
The detour through a story
A story cannot be asserted. It has a place, a task, a decision and an outcome, and whoever tells it was evidently there. That is why hiring managers ask behavioural questions, and why the STAR method is the shape of a good answer: situation, task, action, result. This page does not give you the method, the guide does. It gives you the place where your own stories stay in that shape.
How a story takes shape
The form has five required fields and one optional one. It is deliberately not an empty text box: the split is what turns an anecdote into an answer.
Title
Short and recognisable, so you spot the story in the list straight away. Something like "Migration with zero downtime" or "Handover during sick leave".
Situation
Two or three sentences of context: where you were, what was going on, what was at stake. Without that opening, every result sounds smaller than it was.
Task
What was YOUR task, your responsibility? This is where it becomes clear whether you were on the team or whether you carried something.
Action
What you actually did, in the first person and in the active voice. The longest field, and rightly so: this is where how you work becomes visible.
Result
What came out of it in the end. Numbers beat adjectives, but only real ones. If there are none, describe the difference between before and after.
Reflection (optional)
What you took away, or what you would do differently today. This is the R behind STAR, and in an interview it is often the sentence that lands: it shows you can judge your own work.
- Situation
- Task
- Action
- Result
- Reflection (optional)
The form has five required fields and one optional one. It is deliberately not an empty text box: the split is what turns an anecdote into an answer.
Plus the skills
Every story carries tags you assign yourself, up to twenty of them. They show up on the card and turn the collection into something you search on purpose while preparing, instead of reading end to end.
Two sources, one list
The bank mixes what you write yourself with what your job checks have already produced. Both kinds sit side by side as equals, and a small badge tells you where a story came from.
Written by you
Your own stories. You create them, change them whenever you like and delete them again. They belong to your account rather than to a single application, so they stay put long after that application is closed.
From a job check
When you have a posting checked, the evaluation builds stories that match the requirements in the posting, drawn from what your resume actually says. They land in the bank automatically. You cannot edit them there: they are derived, and the next run would rebuild them anyway.
Master story
If the same story shows up in two or more evaluations, it gets the "master story" badge and moves to the top. That is not a rating, it is an observation: this story worked for several roles, so it is the one you want at your fingertips.
How the list is ordered
Your own stories come first, newest at the top, because those are the ones you actively maintain. The derived ones follow, sorted by how many companies the same story has already fitted. Each of those cards names the companies.
- Written by youYour own stories. You create them, change them whenever you like and delete them again. They belong to your account rather than to a single application, so they stay put long after that application is closed.
- From a job checkWhen you have a posting checked, the evaluation builds stories that match the requirements in the posting, drawn from what your resume actually says. They land in the bank automatically. You cannot edit them there: they are derived, and the next run would rebuild them anyway.
- Master storyIf the same story shows up in two or more evaluations, it gets the "master story" badge and moves to the top. That is not a rating, it is an observation: this story worked for several roles, so it is the one you want at your fingertips.
Your own stories come first, newest at the top, because those are the ones you actively maintain. The derived ones follow, sorted by how many companies the same story has already fitted. Each of those cards names the companies.
Where the second source comes from
Without a checked posting there are no derived stories. The job check reads the posting, compares it with your profile and builds these stories from it, among other things. Filling the bank by hand only costs you nothing - the two routes mix freely.
See how the job check worksWhat the AI polish may do, and what it may not
Next to the save button sits one that sends your story through a language model. It does not rewrite the story, it tidies it up. The rules are tight, and the four that matter most are here so you can read them before you press it.
Active instead of passive
"A process was introduced" turns back into what you did. Filler words go. The first person stays, because the story is yours and has to sound that way when you tell it.
Numbers only where numbers exist
The result gets quantified IF there are figures in your text. If there are none, none get added. An invented percentage is the most dangerous kind of polish there is once you are in the room.
Nothing invented
No new facts, no new figures, no new skills. That is written into the instruction the model receives, and it is the reason you can safely take the result at all: it can only contain what you put in yourself.
Strong fields stay untouched
The structure stays as it is, and fields that already work are left alone. That is why the comparison afterwards is usually short - it only shows what genuinely changed.
You decide what stays
The polished version is not saved. It appears next to yours, field by field, and only for the fields that differ. Then you have two buttons: apply or discard. If you apply, your skills stay exactly as you set them. If you discard, the suggestion is gone and your text is untouched.
- Without Pro you get three polish runs per 30 days; with Pro there is no cap. Creating, editing and deleting your stories is unaffected by that and costs nothing.
- Polishing happens in the language you use the interface in. A story written in English comes back in English.
- Before the text leaves the building, your contact details are swapped for placeholders: name, email address, phone number, postal address, website and the contacts behind your references. They are put back afterwards.
Who gets the most out of it
Not everybody needs this equally urgently. These four cases are the ones where it makes the biggest difference.
You have an interview coming up
Three or four good stories cover most behavioural questions, because the same situation can be told differently depending on what is asked. Write them down beforehand and you stop searching in the room; you pick.
You are writing a cover letter
The paragraph that carries a cover letter is nearly always an example. In the bank it already exists, fully worded, result included. You lift it into your text and trim it to the length that fits there.
You are changing fields or coming back
When you switch industries, the list of past roles matters less than the evidence that you have solved a comparable problem before. That is precisely what a story delivers, including one from a different field.
You have several applications running
Apply for several similar roles and the requirements start to repeat. The master stories show you in black and white which of your stories carries across all of them.