How to answer selection criteria with the STAR method (with a real example)

If a job ad has asked you to "address the selection criteria" and you have never been told what that means, you are not missing something obvious. Most CV advice online is written for the US and UK markets, where selection criteria do not exist as a separate step. Australian public sector employers, and a growing number of larger private employers, ask for it because it is a genuinely different task from writing a CV or a cover letter, and nobody teaches it as a subject on its own.

This guide explains what selection criteria are actually asking for, and walks through the STAR method, which is the structure most selection panels expect, whether or not the ad says so.

What selection criteria actually are

A CV says what you have done. A cover letter says why you want the job. Selection criteria ask something more specific: can you prove, with a real example, that you have already done the thing this role needs?

A typical criterion reads something like:

"Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively within a team to achieve shared outcomes."

That word "demonstrated" is doing a lot of work. It is not asking you to describe your general approach to teamwork. It is asking for one concrete instance where you did it, told as a short story with a beginning, a middle and an end. A panel reading forty applications is not looking for confidence or personality. They are looking for evidence, because evidence is what they can defend later if someone asks why you were shortlisted and someone else was not.

This is why simply pasting a paragraph from your CV under each criterion does not work. A CV lists what you did. A criterion response has to prove it.

The STAR method

STAR is a structure for turning a real work experience into evidence. It stands for:

• Situation. One or two sentences setting the scene. What was the context? What team, project or problem are we talking about?
• Task. What specifically were you responsible for? This is where you narrow from "the team" to "me."
• Action. What did you actually do? This is usually the longest part of the answer, and it is the part most people rush. Be specific about your own actions, not the team's.
• Result. What happened afterwards? A number, an outcome, a change. If you do not have a number, a clear before-and-after still works.

A rough guide to length: Situation and Task are short, a sentence or two each. Action is the bulk of the response. Result is short but concrete.

A worked example

Take the criterion above: demonstrated ability to work collaboratively within a team to achieve shared outcomes.

Situation: In my previous role at a community health service, our intake team was six weeks behind on client assessments after a staff member left unexpectedly, and wait times were affecting people who needed urgent support.

Task: As the senior caseworker on the team, I was asked to help bring the backlog under control without compromising the quality of assessments.

Action: I worked with the team to map where time was actually being lost, which turned out to be duplicate data entry between two systems. I proposed a shared checklist that cut that duplication, ran it past the team for feedback before rolling it out, and paired newer staff with more experienced caseworkers for the first fortnight so quality did not slip while speed improved.

Result: The backlog cleared in five weeks instead of the eight we had estimated, and the checklist is still used by the team now.

Notice what this is not. It is not a job description. It does not say "I am a strong team player." It proves teamwork happened, with a specific action this person took and a specific result. A panel reading this can picture exactly what the applicant did, which is the point.

Where people go wrong

Describing the job, not the example. "I am responsible for liaising with stakeholders and managing competing priorities" is a duty, not evidence. It could describe anyone in the role. A STAR response describes one thing that actually happened.

No result, or a vague one. "This helped the team a lot" tells the panel nothing they can weigh. A number, a timeframe, or a clear before-and-after gives them something concrete to score.

Copying straight from the CV. A CV and a criteria response are answering different questions. Repeating CV wording under a criterion usually means the example is too broad to prove anything specific, and a selection panel notices.

Using an example that does not match the criterion. Read the specific wording of the criterion twice before choosing an example. "Ability to work under pressure" and "ability to manage competing deadlines" sound similar and are not the same thing, and the wrong example, however well written, will not score well against the wrong criterion.

Checking your draft against the actual wording

The most common gap is not writing quality. It is a mismatch between the example chosen and the specific phrase the criterion uses, something that is hard to see in your own writing because you already know what you meant.

CVelo's free Criteria Checker reads the exact criteria from a job ad and checks a draft response against what each one is actually asking for, so you can see the gaps before a selection panel does. It takes a couple of minutes, and it needs no account to try.

Check your selection criteria response, free, no signup

This will not tell you whether you will be shortlisted. No tool can promise that, and any that does is overstating what it does. What it can do is show you, plainly, where a response is describing your job instead of proving it, which is the single most fixable problem in most first drafts.

For the bigger picture of how a whole application fits together, see how to address selection criteria in an Australian job application. And if your STAR examples are for the interview rather than the written response, the STAR method for Australian interviews covers that side.