Civil Service interview technique advice needed please!

[Cellardoor7]

Hi all,

I’m an HEO applying for SEO roles and have been applying for a mix of permanent roles and expressions of interest.

Out of the roles I’ve applied for so far, I’ve been invited to interview for around half of them (applied for 11 roles and got 5 interviews). I’ve really tried to take on feedback from each interview and apply it to the next interview. I’m just waiting on feedback from an interview I did today.

I seem to be scoring better generally on strengths than behaviours (consistent 3 out of 4 on strengths, and 4s and 5s on behaviours). I haven’t been put on any reserve lists as all my interviews bar one have been for expressions of interest roles.

My main feedback on behaviours has been that my examples focused heavily on complex policy context and that the panel wanted me to clearly explain what I did and why.

I’m struggling to work how best to approach this, as I understand I need to get to the ‘actions’ part of my behaviour as soon as possible, but I also need to set out the background of my example to the panel, who’ll probably be unfamiliar with that.

Does anyone have any tips on this please?

I am an experienced Civil Service interviewer and also interviewee.

I also struggle to get to the actions part without spending too long on the context part. I am learning to explain the context as part of the actions (eg “I was aware of x interactions between Y and so I used Z skill to achieve/deliver/influence A” rather than a big preamble about the interactions before you reach the “I” statement).

When we interview, we are (or should be!) literally ticking off the items listed in the behaviours/strengths with a note on whether they’re below/at/above the job grade. Use the words from the frameworks to make that easy for the interviewers.

Listen carefully to follow up questions, particularly if they seem a bit random. Often you’ve ticked off most of the items on the framework and the follow up question is trying to nudge you to talk about the missing parts. We obviously don’t know your example inside and out and so the follow up questions often don’t fit perfectly - listen for what they’re asking for.

My final advice is to make sure you cover everything on the behaviours/strengths/skills you’re being assessed on. Even if that means answering a slightly different question to the one that’s asked! Anything you say in the room should be assessed, even if it isn’t a direct answer to the question. If they ask you if you’ve anything to add at the end, use that time to cover off any of the behaviour/strength items that haven’t been mentioned. You can preface it by signposting to the behaviour/strength saying something like “yes, I’d like to tell you a bit more about my experience dealing with conflict/stakeholders/complex analysis when I …….”. It feels awkward and clumsy because natural conversations don’t work like that, but a Civil Service interview (below SCS, anyway) isn’t a conversation; it is an evidence gathering meeting.

You can also take notes in with examples/breakdowns of the behaviours/strengths etc into the room. You ca even tick them off when you think you’ve delivered that evidence so you know what you’ve got left to cover on the “anything else to add” mop up at the end. You aren’t being quizzed on remembering these things, just being asked to present evidence of when you have done stuff.

I am sure that will all sound like crazy advice to private sector people. Civil Service recruitment is (or should be) a rigid score-based system. The person who scores highest on the day (by evidencing the most criteria at the highest level) gets to job - if they can deliver it all with style and finesse then that’s a bonus!

Good luck!

Thanks Happy!

What I’m finding tricky is how to set out my example for the panel with just enough detail that they understand why I took the actions I did.

A colleague recommended I basically ‘spoon feed’ the panel with my example, which I’ve found helpful advice, but I’m still feeling pretty stuck on how to keep my example intro high level but understandable. I’ve tried to use AI (Copilot) to help with this, but found it’s not great at this, as it tends to come up with corporate-speak and generalisations that don’t mean anything that I then have to edit.

Can you shed any light on that please?

@HappyAsASandboy

Really useful feedback. If I'm interviewing for an HR role and I'm asked 'tell us about a time you had to complete work at pace' do I:
A) give my best example of completing work 'at pace' (even if it's in an unrelated field such as nursing or teaching)
B) give a good example of working at pace that has examples of working with HR functions

@Rubycat6as long as there are obvious transferable skills then I’d use your best example regardless of the field. If you have non-HR (best) and HR (ok) examples you could always give your best example and the say that you also have HR examples if they’d like to hear it. If you haven’t ticked enough boxes with the first example and they don’t think they can cover missing ones off with follow up questions then they might invite a second example. The non-HR/HR distinction gives you the perfect opportunity to offer a second example.

Never interviewed for the civil service so the advice further up is more relevant to mine but I've interviewed a lot in industry. We often advise using "STAR", situation, task, action, result.

If you know what competencies the organisation has, try and reference them as well.

And yes, the previous poster saying the method sounds bizarre is right. It does.

Hello I'm much less experienced than you in this situation but have you tried feeding your planned response into AI ( Chat GPT or similar) and asking for an ideally structured response? I recently tried this for a CS interview and it worked really well.