Civil Service Interview HELP

[Asvan]

I have an interview for a civil service admin type role, which I applied for recently. I've not had an interview in such a long time and I just needed some pointers please.

The only information I have is that I will be assessed against the following behaviours:

1. Delivering at pace.
2. Communicating and influencing.
3. Working together

When I filled in the application I already gave examples for all three of the above competencies. Will I have to think of new examples or will I be questioned in more details about the examples I gave?

Will I also be asked other questions like 'what are your strengths?' etc.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Most departments have now introduced success profiles which means you will be asked longer competency type questions for these three areas but also shorter questions about your strengths in these behaviours. I think it’s fine to reuse the examples you gave in your application if you have to, although I would also think about other examples in case needed. I also wouldn’t necessarily assume that the interview has remembered everything from the application so do practice your answers using the STAR approach rather assuming that they will probe further. Have you seen the details of the success profiles and strengths?

You will be asked questions based on the competencies and need to answer using the star method. (Both have loads of info if you Google) also have strengths based interview now which is quick questions which are to determine if you have the strengths required for the role. I would prepare a few examples based around the behaviours or competencies and practice talking about them using the star method. It's not HMLR is it?

It is possible too that they will ask you a couple of questions about your strengths - why you want the role and what you would bring to it etc - so I would suggest there’s no harm in preparing an answer. It is entirely possible they won’t though, and will go straight into the behaviours. When I’ve interviewed in the past I have asked these questions, but have generally treated these as a warm up question rather than something I would score a candidate on.

And good luck!

It's always good to have other examples, to show your breadth. I used to do a lot of recruitment in the Civil Service (before Success Profiles were introduced, though there's quite a lot of overlap between those and the older Competency Framework) and we'd quite often specifically ask for other examples if we thought a candidate was relying too heavily on one scenario. Also be aware that at least one of the interviewers may not have actually sifted your application (we treated them as separate processes and it was often only the hiring manager who both sifted and interviewed) so may just have read through it rather than going through in detail - so don't assume any prior knowledge.

Also, be aware that the question you are asked can often seem a little tangential to the competence - they probably won't actually ask you "Can you please tell me about an time when you delivered at pace?" - it's more likely to be something like "Can you please tell me about a time when you had to prioritise competing demands to meet a challenging deadline?" And there's usually one or more follow-up questions to that. We always used to tell people exactly what competence we were asking about though.

I never bothered with the 'what are your strengths' type questions, as there wasn't typically time in the interview, and the competence questions gave us what we needed. I'm not familiar with how interviews work under the new Success Profiles, though, and I know they were being introduced to to try and move away from pure competence-based interviewing.

Have you seen all the info here? I assume you would if you've successfully been sifted, but best to be sure!

www.gov.uk/government/publications/success-profiles

@Asvan how did you get on OP?