Civil Service Success Profiles

[Bestmummy2]

I have an interview in 2 weeks, on behaviours and success profiles. Just about managed to get an interview with 4s for all 3 behaviours for Senior Executive Officer. Not great but at least i got an interview right?

Any idea what sort of questions i should expect for success profile? Are the success profile questions going to be related to the behaviours that were listed on the job advert?

Communicating and influencing
Delievering at pace
Changing and improving.

I havent done well in the past so any sort of tips/help will be appreciated.

I've got an interview with success profiles soon too. What I understand is that questions will be linked to the three behaviours and interviews may say which when asking the question. You may also have strength questions too, these answers cannot be rehearsed like the behaviour ones. Good luck.

The questions will definitely be linked to the behaviours in the advert.
If you look in civil service website you can find a document about success profiles with all the behaviours split out by grade. So it'll say for each behaviour what they expect you to demonstrate at each grade. Try to find that and use it to prep your answers.

Have several examples for each behaviours, the way they word the question may throw you and make one planned answer unusable.
Feel free to take your examples/notes in with you, it's fine to do that and refer. I used flash cards, one for each behaviour with bullet points naming a few diff examples which helped

They will be competence-based questions, probably on the behaviours you have listed, but check the advert. You need to have some good examples of times when you have displayed the behaviours. There might be strengths questions too, the advert should say. Hope it goes well.

They will be along the lines of “tell me about a time when you….” and linked to the behaviour. Could possibly be a “what would you do if…” but those are less widely used.

Have a couple of examples ready for each behaviour, but remember to answer the question and not just recite your prepared answer, for SEO grade we expect to see the questions paid attention to and answered. Make some notes to work from, write down the question when they ask it , take a brief pause to think and choose your example, then make sure you link it back to the question.

Make sure you understand the behaviour too:
Communicating and influencing is about how you communicated ie what methods did you choose, not what you communicated. So make sure you talk about eg did you decide to use a PowerPoint and why, did you need to tailor your approach to the audience, did you prep materials in advance etc.
Delivering at pace is not about doing things fast! Although your example should have a clear timescale, and don’t choose a long one (interviewed someone recently who took 3 yrs to do something…..) also it’s about prioritising etc and how you made sure the rest of your work didn’t suffer.
Changing and improving talk about why you made changes, your thought processes etc.

Always had 1 example in the past maybe thats where i was going wrong.... i will try think of others instead of just building on the ones i used when applying.

@Doorhandleghost & @TeethingBabyHelp, thanks for the detailed tips, i will be thinking of other exampes in the next days. Instead of what i have done in the past just reciting what i prepared. Im almost finished with one set of examples not sure if they strong enough though. My past failures in interviews wrecked my confidence.