Civil Service - ghosting, or behind schedule?

[JustNormalMen]

I'm looking for a midlife career change, and the civil service is appealing because they shortlist on skills rather than specific experience. I stuck in an application for a job where the recruitment timetable said interviews would be w/c 13/05 , so this week. I've not heard a dickie bird, but my application status is showing that it's still live, rather than unsuccessful. Which is more likely - that I've not been shortlisted and have been ghosted, or they're dramatically behind schedule on recruitment?

I also applied for 1 with interview scheduled for this week and had heard nothing until a few days ago, when I got an email saying they were taking longer to sift the applications so interviews would be later. So hopefully they are just running behind schedule.

Far more likely they are behind which is quite a frequent occurrence.

CS don't ghost, the online system means we can't do that, there'll always at least be an automated no eventually. We do however run behind schedule for recruitment all the flipping time! Especially at the moment where a lot of departments are bringing in recruitment freezes, there's a lot of general uncertainty about which recruitment can continue and under what circumstances, which is holding up lots of campaigns generally. I wouldn't read anything sinister into it at all, it's almost certainly just a slipped timetable.

There is currently a headcount reduction 'challenge' (otherwise known as job cuts). Some recruitment might be on hold until the department has decided where cuts will land.

Other than that the civil several are usually incredibly slow with recruitment anyway

Civil service recruitment is glacially slow, but you always get an outcome. Try contacting the person or department listed on the job ad for an update.

I don't recall a single campaign I've been involved with where we stuck to the published timetable for sift/interview/results. You have to put something, so you put something aspirational because you can't put "I'm having to do this around my massive workload, John dropped out of the panel at the last minute, we got 50 trillion applications so goodness knows when or if we'll ever get though them, Linda's on holiday so we can't interview in the next two weeks..." etc etc.

For my current CS job I had to nudge them after a month as I'd still not got the application sift outcome, it turned out they'd got over 500 applications so it had taken much longer than they anticipated. Interviews were arranged promptly but over 2 months after the date they'd published.

Much appreciated all. It's good to know I will eventually get a formal brush off, rather than just being left in the dark!

Like PP you will get an answer. If you want you could send an email asking for any news but I am going to be honest when I run a campaign I ignore these emails 😅

My rejection came through today. Doesn't bode well for the application I made to the same department but a grade higher 😬. Back to the drawing board I guess!

@JustNormalMen Mine too, wonder if it was the same role! I'm not having much success with the skills sections on the civil service applications.

Insolvency?

No data science for acas. Must have been the day for rejections!

What scores did you get?

Bear in mind that not the same person will read both applications

there was just one scored element - a technical skills test. Only managed a 4. My H works in a similar field although not for the CS, and thought my answers were decent, but clearly we were both missing something...never mind!

A 4 is a pass and an automatic interview. They might have had too many people to interview and needed to make the cut somewhere. I know this does not make it better. Anything 3 and below is an automatic disqualification, 4 average/bench mark, 5 wow and 6-7 bloody impossible.

Basically 4 is really good

@YorkshireIndie that's kind of you to say, thank you.
I've seen another ad where they're recruiting for 50 posts, so although IMO it's not such a good fit for my skills, perhaps "acceptable" will be sufficient for this one 😀

4 is not an automatic interview at all!

1, and 2 are bad
3 is "nearly there"
4 is minimum pass mark - you are guaranteed an interview if you qualify for the scheme for people with disabilities.
Otherwise, 4 MAY get you an interview so long as no one scoring higher turns up, or there aren't many applicants
5 is basically what you need to get a chance, especially as these days the general pass mark tends to get raised due to volumes of applications and we can't interview 40 people for a role
6 is possibly you applied for the wrong grade
7 is you definitely applied for the wrong grade, will quickly realise this and probably leave really quickly 😆

They don’t ghost. You’ll find out either way. Often delayed as recruitment gets pushed back when other things happen, rarely stick to the timetable