Civil Service - G7 interview tips

[beezlebubnicky]

Hi

Anyone else in the CS out there? I've got my first policy G7 interview coming up, I've been an SEO for 4 years. Any tips for standing out and getting that promotion?

Experience based on several criteria given in the application is going to be tested rather than behaviours. I find these sort of interviews a lot harder to prepare for as they can be a bit more 'tell me about a time when you...' but I've also heard that G7 interviews tend to be more conversational.

For my examples, I'm going to think about leadership and how I deliver through others, how I dealt with challenging situations and brought people together to solve problems, find consensus, etc. It's so competitive right now going for these jobs, and I will be up against existing G7s wanting to move laterally as well, so want to give myself the best chance possible.

Any suggestions for how to prep would be welcome.

The key thing IME is to focus on leadership - making sure that other people are performing to a high level with your direction/support. Lots of SEOs trying to get promoted don't realise this and just talk about work they did personally.

Try and draw out the complexity in your examples, why was it difficult? What challenges did you have to overcome? Anything happen along the way that meant you had to change direction? I sit on a lot of G7 panels and people can undersell situations trying to make it sound like everything went well and in the process make everything seem so easy that we worry they’d struggle if faced with any hurdles. In real life you’ll face challenges so we need to know you know how to tackle them, when to ask for help, when to escalate issues, that you can adapt etc.

It is a tough time at the moment so don’t be discouraged if you don’t get it, ask for feedback and reflect on how it went for next time. Good luck!

Have they told you the behaviours they will be testing? Use those to find example questions online and develop a good star answer for each. Have 4-5 examples for each behaviour so you can select the appropriate response.
Remember to talk about what you did not your team- I not we.
Lits of people calm down on ‘action’ and spend to long on ST. you need to talk in detail about exactly what you did.

If you use STAR to work through your examples, use R as result and reflection. What went well and what could have been better and how you have applied learning from that situation. I would want to see drive and leadership, ownership and expertise in your policy area, so I don't need to be over the details and an emphasis on the well-being of your team in pacey environments when you don't have enough resource to do things in the way you would ideally like to.
An understanding of the political environment, while we are neutral, an appreciation of the political landscape.

I have literally this week been promoted from SEO to G7, on my second attempt.

I agree with the PP about results and reflection. I focused on the results part of STAR the most, and my feedback was all about how 'she clearly demonstrated the impact of her actions and decisions, not just on her immediate area and team, but on wider departmental strategy and approach'. Going into the interview I was advised by my manager that at G7 level they are looking for evidence of genuine impact - in terms of your actual work, yes, but also in terms of how you influence, persuade, mentor and lead more widely. So come up with concrete examples of those - how you thought about an issue, what action you took, why you took it, and what impact it had.

One thing I found really helpful when preparing (and I checked that this was acceptable AI use beforehand - which it is in my dept; may be different in yours):

I fed the job description into ChatGPT and Gemini (they came up with different responses) with the following prompt:

"I am applying for a position as a [job role] in the UK civil service. Read between the lines in the job description below, then list out each of the essential criteria one by one, and tell me what skills, behaviours, qualities, traits, attitudes or prior experience you are looking for, and suggest ways I can best demonstrate them.

Respond as though you are a panel of [senior policy advisers or whoever will be interviewing you] with decades of experience in both working with and interviewing for [the role you're applying for]."

Honestly, the responses were so useful for helping me to organise my thoughts around each of the job requirements and desired experience/behaviours. Once I had finalised my examples, I also asked ChatGPT to sense check that they accurately reflected those points.

Note: I did not use AI to embellish or exaggerate my examples in any way, just to check I was hitting the right points. Eg, I'd say 'Read this example answer and tell me if it demonstrates my ability to [lead a complex project] in a compelling way. Pay particular attention to how I have talked about my actions and the impact of them. Have I successfully shown how I [take responsibility, think strategically, navigate complexity, share knowledge, influence tricky stakeholders, improve efficiency]? If not, how could I make it better?"

This just helped me to finesse my examples, and by doing this work and reading through them all so many times, I was able to deliver them much more fluently and confidently in the interview.

Good luck, OP! Let us know how you get on.

(By the way, my interview wasn't conversational at all - it was very structured, with set questions, and there was no veering off from that. May be different in a policy role - I'm in a tech role.)

Thanks everyone, some really helpful tips! Congratulations @EricTheGardener and I'm definitely going to try that to help me with prepping examples . I'd never used it before for a job, but I did actually use AI to help me cut down my personal statement as the word count was tight - it does make up some crap though so you have to check it carefully afterwards to make sure it's accurate.

@JamDisaster The interview is Experience - linked to criteria in the job advert, not using Behaviours. I had an interview like this before and it was a 'tell me about a time when you...' sort of questions. I do find with these ones it can be less straightforward to prep examples as it's not as clear, the range of what they might ask you.

I feel really chuffed for even getting through sift!

My interview is in a few days - all the helpful tips are great. I've been refining my examples and have also done a couple of mock interviews which were incredibly helpful and gave me stuff to work on - the feedback from them was that I was a really credible candidate, so that has given me some confidence too.

Feeling super nervous but hopeful. I'm going to give it a go and do my very best.

I will come back and let you know how I get on, it might take a while to find out when it comes to CS recruitment.

Good luck! Sounds like you are super prepared, so try to relax and appear confident. Take time to gather your thoughts if you need to, and if you're worried about looking awkward or flailing, you can just say 'I'm just considering the best way to structure my answer' or something, or 'I'm just going to check my notes'. As my line manager told me, the panel really want you to do well. And if they ask you a follow-up question, that's normally a clue that they need a bit more from you to get a really comprehensive, high-scoring answer.

I only had to wait just over a week to get my outcome, but that was also because I was one of the last people to be interviewed. Hopefully yours won't take too long. Let us know how you get on!

Popping back to say how I got on. I feel like it went fairly well, I was pretty relaxed and confident in the way I gave my answers and think I really gave it my best.

I did have one follow up question that I don't know that I answered quite as strongly as the others - I momentarily forgot something, so got in a slight muddle when giving the answer. They didn't ask any additional follow ups after that though, so maybe I did manage to answer what they wanted to know (I finished well within time so don't think that would have been a factor). I say this as I've done interviewing and when a candidate still didn't give me what I wanted with a follow up, I'll probe further to see if I can get it out of them. But who knows.

Hoping I might have at least managed to make the reserve list! Fingers crossed.

Classic post interview overthinking! Apparently I might not hear for a month though 🤯 CS recruitment timelines eh...

@beezlebubnicky Well done! Hope it takes a lot less than a month to hear back!

My recent promotion was off a reserve list. I went for a G7 role and was unsuccessful, but was placed at no.1 on the reserve list and was offered another role only a few weeks later.

Anyway, sounds like you did really well. Fingers crossed for you!

Another update! I didn't get the job but came second out of 10 people and am at the top of the reserve list - they said my interview was really good and didn't really have any feedback, so possibly something else might come up.

I've already had a chat with a vacancy manager who had an identical job available, however it didn't go well. I'd prepared for all eventualities including virtually another interview, but they came across as kind of hostile and grilled me extensively on everything I said, which was pretty off-putting. So I think I'm not going to be getting that. Never mind.

Well done! Hopefully something will come up soon.

Congrats that's great! As per my post above, I got my role off the reserve list pretty quickly so hopefully will be the same for you.

@EricTheGardener Thanks. When you had your reserve list chat, was it fairly informal?
The one I had recently was like a full interview really, but other ones I've had in the past were not like that.

Apols, only just seen this. Yes it was very informal. I basically had an initial chat after my interview to be told I hadn't got the role but I'd been placed in 1st position on the reserve list. Then weirdly a few weeks later I got an offer letter out of the blue from the recruitment team and did I want to accept? This was before anyone in my actual dept had come to me to say another position had become available. When I did eventually speak to the lead person in my area, it was just an informal chat to say, well done, good that you haven't had to wait too long for a role, etc. Nothing interview-like about it at all.