Civil Service Success Profiles: Behaviours, Examples and How to Apply

You have found a Civil Service job you want. The advert asks for a CV and a statement, then lists three behaviours you have never heard described this way, mentions strengths at interview, and possibly an online test. All of that comes from one framework, Success Profiles. Once you know how it is put together, the advert reads like a marking scheme.

Everything below comes from the official GOV.UK and Civil Service Careers guidance, linked at the end. Where I give an opinion rather than a fact, I say so.

The Five Elements, and Why Your Advert Uses Only Some

A Success Profile has five elements. GOV.UK defines them like this, and Civil Service Careers lists the ways each one can be assessed:

Not all five apply to every job. The Civil Service Careers overview video puts it plainly: depending on the needs of the vacancy, the manager will select one or more of these elements for their process. So two adverts at the same grade can ask for completely different things. A policy role might test behaviours and a written exercise; a finance role might add a technical requirement such as an accountancy qualification, which is the example Civil Service Careers gives.

A few details from the same guidance change how you prepare:

• Experience is not time served. Civil Service Careers says it is not looking at how much time you spent in a field, but how you performed, and that experience is most often needed for senior roles or roles in the professions.
• Ability tests usually come early. They are often done at the beginning, scored automatically, and you are told whether you reached the pass benchmark.
• Technical requirements come from the profession. There are more than 20 Civil Service professions, and the head of each one defines the skills, knowledge and qualifications that can be asked for.
• Adjustments are available for any stage. GOV.UK gives large-print or braille documents, extra time and help at an assessment centre as examples, and asks you to say what you need when you apply.

The Nine Behaviours: the Manager Picks a Few

The official behaviours guidance says recruiting managers will choose a selection of behaviours best suited to the specific job role, and that you will not be asked to demonstrate all of them. The manager reviews the full set and picks the ones most relevant to the job, so the behaviours named in your advert are the ones your written examples are marked against.

These are the nine, with the one-line definitions GOV.UK uses:

Those definitions are the same at every grade. They are also too broad to write against. The useful part of the guidance is further down the page.

How the Behaviours Change by Grade

GOV.UK publishes examples of each behaviour for six grade groups: Administrative Assistant and Administrative Officer (AA/AO), Executive Officer (EO), Higher and Senior Executive Officer (HEO/SEO), Grade 7 and Grade 6, Deputy Director, and Director and Director General. The grade examples are where you find out what the panel actually expects.

Here is Delivering at Pace, quoted from the official examples for four of those groups:

Read down the column and the scope widens. At AA/AO the examples are about your own work. At EO they reach into the team's activities and barriers. At HEO/SEO you are balancing other people's workloads and letting them own objectives. At Grade 7 and Grade 6 you are setting the standards other managers work to.

Making Effective Decisions shows the same pattern. The EO examples include talking to relevant people for advice when unsure how to proceed, and explaining how decisions were reached clearly in speech and writing. The Grade 7 and Grade 6 examples include presenting reasonable conclusions from complex and sometimes incomplete evidence, and making decisions confidently even when details are unclear or unpopular.

Two practical points. First, the guidance says there is no expectation that you demonstrate every part of each example, so do not try to hit every bullet in 250 words. I would pick two or three that your real example genuinely shows. Second, pitch to the grade on the advert. An HEO application built on an example that only shows AO-level indicators, such as organising your own workload, leaves the assessor with little to credit, even if the story is well told.

Strength Questions Are Not Behaviour Questions

One interview can include both, and preparing for them the same way is a mistake. The official sources describe them differently on almost every point:

The answer lengths come from civil servants' tips on the Civil Service Careers page for scientists and engineers (interviews up to Grade 6) and from Defra's digital recruitment blog, which gives “What motivates you to get up in the morning?” and “Would others describe you as an analytical person?” as examples of strength questions.

GOV.UK says a strength has three parts: performance (you do it to a high level), engagement (it motivates and energises you) and use (you do it regularly). A good strength answer touches all three without sounding scripted. The sources pull in slightly different directions here: Defra says you don't need STAR, while the Civil Service Careers tips suggest linking your answer to a real example. I would do both. Give your honest first reaction, then one short real instance in a sentence or two, with no Situation-Task-Action-Result scaffolding. If your answer sounds like a behaviour statement, you have over-prepared it.

GOV.UK also publishes the full Strengths Dictionary with each strength mapped to the most relevant behaviour, and notes that any strength can be assessed if it suits the role. Reading it once before the interview is worth it for the vocabulary, not to memorise answers.

How Behaviour Evidence Is Scored

Your advert states how each stage is marked. For one concrete description, a resourcing partner in Defra's digital, data and technology team wrote in 2023 that they use a Civil Service rating scale between 1 and 7 for each assessment on the job advert, and that you need a 4 or more on each assessment to pass to the next stage.

“On each” is the part that matters. A 7 on Working Together does not rescue a 3 on Delivering at Pace. That is why I would spend equal effort on every listed behaviour, starting with the one you find hardest to evidence rather than the one you enjoy writing about.

Choosing and Writing a Behaviour Example

Civil Service Careers says to choose examples that clearly show the behaviour, let you explain in some detail what you personally did, and had positive results. Less successful examples are allowed if you show what you learned and how you would avoid the errors in future. Examples can come from work experience, volunteering or a hobby. The candidate overview adds a warning I would underline: do not assume the recruiting manager will know or understand the situation you were facing.

GOV.UK recommends the STAR method so you set the scene, show what and how you did it, and give the outcome. My own rule on top of that: keep Situation and Task to two or three sentences between them, and spend most of the words on Action, written with “I”. “We redesigned the process” gives the assessor nothing they can credit to you.

If the same advert also asks for a personal statement against the essential criteria, plan your examples across both documents so none is used twice. The Civil Service personal statement guide walks through one statement mapped line by line to a sample advert.

Worked Example: Delivering at Pace at HEO

The example below is fictional. It was written to show the HEO/SEO indicators from the table above, not taken from a real application. It is 231 words, to sit under a 250-word limit.

What an assessor could credit, against the official HEO/SEO examples:

• Setting milestones for each person and checking them twice a week matches “regularly monitor your own and team's work against milestones”, and GOV.UK adds that individual needs are considered when setting tasks.
• Moving enquiries to a rota instead of adding hours matches “act promptly to reassess workloads and priorities when there are conflicting demands to maintain performance”.
• Letting experienced caseworkers decide complex cases matches “allow individuals the space and authority to meet objectives… whilst keeping overall responsibility”.
• Negotiating the finance pause and reordering work matches keeping the whole team's efforts focused on the top priorities.

The same story written at EO would centre on the writer's own caseload and spotting barriers to progress. At Grade 7 it would need to show the writer setting the performance process for several teams, not running one team through a crunch.

If the Advert Asks for a CV Too

GOV.UK says you may be asked for an anonymised CV that leaves out information that could identify you, such as your name, age or gender, and you may be asked to include only qualifications relevant to the role. Follow those instructions exactly. Beyond that, the CV should carry the same evidence as your behaviour examples in shorter form, so an assessor reading both sees one consistent picture. Once you reach interview, the panel asks about the behaviours listed in the advert, so the examples you wrote become the starting point for your spoken answers. The NHS interview questions guide covers a similar values-and-behaviour interview format in the health service, if you are applying across both.

Frequently Asked Questions