Civil Service Success Profiles: Behaviours, Examples and How to Apply
How Success Profiles work in Civil Service recruitment — the nine Behaviours, what assessors score, and worked STAR examples for applications and interviews.
Success Profiles is the recruitment framework the UK Civil Service uses in place of conventional CV-based hiring. Instead of assessing your career history as a whole, it scores you against specific elements chosen for each role — most commonly Behaviours, and sometimes also Strengths, Ability, Experience, and Technical skills. Applications are usually anonymised, so where you worked and where you studied are hidden from assessors. What gets scored is the quality of the evidence you provide against each named Behaviour, structured as specific examples with clear outcomes.
This changes what a good application looks like. A strong CV that would impress a private-sector recruiter can score poorly against Success Profiles if the evidence is not mapped explicitly to the named Behaviours. This guide covers the nine Behaviours, how they are scored, and how to write evidence that scores well.
What Are Success Profiles?
Success Profiles replaced the older competency framework across UK Civil Service recruitment. The core idea is that different roles need different things assessed, so each vacancy specifies which elements will be tested rather than applying a single template to everything.
There are five elements. Any given vacancy will use some combination of them:
| Element | What it assesses | How it is usually tested |
|---|---|---|
| Behaviours | The actions and activities you demonstrate that lead to effective performance | Written evidence in the application, plus interview questions |
| Strengths | What you naturally do well and enjoy — motivation and fit | Interview questions, often unprepared and fast-paced |
| Ability | Aptitude to perform a task or duty | Online tests — numerical, verbal, situational judgement |
| Experience | Knowledge and achievements from your career to date | CV, personal statement, or interview questions |
| Technical | Professional or specialist skills specific to the role | Presentation, technical exercise, or specialist questions |
The job advert will state exactly which elements are being assessed and, for Behaviours, which specific ones. That list is your instruction sheet — everything you write should map to it.
What Are the Nine Civil Service Behaviours?
There are nine Behaviours in the framework. Most vacancies assess between three and five of them, chosen for relevance to the role.
| Behaviour | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Seeing the Big Picture | Understanding how your work fits the wider organisational and political context, and aligning it to strategic priorities |
| Changing and Improving | Seeking better ways of working, responding constructively to change, improving processes and services |
| Making Effective Decisions | Using evidence and analysis to reach sound, timely decisions, and being clear about the basis for them |
| Leadership | Showing visible leadership, setting direction, and role-modelling standards — regardless of grade |
| Communicating and Influencing | Communicating clearly and persuasively, adapting to different audiences, building support for a position |
| Working Together | Building supportive, inclusive working relationships across teams and organisations |
| Developing Self and Others | Investing in your own and others' development; coaching, feedback, and learning |
| Managing a Quality Service | Delivering to a high standard for users, managing resources and expectations, handling risk |
| Delivering at Pace | Working to demanding timescales, maintaining momentum and quality under pressure |
Each Behaviour is defined at every grade from Administrative Assistant to Senior Civil Service, and the definitions differ meaningfully by level. "Leadership" at Executive Officer is about role-modelling and supporting colleagues; at Grade 7 it is about setting direction for a team and representing the organisation. Read the level description that matches the grade you are applying for, not the general heading.
How Are Civil Service Applications Scored?
Behaviour evidence is scored against a published scale, typically running from 1 to 7:
| Score | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 7 | Outstanding — strong evidence across all indicators, exceptional outcome |
| 6 | Excellent |
| 5 | Good — clear evidence, meets the standard comfortably |
| 4 | Acceptable — meets the minimum standard |
| 3 | Minor concerns — evidence is thin or partially relevant |
| 2 | Concerns |
| 1–0 | Little or no evidence provided |
Most vacancies set a minimum pass mark — commonly 4 — for every Behaviour assessed. This is the single most important thing to understand about Civil Service applications: you generally cannot compensate for a weak Behaviour with a strong one. Scoring 7 on Communicating and Influencing does not rescue a 3 on Delivering at Pace. Each Behaviour must clear the bar independently.
The practical implication is that your effort should be distributed evenly across every Behaviour assessed, not concentrated on the ones you find easiest to write about.
How Do You Write Civil Service Behaviour Examples?
Use the STAR method — Situation, Task, Action, Result. Civil Service assessors are trained to look for it, and evidence that does not follow it is harder to score even when the underlying example is strong.
The critical detail: the Action section should be roughly 60–70% of your word count. Applicants routinely spend most of their statement describing the situation and almost none describing what they personally did. Assessors score your actions. Everything else is context.
| Section | Proportion | What to include |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | ~10% | Brief context. One or two sentences. Enough to make the rest make sense. |
| Task | ~10% | What specifically you were responsible for — not the team, you. |
| Action | ~60–70% | The steps you personally took, in sequence, with reasoning. Use "I", not "we". |
| Result | ~15% | The measurable outcome, plus what you learned or what changed as a result. |
The "we" problem
The most common reason for a low score is evidence written in the first person plural. "We identified the issue and we redesigned the process" tells an assessor nothing about your contribution. Every sentence describing an action should begin with "I". If you genuinely cannot write a sentence with "I" in it, that part of the example is not your evidence.
Worked Behaviour Examples
The examples below are written at roughly Executive Officer to Higher Executive Officer level and sit within a typical 250-word limit. Adapt the scale and complexity to your grade.
Making Effective Decisions
Situation: Our team managed a grant scheme with a fixed annual budget. Six weeks before year end, applications exceeded the remaining funds by around 40%.
Task: I was responsible for recommending an allocation approach to our Grade 7 within a week, so decisions could be communicated before the deadline.
Action: I began by establishing the actual position rather than relying on the reported figure — I reconciled the finance system against our case management records and found £22,000 of lapsed commitments that had not been released, reducing the shortfall. I then set out three options: reduce all awards proportionally, apply the published eligibility criteria more strictly, or prioritise by scheme objectives. I tested each against the scheme's published criteria and against the risk of legal challenge, and consulted our legal adviser on the second option, which she flagged as inconsistent with what applicants had been told. I discounted it on that basis. I modelled the financial and delivery impact of the remaining two options and recommended prioritising by scheme objective, because it protected the highest-impact projects and was defensible against the published criteria. I documented the reasoning and the rejected options so the decision could be audited.
Result: My recommendation was accepted and implemented. All applicants received decisions before the deadline, no appeals were upheld, and the audit team cited the documented decision trail as good practice. I have since applied the same approach of verifying the underlying data before analysing options, which on one occasion revealed a reporting error worth £15,000.
Communicating and Influencing
Situation: A policy change affecting how a service was delivered had been agreed centrally, and frontline teams in three regional offices were resistant, with two team leaders formally objecting.
Task: I was asked to secure operational buy-in ahead of implementation in eight weeks.
Action: Rather than repeating the central messaging, I arranged individual calls with each of the three office managers to understand the objections properly. I found the concern was not the policy itself but the absence of a transition plan — staff believed they would be blamed for a dip in performance during changeover. I documented this and raised it with the policy lead, proposing that performance metrics be suspended for the transition period. I prepared a one-page briefing setting out the operational risk in the language the policy team used, and presented it at their weekly meeting. When the suspension was agreed, I wrote directly to the three offices explaining what had changed and why, crediting the concern they had raised. I then ran a short session with each team to walk through the new process and answer questions directly rather than by email.
Result: Both formal objections were withdrawn. Implementation went ahead on schedule across all three offices, and post-implementation feedback recorded 85% of staff saying they understood the reason for the change, against 40% before. The transition metric suspension was subsequently adopted as standard for similar changes.
Delivering at Pace
Situation: A ministerial commitment brought a publication deadline forward by three weeks, with four workstreams still incomplete.
Task: I was responsible for delivering my workstream — the data annex — and had been asked to coordinate the overall timeline.
Action: I first established what "complete" actually required, and found two of the four workstreams had scope that was not strictly necessary for publication. I proposed to the SRO that these be reduced to the essential content and the remainder published as a follow-up, which was agreed. I rebuilt the timeline backwards from the new deadline with explicit checkpoints, and set a daily fifteen-minute stand-up rather than the weekly meeting, so blockers surfaced within a day rather than a week. For my own workstream I prioritised the analysis that fed directly into the main findings and deferred the supplementary tables. When the statistics team flagged they could not clear quality assurance in time, I negotiated a phased handover so they could QA in tranches rather than waiting for the complete annex.
Result: The publication went out on the revised date with all four workstreams included. The quality assurance process was completed without exception, and no corrections were required post-publication. The daily stand-up format was retained for subsequent publications.
Do You Need a CV for a Civil Service Application?
It varies by vacancy. Some Civil Service applications ask only for Behaviour statements and a personal statement. Others — particularly Fast Stream and specialist or technical roles — request a CV alongside.
When a CV is requested, two things matter:
Anonymisation. Most Civil Service recruitment is name-blind, and many applications also strip employer and university names before assessors see them. Do not rely on brand recognition; your evidence has to stand on its own. Describe the organisation by type and scale ("a 200-person local authority department") rather than depending on the name carrying weight.
ATS parsing. Civil Service Jobs and departmental systems parse CVs automatically. The formatting rules are the same as any ATS — single column, standard headings, no tables or text boxes, no graphics, contact details in the document body rather than the header. See our guide to applicant tracking systems for the full set.
Where a CV is requested alongside Behaviours, mirror the language of the Behaviours in your CV bullet points. An assessor reading both should see the same evidence reinforced, not two unrelated documents.
Common Mistakes in Civil Service Applications
- Writing "we" instead of "I". The single most common cause of low scores. Assessors cannot credit you for team achievements you do not personally claim.
- Front-loading the situation. Spending 150 of 250 words setting the scene leaves no room for the actions that actually get scored.
- Reusing one example for multiple Behaviours. Permitted in some competitions but rarely effective — the evidence gets stretched thin. Use a different example for each Behaviour where you can.
- Ignoring the grade-level descriptors. Writing Leadership evidence pitched at Grade 7 when applying for Executive Officer, or vice versa, scores badly in both directions.
- No measurable result. "The project was a success" scores lower than "processing time fell from 12 days to 7." Quantify wherever the data exists.
- Exceeding or badly undershooting the word count. Systems often truncate at the limit mid-sentence. Write to roughly 90–95% of the maximum.
- Generic examples with no specifics. Assessors read hundreds of these. Concrete detail is what distinguishes a 6 from a 4.
The Behaviours you write about in your application are the same ones the panel will probe at interview, usually with a follow-up asking what you would do differently. Our guide to common interview questions covers how to develop each example into a spoken answer without repeating your written statement word for word.
Map Your Experience to the Behaviours
resum8 analyses the vacancy, identifies which of your achievements evidence each named Behaviour, and rewrites them in the first person with the outcome up front — so nothing that would score is left out.
Try resum8 Free →Frequently Asked Questions
What are Success Profiles in the Civil Service?
Success Profiles is the UK Civil Service recruitment framework. It assesses candidates against up to five elements — Behaviours, Strengths, Ability, Experience, and Technical skills — with each vacancy specifying which apply. It replaced the previous competency framework and most applications are anonymised.
What are the nine Civil Service Behaviours?
Seeing the Big Picture, Changing and Improving, Making Effective Decisions, Leadership, Communicating and Influencing, Working Together, Developing Self and Others, Managing a Quality Service, and Delivering at Pace. Each is defined separately at every grade, and most vacancies assess three to five.
How do you write a Civil Service Behaviour example?
Use STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result — and spend 60–70% of your word count on Action. Write in the first person singular throughout. Give a measurable result, and match the example’s complexity to the grade you are applying for.
What score do you need to pass a Civil Service application?
Most vacancies set a minimum of 4 out of 7 per Behaviour, stated in the advert. You generally need to meet the minimum on every Behaviour independently — a high score on one does not compensate for a low score on another.
Do Civil Service applications use a CV?
It varies. Many vacancies assess only Behaviour statements and a personal statement; Fast Stream and specialist roles more often request a CV. Where required it is usually anonymised, so evidence must stand without relying on employer or university brand recognition.
Can you use the same example for more than one Behaviour?
Some competitions allow it, others require distinct examples — check the advert. Even where permitted, different examples score better, because one situation rarely contains enough distinct evidence for two Behaviours.
How long should a Civil Service Behaviour statement be?
Usually 250 words per Behaviour, though 200 and 500 also appear. Write to about 90–95% of the limit — under-using the space suggests thin evidence, and exceeding it risks truncation mid-sentence.