Competency Writing

[DanH84]

Hi all,

I'm currently applying for a HEO position within the civil service. I'm writing my competencies up and I'm using the STAR method as best I can but I was wondering if there were any competency writing pros out there who had any tips/could have a look over my competencies for me and tear them apart a bit. I'm doing my best to meet the competency markers but with the 250 word limit I need to make sure I am providing sufficient clarity for the people assessing the competencies.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[DanH84]

Hah inconsistencies with grading is worrying but then who knows. I've been successful at eo sifts previously so hopefully I'm not too awful. Will just have to see how it goes now. Thanks

 

[DanH84]

Thank you. I have already submitted the competencies now, this vacancy is within HMRC and has had a much quicker turnaround time than most civil service jobs I had previously seen.

I was very aggressive in editing my competencies down, typically I have spent far too much time scene setting but this time I was able to par that down to a minimum with both the Making Effective Decisions and Leadership and Communicating competencies. I did talk in both about overcoming resistance and getting people to buy into new processes and how I managed this. Possibly I didn't manage enough reflection at the end but overall I was happy with how they came out.

I received an email this afternoon from HMRC saying I was one of the top candidates in the verbal and numeric reasoning tests so I've obviously managed to scrape into a high enough percentile to progress to the next stage of having my competencies assessed. I'm fairly happy about that as I'm sure there would have been a very high volume of applicants (stage 4 - no previous tax quals HEO grade) so I imagine the bar was set relatively high to minimise the numbers needing to go to sift.

Fingers crossed and thanks for the offer of help!