Civil Service Success Profiles Explained

What Success Profiles actually are

Success Profiles is the framework the UK Civil Service uses to assess candidates for almost every role - from entry-level administrative posts through to senior leadership. It replaced the older, narrower "Civil Service Competency Framework" specifically because that older system over-indexed on past experience and under-valued potential, which tended to disadvantage candidates moving into the Civil Service from different backgrounds. Success Profiles assesses candidates against up to five elements, chosen per role depending on what actually predicts success in that job - not every job tests all five.

The five elements

• Behaviours - how you approach your work: things like "Communicating and Influencing", "Making Effective Decisions", "Delivering at Pace", or "Working Together". Almost every Civil Service job tests at least one or two of these, usually via a written application question and again at interview.
• Strengths - what naturally energises and motivates you, assessed through fairly conversational interview questions designed to surface genuine reactions rather than rehearsed answers. Over-preparing for strengths questions can actually backfire, since assessors are trained to spot rehearsed responses.
• Ability - tested through online tests: numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, or situational judgement tests, depending on the role.
• Experience - your career history and track record, usually assessed via your CV and a personal statement rather than a separate test.
• Technical - role-specific professional or technical skills (for example, a qualification requirement for a finance or legal role).

A typical mid-level role might test two Behaviours plus Experience at application stage, then two Behaviours plus Strengths at interview - the job advert and candidate pack always state exactly which elements apply.

How to answer a Behaviours question well

Behaviours questions are competency-style ("Tell us about a time you..."), and the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) works well here too - see our council application guide for the full breakdown. What's specific to the Civil Service is that each Behaviour has published "positive" and "negative" indicators in the official Success Profiles framework document - phrases describing what strong and weak performance actually looks like for that specific Behaviour. Reading these before you write is one of the highest-value things you can do: it tells you, in the assessors' own language, exactly what they're scoring for, so you can consciously build your example around those indicators rather than guessing.

A worked example

For "Communicating and Influencing" at a junior/working level, a strong example doesn't need to be about a formal presentation - it might be explaining a policy change to a confused member of the public, adapting your language for a non-specialist audience, and confirming they'd understood before moving on. What matters is that you can point to specific choices you made about how you communicated, not just that a conversation happened.

Common mistakes

• Picking the most impressive-sounding example instead of the most relevant one. A small, well-evidenced example beats a big, vague one every time.
• Ignoring the level. Behaviours are assessed differently at different grades (e.g. Executive Officer vs Grade 7) - the same Behaviour has different expectations at each level, and the candidate pack usually states which.
• Treating Strengths questions like Behaviours questions. Over-rehearsed answers to "what do you enjoy about..." style questions read as inauthentic to trained assessors - it's fine to answer these more naturally.

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