Most people preparing for a Civil Service application read the list of nine Behaviours, recognise the words, and assume they understand what is being asked. Then they write an example about Delivering at Pace that is really about working hard, or one about Leadership that is really about being senior, and they score a 3 when they needed a 4.
The Behaviours are not general qualities. Each one has a specific published definition and a set of level descriptors, and the panel marks you against those words rather than against your general impressiveness. Once you see how narrow each Behaviour actually is, preparation gets much easier, because you stop writing good stories that answer the wrong question.
The nine Behaviours, and what each is really asking
- Seeing the Big Picture. Not "I understood the strategy". It is about connecting your work to the wider organisational and political context: who else is affected, how it fits the department's priorities, what is happening beyond your own team.
- Changing and Improving. Not "I coped with change". It is about actively improving something: spotting waste or a better way, and doing something about it. Passive acceptance of change scores badly here.
- Making Effective Decisions. The evidence must show the analysis, not just the outcome. What information did you gather, what options did you weigh, what were the risks, and why did you choose as you did.
- Leadership. Available at every grade, and it does not require line management. It is about setting direction, modelling standards, and taking responsibility for a group's outcome.
- Communicating and Influencing. The key word is influencing. Explaining something clearly is the floor. Changing what someone thought or did is the evidence.
- Working Together. Collaboration across boundaries, building relationships, and inclusion. Panels look for you making the group function better, not just being a pleasant member of it.
- Developing Self and Others. Two halves, and candidates usually give only one. You need your own development and your contribution to someone else's.
- Managing a Quality Service. Planning and delivering a service to a standard, with the user in mind. Strong answers usually include a service standard, a customer, and a trade-off between quality and resource.
- Delivering at Pace. Not "I was busy". It is about maintaining momentum and quality under time pressure, prioritising, and keeping others informed about progress.
If you take one thing from this list: Changing and Improving, Delivering at Pace and Communicating and Influencing are the three most commonly misread. They are not adaptability, busyness and clarity. They are improvement, momentum, and persuasion.
Levels matter more than most candidates realise
Each Behaviour is published at levels roughly aligned to grade: Level 1 and 2 for AA and AO roles, Level 3 for EO, Level 4 for HEO and SEO, Level 5 and 6 for Grade 7 and Grade 6, and Level 7 for the Senior Civil Service. The job advert tells you which Behaviours are being assessed, and the framework tells you what the expected level looks like.
This matters because the same story can score differently at different levels. An example about improving your own workflow might be a solid Level 2 for Changing and Improving, and a weak Level 4, where the panel expects you to have improved something beyond your immediate work and taken others with you.
Before you write anything, find the Success Profiles level descriptors for the grade you are applying to and read the bullets for the Behaviours listed in the advert. Write to those words. Candidates who do this consistently outscore candidates with better stories who did not.
A worked example: Delivering at Pace
This is the Behaviour most often answered badly, so it is the most useful to see done properly. Assume a HEO application, so Level 4.
(Situation) "My team was responsible for a quarterly returns process for forty partner organisations. Six weeks before the deadline, a change to the reporting template was issued centrally, which meant every partner had to resubmit data they had already provided, and we had lost two of our five staff to a separate priority.
(Task) I was responsible for getting all forty returns in, validated and submitted to the centre by the statutory deadline, with a team of three and a process that had just been reset.
(Action) My first move was not to work faster, it was to work out what could be dropped. I split the forty partners into three groups by how complex their returns historically were, and by whether they had already submitted under the old template. That told me eleven partners would need real support and the rest could be handled with a clear guidance note.
I wrote a single one page guide covering the changes rather than answering the same question forty times, which I estimated saved us about two days of handling queries. I then agreed with my grade 7 that we would pause a lower priority piece of work on data quality reporting for four weeks, and I set that out in writing so the decision was owned rather than assumed.
For the eleven complex partners I set a weekly fifteen minute call, and I kept a simple RAG tracker that I circulated every Friday to my team and my grade 7, so slippage was visible early rather than discovered at the end.
(Result) We submitted all forty returns two days ahead of the statutory deadline, with a validation error rate of under two per cent compared with about nine per cent the previous quarter. The one page guide was adopted by two other regional teams for the following quarter, and the paused work was picked up in the following month with no lasting impact."
Why this scores well at Level 4: it opens with prioritisation rather than effort, which is the heart of the Behaviour. There is a specific mechanism (segmenting partners, the one page guide) rather than a general claim of organisation. It shows the candidate managing upwards and getting a deprioritisation decision recorded, which is exactly the "maintaining momentum" and "keeping stakeholders informed" language in the framework. And the result is quantified in two ways, one of which is a quality measure, which answers the part of the Behaviour about not sacrificing quality for speed.
A weaker version of the same story would have said "it was extremely busy, I worked late and we got everything in on time". Same facts, probably a 3.
A worked example: Changing and Improving
(Situation) "In a customer contact team, we were logging every enquiry twice: once in the case system and once in a spreadsheet that a previous manager had introduced for reporting.
(Task) Nobody had asked me to look at this. My job was to handle cases. But I estimated we were losing around forty minutes a day across the team to a duplicate record that I suspected nobody was using.
(Action) Before proposing anything I checked whether the spreadsheet actually mattered, because assuming it did not would have been the easy and wrong move. I asked the two people who received the monthly report what they used it for, and it turned out one of them needed a single figure from it, which the case system could already produce as a standard report.
I put a short proposal to my line manager with the time saving, the one dependency I had found and how it would be met, and a suggestion that we trial it for a month with the spreadsheet still running in parallel so we could prove nothing was lost. That parallel run was the part that got it agreed, because it removed the risk of the decision.
(Result) We stopped the duplicate logging after the trial confirmed the standard report covered the need. It gave the team roughly three hours a week back, and the recipient of the monthly report was content because they were consulted rather than told. I also documented the change so the reasoning was available to whoever came next, since the original spreadsheet had survived years mostly because nobody knew why it existed."
Why it works: the improvement is genuine and unprompted, which is the Behaviour. The candidate tests the assumption rather than charging in, which demonstrates judgement. The parallel run is a risk mitigation the panel will recognise, and the closing point about documenting the reasoning shows an understanding of institutional memory that reads as genuinely Civil Service.
The mistakes that cost marks
Answering the wrong Behaviour. The single most common failure. A good Working Together story submitted under Leadership will score poorly, because the panel marks against the Leadership descriptors and finds them thin. Read the definition before you choose the story.
No "I". Departmental writing habits push people towards "we". The panel cannot score a team. Use "I" for your actions and "we" only for context.
Outcome with no method. "I resolved it and the customer was happy" gives the panel nothing to mark. The Behaviours are about how you work, so the middle of your answer matters more than the end.
Ignoring the level. Writing a Level 2 example for a Level 4 post is the quiet killer. If the descriptors mention influencing others or working across boundaries and your example is confined to your own desk, it will not reach the score.
Using the same example twice. If the advert lists four Behaviours, prepare four distinct examples. Reusing one story across two Behaviours dilutes both and signals a thin evidence base.
How to prepare efficiently
Work backwards from the advert. List the Behaviours being assessed, find the level descriptors for the grade, and for each one write down the specific phrases the framework uses. Then choose a story that hits those phrases rather than a story you like. The STAR structure is the right shape for Behaviour answers, and the wider Civil Service interview guide covers how Sift and Interview stages differ.
Two further pieces are worth reading alongside this: how Civil Service applications are actually scored, because knowing what separates a 4 from a 6 changes how you write, and the Strengths element, which is assessed completely differently and cannot be prepared in the same way.
Finally, say your examples out loud before the panel does. Behaviour answers are written first and then spoken at interview, and written evidence rarely survives being read aloud without becoming stiff. You can practise Civil Service style questions and get feedback on structure, length and whether your evidence is actually landing at the level you need.