There is often a lot of nervousness around interviews, and the worry is entirely justified. Sure, some people can do a bad application, simply because they don’t know what a government application requires, but once you learn that, you should be able to get screened in for anything that you have sufficient experience for which to apply. For the written exams, it doesn’t look a whole lot different from a school test, so people know how to study. In other words, you can control your performance in a fairly predictable fashion and with some practice, get a good or at least passing mark. But interviews are often viewed as a different beast.
Some people think it is because the interviewer is trying to “trick” them, but that’s rarely the case in a government interview. There are no “tricks or traps” at the sub-EX level, and while they are more difficult to prepare for, you CAN indeed improve your preparation so that your outcome is also improved. But nervousness, and the artificial nature of government interviews, often means you can be perfectly prepared and yet still bomb the interview. It happens.
In my view, most of that nervousness comes from worrying beforehand about what questions they’ll be asking and what they’ll be looking for…yet both are entirely knowable.
Five types of interviews
There are five types of government interviews, ranging from the casual up to the very formal.
- Informational Interview – where you are asking for a meeting with someone, and you have no idea if they have any jobs available;
- Casual Deployment Interview – often when people move around in government, they do so because they have heard that manager x or y is looking for someone, or that manager already knows you and has reached out directly, and so you’re having a casual conversation about what they do and what your interests are, just seeing if there is mutual interest;
- Formal Deployment Interview – this is where the manager has announced a position at level, and you have formally applied, often without knowing the manager or other staff in the area;
- Formal Competition Interview – this is the “full” interview that most people fear the most, and will be the main focus of this chapter; and,
- The Best Fit Interview – this is after you have made a “pool” and you are meeting with a hiring manager to talk a bit informally about the exact position and your interests (looking very much like a hybrid of the second and third ones above).
A. The Informational Interview
For those not recognizing the term, an informational interview is where you basically want to talk to someone about their area of work to find out what life is like working in that area, if there are jobs available, or what openings might be coming up, etc. So you have cold-called (or cold-emailed) them and asked if they would be free for a meeting for coffee. Or got a friend to introduce you and then you asked if they have time for a chat.
Now, let`s be frank. Most people asking for informational interviews are really saying, “Hey, wanna hire me?”. But they have learned, or been advised by people like me, that if you ask to meet with someone to talk about openings in their area, the person will usually decline to meet with you. They’re not being rude, they’re being practical. If they had an opening, they would advertise it, and you would have to apply through the main system; if they don’t, they can easily say “no, we don’t have anything available” and avoid wasting their time and yours.
By contrast, if you contact them and ask for a chance to meet with them to get some advice from them, the person might find it hard to say no. Partly because THAT response is kind of rude, partly because they remember when they were in the same boat and someone gave them info they didn’t already have or met with them to give them some insights, and partly because people like talking about themselves and you’ve already flattered them by suggesting they are worthy of meeting with to pick their giant, knowledgeable brains!
Plus, if you are in government, there is a component of your job that is supposed to be about building the public service so there’s almost a values-and-ethics component that encourages you as a manager to say yes to these types of requests. No, that doesn’t mean the Deputy Minister or CEO of a crown corporation will meet with anyone who asks, i.e. they’ll almost always delegate if you waste your time even asking, but managers and middle managers often (almost to the level of “usually”, but not quite) will say yes to a request for an info interview.
Remember though that you are asking for an info interview…so what are you going to get out of that? Information and advice.
To make sure you get the most out of the interview, you should do some basic research into what their organization does, and if you can, what their own group does. Do NOT go into the interview knowing nothing about them. You need to show you invested some time in preparing (not to impress them, just so you look professional). Some people think, “Oh, if I can ask 500 Qs about the area, I’ll show how interested I am” but what you’ll really show is how unfocused you are. Figure out what areas you want to ask about in advance, particularly in case the person throws the ball back to you and says, “So, what do you want to know about?”.
Depending on how advanced your career is at this point, you have two choices for an opening gambit:
- If you’re already in government and have been for a little while, you can start with a very short “pitch” about yourself to say, “Well, I’ve been in government for x years now, and mostly doing [x]. I really enjoy [aspect y], and I think I’ve developed some degree of skill at [aspect z]. But I’m thinking ahead to the types of areas I might want to work in some day, and your area seems like one where I might be able to build on those experiences and skills. So I was mostly hoping you could tell me about the type of work that the units in your area do, and if I’m on the right track with my background so far.”
I have to confess, I love this opening. Obviously, based on your research, you’re going to have chosen examples for [x], [y] and [z] that not only reflect your skills and experience but also link directly to their work. You did your research, you have some idea what they do and need, at least at a high-level, and you think you might be a fit. On top of it, you have said “SOME DAY” to take the pressure off that you’re looking for something NOW, which allows him or her to be more open if they wish. In addition, you have given them three openings [x, y, z] for them to talk about how they fit within their area. It gets them talking. Plus, you asked them to tell you if you’re on the right track.
- If you are new to government or outside government, you can start with a short pitch about yourself to say, “Well, I have a background in [x] and some work experience in [y]. I really enjoy [x2, y2] and they seemed like areas that I might be able to use in your area. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble breaking in, partly because I don’t know enough about the type of work that is done on a day to day basis, or where I could aim to start. So I was mostly hoping you could tell me about the type of work that the units in your area do, and if I’m on the right track with my background so far.”
This one is really challenging to nuance. Why? Because you’re being self-deprecating to get them to give you targeted info, but at the same time, you want to impress them enough that they think highly of you in the future. Most important, though, is that you are not saying “How can YOU help ME break in?”. You’re just asking for info and advice.
At this point, you have accomplished the trifecta for getting good info and advice from them — your personal profile + your skills/competencies/interests + their knowledge of their area.
Note that it’s good if you can make it a real conversation rather than an interrogation, and while you are often trying to fake your way into a job interview, you should try to keep your personal “pitch” about yourself relatively short. You’re there to listen, not talk about yourself or show off what YOU know about their job. If they want to know more about your experience, they’ll ask. One key take-away that you’re likely to get, if you focus correctly, is a better understanding of what other skills you might need to get into the industry. If the conversation stalls, you can even prompt to say, “What other skills, beyond the ones that I mentioned, do you think people entering your area should have?”
The other tip for the conversation is you want to be able to ask some intelligent questions…preferably one that shows some relatively straight-forward linkage. It’s good, for example, to ask how some of the research they might describe gets translated into recommendations — is it done by the same team, or is it handed off to someone else? Or if it was about Gs&Cs, does the same team do the review of proposals and the monitoring of projects (i.e. like CIDA) or is it separated (i.e. like most other departments who have separate delivery arms)? Do NOT try to come up with some brilliant question that you know nothing about just to use some big words…”So, I see you have a lot of technology supporting your delivery…how are you set up for block-chain conversion?” might be a great question in the right context, but just throwing it into your conversation willy-nilly will likely just make you look like an idiot. If in your research, you found out their program was recently in the news, and you both read and understood the articles, you can make a small leap to draw linkages to it, but I wouldn’t go much further.
So now you have covered “you”, “what the jobs require”, gaps you might need to fill, and ensuring it all ran like a normal conversation.
That only leaves one area remaining — asking advice on how to proceed. Now, obviously, if they just said “you need experiences [a,b,c]” you don’t want to say “So what should I do next?” as an open-ended question. But you can say, “So, I need to expand into experiences [a,b,c]. Are there areas where others on your team have gained those experiences where you think I could follow in their footsteps?”. It doesn’t have to be that precise, it depends on the conversation, but it should be somewhat pointed. You want specific advice, so you should try to be specific.
As a final tip, you also want to try to manage the duration of the meeting and respect their time. If they say they’ll give you 30 minutes, keep it to 30. You want to end smoothly, not like a timekeeper who blows the whistle and then rushes out the door, but do try to respect the duration and manage your time accordingly. You will also likely be able to tell if they’re feeling rushed to do something else or not. Take their cue. And I will readily confess that this is a “do as I say, not as I do” type tip. I regularly get involved in great conversations with future bosses, and what should have been 30 minutes is now an hour or more, just because we got into the issues. I like to think if they were hating the conversation they would shoo me out, and they didn’t. But they’ll also respect you more if you respect their time.
And when it’s over, if you want to follow-up, do so with gratitude, not a bunch of requests.
I know, I know, a lot of people told you to do the interviews to network, to build your contacts. And the secondary purposes of the interviews — gain exposure, build a contact network, or even leverage it towards a job — are all possible, but you need to manage your expectations. After all, you started the conversation by asking for information. Sometimes, that’s all it will turn out to be.
Yes, you made a contact. But not every person you meet will create a “lasting relationship” or a lasting network contact. Nor are they automatically your BFF, so don’t start spamming them. You’ll know (or should know) if the person is open to further contact or not, or if you felt a connection or not. Sometimes you’re going to meet with someone where there’s no connection, no chemistry, and it’s just not a good fit. Maybe they’re busy, maybe they’re not very friendly, maybe they’re just plain jerks. Or maybe they just don’t like you. It happens.
But you didn’t ask them on a date looking for lifelong romance, you asked them for information and advice. And, hopefully, if you manage it right, that’s what you got.
B. Casual deployment
Once you are in government, people often move simply through deployment. Deployments are lateral moves exactly at level i.e. no promotion involved, and because of that, it is a lot less complex and formal than some of the other types of moves. You are already “appointed” at level, i.e. someone already ran a competition and appointed you at that level so the “proof” of you meriting that level has already been done…the only paperwork to do in a deployment is for the manager to say how you meet the criteria.
Of course, just to confuse things, you can find out about deployments either through a very formal process (such as it being advertised) or just generally through the grapevine. For example, you hear that a manager is looking for someone at your level. Or perhaps a former boss told you there was someone looking. Either way, you want the job.
Reaching out to them is a lot like the cold-call process, although you might use a bit of a hook if a friend or colleague or former boss is referring you to them. You’ll provide a copy of your resume, express your interest in the position or at least in having a conversation with them if they’re interested, and you’ll give them a short email to grab their interest. Preferably something like “I have 3 years working in a similar job and I’m looking for a change”, and then a few lines explaining the type of work you are doing that is similar to their opening.
Chances are that they are going to be interviewing several people, and I hesitate to even call them candidates because it is all informal. No rating guide prepared, no formal job description, no formal questions. Really, they’re just meeting people to see if there is a match of interest. If there is, they’ll check some references, maybe ask for a writing sample, etc., narrow it down a bit more. But they are only going to do that if there was a match, or to use the official parlance, a “right fit” between you and their opening.
The interview is going to be very informal, and will run one of two ways:
a. They’ll start by telling you what the job is, and then you’ll describe how some of your experience relates to it; or,
b. They’ll let you tell them something about yourself, and then they’ll tell you about the job.
I know, I know. You’re thinking the second option would be stupid. Except you are reaching out to them. They think you already know about the job, or you wouldn’t be interested. Ninety percent of the time, you’re going to start by asking them to tell you a bit about the job, and then you’ll be back in option (a). Which sounds normal, safe, logical. You may not want that option though, and I’ll explain later why.
First, let’s assume they describe the job. It’s going to look a lot like they’re writing Statement of Merit Criteria for a formal posting. They’re going to mention, for example, that you’ll have to do a lot of writing of different documents, maybe some briefings, lots of working as part of a team, etc. Which if they were writing a SOMC would be the essential experience requirement. But instead of writing a cover letter, you’re now going to tell them orally how you have experience that meets those requirements.
The position requires a lot of writing of different documents? You’ll outline the different types of writing that you have done and for whom. The position requires teamwork? Well, you’ll tell them about your experiences working as part of a team.
Seems straightforward, and on the surface it is. They ask you basic questions about your experience, and you answer them. No difficult questions or scenarios, it is all about your past experience. With a very open-ended question like, “Tell us about your experiences.” It will likely be that informal.
Under the surface, it is a bit more complicated. While you are talking, they are asking themselves three questions…first, of course they are seeing if you have the experiences they require. Second, they are asking themselves if you’re someone they want to work with in the future. Simple personality aspects. And third, are you a good fit for the team and the work?
Let me give you an example. I’ve been working in planning for awhile now, as well as lots of work in horizontal policy coordination. Lots of people with evaluation or research backgrounds often gravitate towards the area when they are looking for a change. Except the work environment is quite different. While an evaluator or a researcher might work on files with similar content, they often have one or two large projects and a six-month window (or longer) to deliver. The corporate policy and planning world is more dynamic. It has work schedules and file priorities changing rapidly and often. Which, to be honest, a lot of evaluators and researchers not only do not enjoy, but they also are often ill-suited to the work pace. It’s not their strength, experience or training. Some of them can do it, some of them can even do it well, but many are not happy doing it. Because it isn’t just a matter of “coping” with the high degree of uncertainty and change, as if it happens a couple of times a year, it is potentially several times a week.
So, when I am hiring, I often tell people that about the work we do. And see how they react. If they are stressed by the description, they will not be a good fit. If they tell me they can “cope” with it, I probe harder. I need to see some examples of where they have done it before and thus not only know what it’s like, but are still seeking to do it again.
For me, that’s a key “fit” variable. I need to know too that they will fit into the team, flexible, willing to share files, willing to cover for people if priorities shift. For my type of work, ownership of a file is frequently an illusion. For someone who likes having a project all to themselves, my team isn’t the right fit for them, and they are not the right fit for my team.
That isn’t cut and dried by any imagination of course. It’s more a feeling of whether they fit. Combined with the way they interact on an interpersonal level. How they describe their former jobs. What animates them in their descriptions, what they shy away from in other descriptions.
I absolutely need to know they can handle the job, sure, but I also need to know if I want them in the team at all. I’ll be even a bit more blunt. There are people who would be aces for the work content, but are absolute jerks to work with on a day-to-day basis. They’re borderline toxic. Why would I risk putting one of them on my team? It’s a lateral unadvertised deployment. We’re just having a conversation. I won’t pursue it, because I will see who else is out there.
Equally though, if you prefer solo projects and your potential future boss tells you the jobs is highly variable for work loads and file priorities are constantly changing, then that team is probably not right for you either. You’re also evaluating them…would I like the work? Would I like to work with this boss? Would I like to work with this team?
Now, as I said, the questions are almost going to be entirely about your past experiences. Which is a giant danger, because it can be rather dry and formal if you let it. You want this to be as close to a conversation as it can be. You want some back and forth. You want it to stay informal, because that’s how they’re going to see if you would work as part of the team.
Which brings me back to the reverse situation where they ask you to tell them about yourself before they tell you about the job. I mentioned you can invert that, put them back in the lead, and that works if you are risk-adverse.
Why might you leave it inverted? Because it is a highly-effective sales strategy to tell them about yourself and your interests before they tell you about the job. I call it the “reverse sell”, and I found it by accident.
About ten years ago, I was looking around for a change. I wasn’t a planner by trade, but I had done it in previous jobs, and I heard about a manager with an opening in another branch. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me. I sent him an email, said I heard he was looking for a manager on the corporate side, and gave him a brief hook or two of things I had done, plus my resume. He suggested we meet, and it was right away. I agreed to meet, but I was taking a huge tactical risk — I knew very little about their exact work, or even their branch. I had some idea, but normally I would have done more research before going in to see him. With little time, I went in cold.
And he started with an inverted opening for me to tell him about myself. So I did. I talked about some of my previous experiences, and anticipating some of the type of work the jobs in his area would do, I mentioned things that I had enjoyed in previous jobs that were similar, without pointing it out. For example, I noted that I really liked the link between policy and programs. I had been doing high-end policy work for awhile and was looking for a change, something with more ties to programs, but I wasn’t looking to move into the “weeds” of running programs. All of this was true, I wasn’t lying, but I was selecting it because I knew that corporate planning often intersects with both policy and programs. And so I said I was looking for that and enjoyed it.
As he responded, he said that he too liked that aspect, and it was exactly what his division dealt with every day. He went on to explain the work they did, and how it related to what I said, and part of me was thinking, “Well, duh. That’s why I said it.” It was almost like I was applying to work at a carnival selling peanuts and I had said I liked selling things, particularly food, and the boss was explaining to me how that would be a good fit for me. Of course it would be, that’s why I said it.
Except a funny thing seemed to happen. While he was “selling me” on the job and how it fit my needs/desires, he was also selling himself on me. By inverting the order so I went first, the “selling” job was all his by going second and making the linkages for what the job was that he had to fill. He sold me, and he sold himself on how I would fit. It was the easiest interview I have ever had. I barely had to tailor any of my experiences to the job, other than presenting it well up front.
I have used the same technique in other situations, and it actually has some validation by classic “sales” techniques that are taught in business schools. But I just found it by accident, I wasn’t trying to game the interview. It just worked out really well.
So that’s it. You find out about a job opening at level, you see if they’ll meet with you, and you tell them about your experiences in as conversational a tone as possible. Maybe there’s a good fit, maybe there’s not. Or maybe someone else is a better fit.
If the fit happens, they can deploy you relatively quickly. Far faster than formal processes, which is why the option is so popular.
C. Formal deployment
The formal deployment interview is where the manager has advertised a position at level, and you have formally applied, often without knowing the manager or other staff in the area. The easiest example of this is where a manager at another department, say Environment Canada, has announced an AS-04 position as a deployment and it is open to those at level who work across the National Capital Region, and you work at perhaps Foreign Affairs and want to apply.
Maybe you have always wanted to work at Environment Canada; maybe you live on the Quebec side and would rather not commute across the river any more; maybe the AS-04 has some supervisory functions that you want to add to your resume. For whatever reason, you have applied because you are already an AS-04 and would like the job.
You will do the full cover letter approach described earlier — you will explain how you have the experience they are looking for, you meet the eligibility criteria, you have the education required, etc. But this is where it gets weird for the manager.
It isn’t a competition — you are already at level, so there is no “proof” required to show you merit the level, that’s already done. And, to be honest, it would put the government potentially in a weird position to have people go through a reassessment of their abilities again anyway … what would happen if you fail? Does that mean the competition was flawed, or that you really aren’t at level, or was it just you having an off-day? None of those are good outcomes. So you are already at the same level, full stop. The manager moves to the “best fit” criteria, right?
Which would mean they would call you in, ask you some informal questions (like the previous post), decide if you’re the right fit or not, and select someone. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Which is also why deployments are popular with managers. They’re supposed to be easy.
Except I just ran an EC-06 full deployment process. I was fortunate enough that there were only a handful of viable candidates, and I interviewed all of them. No “screening” process — if they were initially eligible, as they were, I gave them a shot at the interview. Think of it as a very low bar on the experience criteria. I did have a fairly straightforward set of questions, three of them, and I asked each of them the same ones. Not formally written-out like a full rating guide, but they all got the same three questions. While all of the candidates were possible, i.e. they could all have done the job, one of the candidates was by far the most qualified for what I was looking for in this specific instance. I still had all three give me writing samples and names of references. I reviewed the writing samples, and the “strong” candidate was still in the lead, so I moved on to reference checks — which I only did for him. Because it is not a competition, I didn’t need to fully assess all the candidates.
In fact, I technically wasn’t assessing them at all. Not their knowledge, abilities, or personal suitability. They are already at level. So as a manager, I’m not supposed to “re-evaluate” them and asign scores.
Yet when I was done everything, and went to select the strong candidate, HR started asking me for copies of my rating guide, my score results, all the things I would do if it was a competition, but it wasn’t. I pushed back, and they said, “Oh right, you don’t need that, but it’s a good idea anyway, so give it to us anyway.”
And that is the weird part for the manager. I am legally barred by regulation and tribunal decisions from re-evaluating candidates, yet I also am supposed to provide some sort of formal “non-evaluation evaluation process” to select the candidates. Most HR people have no idea what that actually means so they default to asking for all the things in a competition. Equally, many managers get their advice from those same HR people and end up doing what they’re supposed to avoid — formally evaluating the candidates.
A friend of mine just went for what I thought was a competition, and I was advising her on all the steps (see next section) for a formal competition. Then, she said it was deployment at level. So I told her the steps from the previous section (informal). She did a hybrid of both, and it was a good thing because one of the first things they asked her was a very formal knowledge question. Something they are NOT supposed to do. If it even hints at a process that is re-evaluating candidates at level, it’s grounds to have the whole process tossed.
Yet many managers do it anyway.
Here’s what you SHOULD prepare for if it is a formal deployment interview:
- Review the knowledge elements and do some basic prep (sort of a lite version of the next section);
- Review the abilities and personal suitability elements, and have an example to use in conversation if they ask you about your past experiences (again, sort of a lite version of the next section); and,
- Prepare a couple of speech modules of your background — perhaps a 5 minute version and a 2 minute version of your “elevator pitch”.
Will that cover all scenarios? Not completely. If it is a job that you REALLY REALLY REALLY want, do the full prep of the next section, just in case. But most often, this should cover you in case the managers don’t know what they’re doing and “test” you on elements anyway.
D. Formal competition
When I started this chapter, I said there were five types of interviews. While that is true, it is also true that each of the five are variations on a theme — or, alternatively, across a spectrum. The formal competition interview is at the most extreme end of the spectrum, and requires the most preparation.
Normally, a “full” interview is when you are doing a full competition to get a job at a level higher than you currently are now or perhaps at the beginning of your career in order to get into the public service. Since you are not at level, the competition has to test you on all the elements in the poster to show you that you are capable of meeting each of the criteria.
As outlined previously, most of the “experience” and “eligibility” elements were tested during the upfront application process. Some of the knowledge was likely tested through a written exam, and some of the personal suitability elements will be tested through reference checks. This means that the interview is primarily about testing your abilities, as well as some personal suitability factors and potentially some knowledge.
But before you prepare for the content, you need to think about what you are about to do. They are going to ask you questions and then you’re going to answer, that’s obvious. And they’ll mark your answer, which is also obvious.
While the goal is always to make the interview seem like a comfortable conversation, remember that you are being marked for what you say. It is very formal. You can’t assume someone already knows something — if you don’t cover it, they don’t hear it to mark it. Take for example a situation where you have been giving briefings for some time. And you know that one of the most important things in briefings is to tailor your presentation to the audience. So you’re fully prepared to highlight that in your interview.
Then you get in there and realize one of the interviewers is an old boss from another division. One that trained you on how to do presentations, including to always tailor presentations. So you relax. They know you. They know your history. And so, if you are like most people having a conversation with someone you know, you may tend not to stay the obvious things that you both know to be true. You may even feel a little silly to say to an old boss, “Well, I believe the most important thing is to tailor a presentation to your audience.” Because he or she already knows that you know it. Which means, like many candidates in interviews with people they know, you may forget to mention something obvious. But if you don’t say it during the interview, you don’t get any marks for it. You are marked ONLY for what you say during that time.
And most important of all? It’s going to seem like a monologue. They ask you a question, and when you start talking, they shut up. They take notes on everything you say until you tell them (or it’s clear) that you’re done answering the question. It will NOT seem like a conversation, and the people doing the interview may not even make eye contact because they’ll be busy taking notes. It is very unnerving for some people. You need to know they aren’t being rude, they’re just taking notes. And they are NOT allowed to prompt you very much. If you miss a small element, they might prompt you to elaborate on something. But here’s the thing…if they prompt YOU, they have to ensure they prompt everyone. Or the process won’t be fair. So, rather than risk unfairness, they will NOT prompt you if you miss something, even if it’s obvious.
However, they do sometimes ask you if you have anything to add. That is NOT a prompt for you to actually keep talking or that you must have missed something..it’s more often than not just them making sure you are done with that answer and they can move to the next question.
So think about that…formal questions, formal answers, and you doing a lot of talking, likely with little interactions with the members of the board. Assuming a standard interview, your answer to an individual question will last somewhere between 5 and 8 minutes. Which means you are going to talk for on average 6 minutes without them saying anything. Can you do that without practice, in an organized fashion, without repeating yourself?
Most people cannot do it. They talk in circles. They get nervous. They repeat themselves. They start digressing. They repeat themselves again. And all the time the markers are listening to your answer and awarding points.
There are only three strategies to manage this challenge:
- Practice…you can practice talking about an area (see below) on your own or with a friend, you can participate in multiple competitions so you get experience in doing it, or you might even try joining something like ToastMasters;
- Prepare…you will see lots of explanation below on how to prepare your answers in advance so that you’re not trying to think on your feet; and,
- Structure your answer.
If structure is king for a written exam, it is queen for an interview.
You want to give an answer that is logical, easy to follow, detailed, well-developed, and answers all the elements that are needed for that question to get full marks. The markers need to take notes, and they’ll award your score based on the notes they take. If they have trouble following you, any trouble at all, you lose marks. It is that simple. So you need to always be clear with your answer — where you’re going, what you’re saying, when you’re done.
For example, if you start your answer by saying you have four parts, three phases, five elements, or even eight, they know that you are now going to tell them 3, 4, 5 or 8 things. And they are structuring their notes accordingly. They’re probably even organizing them already with numbers in order for 1, 2, and 3. You have already given them a logical, easy to follow structure. That’s half your marks right there. Now all you have to do is populate your answer. (To be frank, if you are going beyond 4 or 5 things in ANY answer, you’re likely too far into the weeds, but you get the picture.)
But fear not, intrepid candidate. Candidates have been given a small advantage since about 2004/2005. Since then, candidates are usually invited to arrive about 30 minutes ahead of the interview. What happens in that thirty minutes? They’ll put you in a room, take away your notes and any cell phones, etc., and they’ll let you look at the questions for 30 minutes. And let you outline your answers a bit, take some basic notes to guide your answers. Everyone thinks this is all about helping the candidate, but it is mainly to help the markers.
Before the candidates were given this type of 30 minute preparation/review period, they would just get the questions cold in the interview room. Spontaneous, everyone said. Deadly, the markers said. Why? Because people would do the same three things when the question was asked.
- Stall. Say things like, “That’s a very good question, thank you for asking. I think that is one of the most important questions you could have asked me. I’m really glad you asked me. In fact, I would have been surprised if you didn’t ask me that extremely interesting question. I think it is the core of the job, that question there.” Were they really that bad? Not all of them, but some were. They were just talking to fill space while they thought of what their answer would be.
- Pause. Some would also punctuate their answers with “er” and “um” as they stopped talking to think about what they wanted to say next.
- Repeat. This would be kind of like them saying, “Thank you for that question. I think the three most important things are A, B and C. So, yes indeed, A is important. B is important too. And so is C. Yes, C is very important. Linked of course to A, which is also important. But B is in the mix too. Yes indeed, C, B, and A are important. Did I mention B enough?” I exaggerate of course, but sometimes marking “spontaneous” answers seems a lot like that. They aren’t saying anything, they’re just repeating everything they already said. It still happens for another reason with the current process, but I’ll deal with that element later.
For now, rest assured, a good structure to each answer not only helps you as a candidate but also reduces the pain for interviewers of watching a candidate flounder simply because they didn’t have a good answer on the spot when they were in an artificial environment, under the spotlight, and nervous.
Let me digress to tell you about my interview with Foreign Affairs and how I found out about the importance of structure. It was under the old style, questions were not seen in advance, you just went in “cold” to the room.
I was given a scenario question where I was the Public Affairs Officer in Bonn, Germany, Rick Hansen was coming to town, I needed to organize an event, and I had no budget for it…what would I do? I started with the simple stall as I desperately tried to think of what to actually do. So I started with, “Well, I think the first thing I would do is check our files for similar events in the files to see if we had previous situations like this and how we handled them.” A nice conservative start, I thought. Except there was a woman on the board whose body language was EXTREMELY overt and easy to read. I actually saw her roll her eyes, so I knew it wasn’t the answer that they wanted.
I zigged sideways and started again. “Now let’s assume that I check the files, and I find nothing. No ideas at all, and I’m starting from scratch.” The woman almost dropped her pen. She smiled, looked up at me, clearly now interested. I had taken the question out of the comfort zone, and she was now ready to hear what I would really say.
Confession time. I might have zigged out of that first stalling hole, but I had NOTHING. No idea whatsoever. So I reached into my bag of magic tricks and said, “Let’s look at the question a little more closely. I have to have an event, and I can’t pay for it. But that can be nuanced three ways, and it gives me some ideas. First, one interpretation is that I can’t be the one to pay for the event, but perhaps I could find a sponsor. Perhaps there’s a disability association in Germany who would like to honour Rick’s work. Second, another interpretation is that I can’t pay for the event, but perhaps there’s an event we’ve already paid for where we could add Rick in some capacity. Perhaps there’s an event celebrating Canadian-German relations, and our special guest for the evening could be Rick Hansen! Third, if I go with the basic interpretation, i.e. that I can’t pay for it, and I can’t find a sponsor or another event, then it would have to be some sort of free event — which likely means something outside. Perhaps I could talk to the City of Bonn, try to recreate Man In Motion through the streets of Bonn, and get them to give Rick a key to the city.”
I confess, at the time, I thought that was the STUPIDEST answer I had ever given to a question. You might be thinking it’s actually not a bad answer, but I was already working for the department on contract and I knew lots of creative public affairs officers who would have laughed those options out of the room. So I knew the content was actually kind of weak, but I had nothing else to offer. Yet the woman with the expressive body language kind of nodded her head, and we moved on.
I didn’t make the pool, and when I went for an informal afterwards to get feedback on my performance, we came to that question and I cringed. I figured I might have got 3 or 4 out of 10. I was gobsmacked to find out my score had been 10/10.
I was pretty candid with the HR person giving the feedback and bluntly asked, “How is that possible?”. He looked over the notes and he told me that he remembered my answer as the ONLY one in more than 500 interviews that he had been part of where the candidate had actually had any sort of logical structure to their answer. He admitted that other people had more creative solutions, some had really grandiose plans, some were really impressive even. But it was like watching some sort of wild brainstorming exercise, thoughts all over the place. The interviewers often had trouble taking notes because they had no idea where one partial idea ended and the next partial or full idea started.
I had a good structure and somewhat average content, and I got 10/10.
Others had a bad structure and great content, yet failed the question.
Wow.
Such results aren’t often as startling now that people get questions in advance for 30 minutes, since they can use that time to create at least a basic structure, but structure still reigns. Repeatedly in interviews where I had weak content, I made up for it with a near-perfect structure. And received high marks because of it. And from the other side of the table, well-structured answers look downright awesome. As an interviewer, I sometimes feel like someone gave a great answer, yet afterwards when I look at only the content in my notes, it isn’t always as good as I first thought. But my first impression was that they had given a solid answer, easily passing the mark for that question. And I have never first thought someone passed and then subsequently failed them on secondary review. I might have lowered their mark from an 8 to a 7, but never below the line. And since marks are usually a consensus of the board, that isn’t just me being an easy marker…the other members of the board thought they were clear passes too, but in the final review, we might downgrade them to a more appropriate grade. Still a “pass”, but with some of the shine removed from a great structure. And some boards don’t even do that secondary review, they just go with their first impression.
Structure is queen, all hail structure.
However, once you understand those upfront elements, you need to prepare for four things in the interview preparations — knowledge, abilities, personal suitability, and what I call “extra” modules.
For the knowledge, it is exactly like the preparations previously described for a written exam. You’ll read the Departmental Plan (formerly Report on Plans and Priorities) to find out what is going on in the department. You may read recent statements by the Minister, particularly if they did any overview speeches with Chamber of Commerces. You’ll also need to refresh your memory of any of the special content / background documents you reviewed. However, there is a difference between the written and the interview. While the goal of the written was to have really detailed knowledge ready to “dump” into written answers, you are going to be using the info in the interview to populate some “extra” aspects of your answers. So you might get a question in the written exam where you have to explain the mandate and current priorities of the Department in detail in a memo, but in the interview, it is more like you will be asked to respond to a scenario of a new priority and how to handle it, and in your answer, you MIGHT want to drop in a reference to how this new priority fits within the existing priorities. You may not be getting a lot of points for “knowledge” in this part, but if you can throw it in, your answers are just automatically richer in content, and your overall score will go up. You’re just making your answers that much more concrete than without the knowledge. But if that is all you need, i.e. context, you’re more trying to drop in big headings in the interview, not the detailed sub-knowledge of each priority.
I do have one very large caveat to this comparison. I am basically saying that the written requires heavy knowledge content, almost an info dump, and the interview doesn’t, more the headings to help populate your answer a bit, make it richer. In the first instance, knowledge is the main course; in the interview, it is more like a mere spice to enhance flavour. However, this assumes that your competition had a written component that was separate from your interview. In other words, it assumes that by the time you get to the interview, you have already been tested on knowledge…but if you WERE NOT tested previously on knowledge, all bets are off in the interview. In that case, you WILL need to know all the detailed content.
When I applied to CIDA’s post-secondary recruitment, there was no written exam, and the first three questions of the interview were basically data dumps by the candidates to show the interviewers we had read all the priorities and could regurgitate them back in some form. And yes, that is as deadly as it sounds for both the candidates and the markers. Listening to the same answers over and over and over. It was even worse though because we didn’t get the questions in advance, it was just “enter and answer”. The first question I got was to outline CIDA’s six priorities. No indication of depth of answer required, no indication of what was to come. So I started answering. And I spent about 3-4 minutes on each of the six priorities to explain them in detail. Regurgitating what I had memorized. A complete brain dump. After my 15-20 minute answer, seriously, I stopped. I had no idea if that was too much or too short. They then said, “Okay, Question 2 is to take one of the six priorities and explain it in detail. You’ve already answered that, let’s go on to Question 3.” Oops. And Q3 wasn’t too far off some of the stuff I had already said too…I almost answered all three with my first answer.
Which is one of the reasons you get the questions in advance to review, so you can balance your answers better, but this type of answer is what I mean by the content required if you don’t have a written exam. If you have a written, that’s the spot for the detail; if you don’t have a written, the knowledge detail will be required in the interview.
For abilities and personal suitability, the possible questions seem endless. For example, if I’m running a competition and I’m marking initiative, and I ask you about a time where you demonstrated initiative, you might think that because everyone will have a different example, it’s impossible to figure out the question in advance. At first glance, lots of people think that way — because everyone has different answers, the question must be impossible to predict.
But it isn’t. It’s the same question. I’m marking X so I ask you to tell me of a time when you did X. And when five candidates answer that question, I am going to hear five different answers. But my marking grid, which I have to create in advance, has what I think is a generic answer that will allow me to mark everyone’s answer. For example:
- Did something that wasn’t assigned to them i.e. they initiated the activity;
- It wasn’t something they were expected to do as part of their job i.e. it was above and beyond or separate from their current responsibilities;
- It took some effort to do i.e. they had to figure out a way to do something or to do it better, something that wasn’t obvious, preferably something with options, and they had to make a choice / can’t be something really simple or obvious;
- There has to be a better result because it was done i.e. not just doing something different but actually improving something / so what; and/or,
- It challenged the status quo or was innovative.
So that’s my marking grid. Because that’s what initiative means. Which means when I hear the five different answers, I’m looking to see how many of those bullets you have. One or two? You probably fail. Three or more? Probably enough to pass. All five? High scores all around, well done!
Now let’s digress for a minute to look at those five bullets. Where did I get them from? Did I have some magical resource that exists only for managers? No. I have the same resources you do. Dictionary.com. Google. Thesaurus. Websites like Treasury Board’s that explain what initiative means as a competency or ability. And after you look at a few, you see some common denominators.
Initiative requires that YOU initiate. Lots of people will tell me of a project they led or we’re in charge of, and all the great things they did. Except they were told to do it by their boss. That’s not initiative, because you didn’t initiate; you maybe demonstrated management or leadership, but not initiative. The number of people who give leadership examples is astounding…close to almost 70% in my experience give a leadership example as they have never thought about what initiative actually means.
Or they say that they came up with a way to track all the correspondence in their unit in a special spreadsheet. Great. But what was their job? Correspondence manager. Someone who was expected to track the correspondence. It’s their job. So yes you came up with a tool, but you were kind of expected to do that anyway. It’s not anything “special” or “unique” or you showing initiative, you’re simply doing your job.
Often, too, people will talk about this fantastic thing they came up with as an idea, and yet it is extremely simplistic. For example, they were designing a new tracking system for urgent files, and they came up with the idea to use blue tags for correspondence and red tags for memos to allow people to triage the files quicker. Total time to come up with the idea and implement it? Thirty seconds. It was a good idea, but there was no effort involved. There were no real obstacles to overcome, no planning involved, you didn’t have to work at it. Which means as a demonstration of initiative, I simply don’t care about it.
Or the worst scenario? They’ll tell me how they completely revamped a system, because they thought it was fun to do, and when they were done, it made no difference whatsoever. No better outcome. No improvement in speed or result. No result other than that they did something different to fix something that was working just as well previously. I’ve even had people admit that after they left, their replacement dumped it and went back to the old way.
However, one thing that always looks good is if you were challenging the status quo or truly being innovative. Yet without those other four elements above, why will I care as an interviewer? Did you do a lot of work to improve something, or are you just someone who likes to spin their wheels doing things differently because they hate whatever is already in place and they just want to be “innovative” for no reason?
Ultimately, look at the answer grid. If you tell me that you set up a new colour code system because your boss told you to do it, it took you thirty seconds, it was different than what went before, but two months after doing it, they dumped it because it didn’t matter, how is that an example of initiative? Contrast that with an example where you’re perhaps in charge of finance, but you’re pretty good with Excel; you aren’t involved with the correspondence system, but you know they are over-worked and having trouble finding time to triage files properly or come up with a new tool; you suggest to your supervisor that perhaps you could take this on as a special project, and you study it for a couple of days or weeks and come up with three or four options but recommend one particular one that involves a new Excel file that you design and train people to use, along with a new colour coding system; it’s completely unique in the branch; and it works so well that response times are cut in half, your group is suddenly meeting all of its correspondence deadlines, you have a tool that generates reports for management, and other directorates or divisions are asking if they can have a copy of the tool to use in their offices.
If you contrast those two examples, which one do you think demonstrates initiative? As a marker, the second one gets 10/10, the first one perhaps 1 or 2, nowhere near a passing grade.
Now, you might suddenly say, “Yes, but I’m a junior employee, I don’t have the opportunity to demonstrate initiative, all my files are assigned to me.” That is absolutely a common problem. But it doesn’t mean you can’t give me an initiative example. You may have to give me one that was assigned to you, true. And as such, you’re not getting the points for coming up with it on your own. But if it took effort, if it was innovative, if it produced a good result, if you went above and beyond the tasking, then you’ve demonstrated the other four elements pretty well and you’ll get a good mark. Just be aware that in an ideal world, you don’t start off with that spot if you can avoid it. Or if you do, make sure you hit the other marks as best you can.
Going back a few steps though, the question was about initiative, but the context was whether or not you can predict the question in advance. Some people will tell you of course not, you’re not a mind reader.
But you don’t have to be. Here’s the magic trick. In almost 95% of all interviews that are asking about abilities or personal suitability, there are only three types of questions I am likely to ask you. Some call it past, present and future; some call it applied, situational or theoretical. I prefer to think of them as experience, process, and principles.
- Experience (or past or applied) — Tell me of a time when you’ve demonstrated strong interpersonal skills?
- Process (or situational or present) — Here is a specific situation, tell me how would your strong interpersonal skills help you to deal with it?
- Principles (or future or theoretical) — Why are strong interpersonal skills important to being part of a team?
When I do my presentations, people are almost shocked that there are only three types of questions. So they start trying to come up with scenarios or questions that would be a fourth type. Go ahead, do it yourself now. I’ll wait.
Now that I’ve hummed the complete soundtrack to Jeopardy, what have you got? Now take that question and ask yourself this…is it REALLY any different from one of the above three? Remembering too that the situation could be different, or your past might be different, or it says in a group instead of a team, but ultimately they are asking you to talk about interpersonal skills.
Remember above where I said they had a generic marking grid? They have it here too. For interpersonal skills. So no matter which answer you give vs. the next candidate’s answer, they can still mark both. So they googled “interpersonal skills” and came up with some headings. Like showing respect. Listening. Working together. Building trust. Clear communication. Transparency. And another four or five other possible headings.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that I as the marker only decide to list three things about interpersonal skills — respect, trust and communication. Now, ask yourself…what is my marking grid if I ask you to tell me about a time when you demonstrated good interpersonal skills?
- Shows respect for others
- Builds trust with other people
- Clear recognition of the importance of communication
Now ask yourself…If I give you a situation where you are in a new team, there’s been some conflict, and I want to know what you’ll do to demonstrate good interpersonal skills, what does my rating grid look like?
- Shows respect for others
- Builds trust with other people
- Clear recognition of the importance of communication
Hmm, looks familiar. Now what if I ask if you think that good interpersonal skills are an important aspect of teamwork? What does my rating grid look like?
- Shows respect for others
- Builds trust with other people
- Clear recognition of the importance of communication
You’re not seeing double or even triple. It’s true. My rating guide for all three of those questions is (probably) identical. Oh, sure, I might have said “showed respect” in the first, and “shows respect” in the second, and “important to show respect” in the third, but it is the SAME rating grid.
Now, at this point, you know there are only three types of questions and you also know that I’m going to mark whichever one I ask (almost) exactly the same as the other two.
Doesn’t that sound like a question you can predict in advance?
Of course it does. Because I, as the hiring manager running the competition, am not a rocket scientist. I am not gathering magical information from the Oracle at Delphi to populate my rating grid. Instead, I’m basically doing the same thing you’re likely to do. Google it. Talk to other people about what it might mean. Come up with some headings. Put together an outline of possible things people may say. Call it done.
In the above example and summary, I keep saying that all three are “almost” identical, and they are. But there is a slight nuance difference.
In the first form of the question about experience, I need you to give me an example that shows those headings. In the second form of the question about a situation, I’m looking for the steps in a process that you’ll follow to show that ability. In the third and final form of the question, I need you to talk more about the principles involved.
But if you combine all three, you can create a single answer that answers all three and actually gives you more points for any of the three. Let me show you.
Suppose for example I ask you to tell me of an example where you demonstrated good interpersonal skills. You’re likely to immediately start with the context, what you did, etc. and tell me you showed respect, built trust, and emphasized communication.
But what if you started with, “I think the most important element of interpersonal skills is respect for other people. So the example I’m going to give you…”. Instead of starting with the details of what you did previously, you already are creating a great structure that says, “respect for others” and now your example is evidence of how you have done that exact heading. Then, as you go along, you might say. “After setting up those first few meetings and respecting what the others had to say, I felt it was important to start building trust with others.” Now you’re pulling from the process type response. And perhaps you finish with the experience example, “I really learned from this interaction the clear importance of communication, and I try now to incorporate it in all my interactions.” Wow, all three elements in the same answer.
Why would you do that? Because the first one is a basic answer. The second one is much more robust, more comprehensive, gives concrete examples, talks about principles and what steps you would take again, etc. And more robust while still maintaining a good structure means higher marks. Instead of getting 6 with your first example, you’re up into the 8 or 9 point range with a full answer.
Remember back in Chapter (x) where I said there was Secret Template #1? It is time for Secret Template #2. For every element that they are marking in the interview, you’re going to fill out the following table with short bullet points.
Experience | Process | Principles | |
Ability 1 | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
Ability 2 | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
Ability 3, 4, 5… | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
Personal Suitability 1 | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
Personal Suitability 2 | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
Personal Suitability 3, 4, 5… | Position / Project 1
Position / Project 2 (Work / academic / volunteer) | Step 1
Step 2 Step 3 | Principle 1
Principle 2 Principle 3 |
See Annex 2 for a sample blank layout that you can use to populate your own info. Note that you do not want a lot of information, as you won’t be able to memorize it. I’ve listed 1 or 2 projects for experience, but ideally you can get it down to one really solid one that meets all your headings. For processes, I think in some cases it might be 4 or 5, but again, will you be able to remember them all when you get in the interview? And for principles, I like to stick to the rule of 3, as it is easier to remember those than it is for 4 or 5. And often if you are trying to do 4 or 5 principles, you’re too far into the weeds. Plus, if you did it right, you’ll be able to pull from ALL THREE columns for your example to create a really rich and robust response to whichever form of the question you get asked. So you won’t have room for two examples, five steps, and five principles in your answer. Keep what works, drop what doesn’t.
You’ll see in the above table that I have taken the identical approach to abilities and personal suitability. Some managers have noted that abilities tend to emphasize the experience and process/situational columns more so than principles, while personal suitability tends to use principle questions more often than experience or process. I tend to believe that is generally true, but I have no quantitative evidence to prove it one way or another. However, both abilities and personal suitability CAN ask any of the three types, and you need to be prepared, so I don’t recommend shifting emphasis in that fashion. Note too that you can expand the table if you want to include rows for the essential experience and knowledge, but the three columns don’t work as well for that. Essential experience is covered by the application, and you have a separate table to cover all the “experience examples” in more detail. For knowledge, you could put the knowledge factors down the left hand column, but usually you would be only using the process or principles at most, and highly dependant upon the type of job you’re doing (an FI might have some examples of where they used legislation, or the steps they used, or the principles behind the legislation, whereas an AS might have steps only). I think knowledge prep is mainly about the different types of documents referenced earlier, not putting it into a table like the two secret templates.
Finally, I said at the beginning of the chapter that there were four areas to cover and the one that is left is a heading for “extra” modules. If you did the work above, you know how to answer questions that fit 95% of the form you’ll see. Past, present or future, for example. You’re good to go.
Then you get in the interview and they ask you something weird. Something you are totally not expecting. And it doesn’t look like anything you have prepared. You start to panic. What do you do?
Well, remember how I said structure was queen? You need a structure to answer the question. Because a good structure is going to give you something to say, and it might be enough to get you half-way to passing the question. But what structure do you use for a question you weren’t expecting?
You are going to use one of the extra modules you can create to handle the unexpected. For example, if you google “problem solving cycle” or “steps”, you’ll see there are tons of examples. I like to cheat and look at the images tab to see what diagrams people have posted on various websites. Some will have 4 steps, or 5 steps, or 10 steps. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, as long as it is one you can understand and remember easily. I tend to think of problem-solving as having five steps:
- Define the problem
- Analyse the problem
- Develop options and choose one
- Implement the chosen solution
- Evaluate the solution
Now, if you are doing policy work, you should have the policy development cycle too. Search the same way. Guess what you find? The policy cycle looks pretty similar. Define, analyse, options, implement, evaluate. If you’re in project management, look at the project management cycle. Hey, almost the same. It’s not rocket science, they’re all pretty general and generic. So, how do you use them?
Let’s look back at that example of Foreign Affairs where I asked how to have an event for Rick Hansen when I had no budget. I had no idea how to answer, so I reached into my bag of magic tricks and pulled out the problem-solving cycle.
- Define the problem — Have to have an event and I can’t pay for it;
- Analyse the problem — Three possible interpretations — I can’t pay for it because I have no money, I can’t pay for this event but could pay for another, or I can’t pay but someone else could;
- Develop options — Free event, merge with existing event, find a sponsor
I didn’t have to implement or evaluate the options for that question, I just had to give ideas. But it was an unexpected question and I needed a good structure — so I used my “extra” problem-solving module to give me the headings to use.
While problem-solving, policy development or project management are relatively the same, there is no universal set of headings to “choose”. The five part option listed above is pretty standard, but if a model that has only four elements works for you, use that instead. It isn’t about the right answer per se, it is about you having some headings that will let you give a good answer to an unexpected question.
There are lots of little cycles like this that are good for various types of jobs. If you are applying for a stakeholder relations job, it is a good idea to memorize steps in a consultation process. If you are in HR, maybe the steps in a general job process. If you are in finance, maybe the headings for the typical budget cycle. A researcher might have headings around managing a research project. Things that resonate with them and they can adapt to other unexpected questions on short notice.
I also like to have in my backpocket some sample answers to weird and wonderful questions that someone might use as an icebreaker or part of another question. They can ask:
- How you are the best candidate?
- What is your past experience?
- What are your personal strengths?
- What are your biggest achievements>?
- How would this job relate to your career goals?
- What is your biggest weakness? (Very rarely asked, as difficult to mark) and what you are doing about it (obviously you will not give an example that something needed / relevant to the job!)
- What is a challenging project or situation with a difficult employee that you have dealt with?
- Do you have any good examples of teamwork or partnering?
- Tell us about your leadership style / communications style / personal values and ethics?
These questions are generally answered badly by everyone, so most managers never ask them. However, if used properly by the hiring manager, they can be good questions to use as icebreakers or just to see how they answer a difficult question in terms of communication styles, etc. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on them, but their worth reviewing every so often.
For the summary of yourself or your experience, it can be the same summary for best candidate, past experience, personal strengths, achievements, weakness, etc. It’s up to you to decide how you want to respond, and again, they are not likely scored so there are no wrong answers in terms of an answer grid. They are really just trying to get to know the real you. And to make sure you’re not a general whackjob who says their greatest weakness is poor integrity or low attention to detail for a job that requires high values and integrity and a lot of precise details.
For me, I’m a manager, so I often get asked a general question about my management style. I’ll embellish a bit, and make it a bit more hypothetical, but I could say. “You know, I think my management style is tied tightly to my values and ethics and how I deal with other people. For me, it starts with respect for others. Embracing diversity, the use of french and english in the workplace, and a strong commitment to lifelong learning. But I think my biggest accomplishment as a manager has been tied to transparency. I focus heavily on sharing information when I can, and using that information to create a shared vision with my team that is clear and open, and I feel like I have had a lot of success with this in my last 10 years as a manager.” Off the top of my head, is that a perfect summary? No. But I can tweak it, practice it a bit, improve on the structure and then voila! I’ll have a handy dandy little speech module that I can use in different ways depending on what “weird” or “unexpected” question comes along.
Interviews are complex, and you need to be ready for all the parts that come your way.
E. Best Fit
At the beginning of the chapter, I mentioned there were five types of interviews, and the one that is left is what is called the “best fit” interview. This is the interview where they are seeing, amongst a small pool of fully qualified candidates, who is the best fit for the team.
Let’s go back for a second to an earlier example. Let’s say someone has a bunch of tech support workers working for them, and also say that they have three areas to cover – mainframes, PCs, and Macs. So they have an opening and run a selection process looking at experience in providing tech support, knowledge of various elements of different systems, abilities to be a front-line service worker and the personal suitability factors for dealing with a lot of different types of people all coming to you for help. Now suppose they have an opening, and have found three really good candidates who have been tested, evaluated, all good – any one of them could do the job. But there is only one position available. And you have to choose one that will fit well with your needs.
Suppose for example that you have existing workers who are really good with mainframes and PCs, but you’re a bit weak on Macs. And one of the three candidates is REALLY strong with Macs. Then you might choose them as the best fit for completely legitimate operational – yes, all of them are qualified, but this one brings a little extra experience with Macs to the table, and you’re short in that area. Tomorrow, someone might leave from the mainframe team and suddenly you’ll pull a mainframe person off the pool.
That’s partly what best fit is about – seeing which candidate fits your basic and extra needs the best.
But I need to warn you of something else. That previous example could have probably been decided just on paper. So why an interview? Often the processes are large and complex undertakings with lots of managers doing the interviews. So it is quite common for a hiring manager not to have seen EVERYONE that was interviewed earlier. They may not have met YOU for example. So if they are good managers, they’ll narrow the pool down to a potential sub-list that looks good and then call 3-4 of them in for a quick conversation.
What are they looking for? They’re making sure you’re not a whack job, for one. I’m not joking. Just because someone passed an interview or wrote a test doesn’t mean necessarily that you want to work with them on a day to day basis. Anyone can clean up nice for a formal process, answer the right questions in the right way, and maybe no alarms go off. But they’re a whack job. Look around your own work unit…chances are there are a couple of people you would rather not work with, but hey, somebody hired them.
The “nicer” way of thinking about this best fit interview is partly just getting to know you and partly to see how you interact on interpersonal skills in an informal setting. Are you shy? Are you aggressive? Are you constantly joking, are you deadly serious? They just want a feel for who you are, what you’re like.
Another area they want to gauge is how interested you are in the job. I know what some of you are probably thinking…what do you mean? We applied for the job, of course we want it, doesn’t every one of us want it the same? The short answer is no.
Some people applied just to be in a competition and hopefully make a pool so their own manager could pull them and appoint them where they are working now. They don’t want the job AT ALL. They’re just playing the game to get promoted.
Some other people are victims of time…they applied nine months ago but since then, their lives have changed. Maybe they have a divorce in the works, or a new baby, or a new boss, and they don’t want to move right now after all. They want to stay put. Or their boss has offered them another opportunity. Or they made another pool somewhere else, or are about to make one. Lots of things could cause them to change their minds since they first applied.
Are managers going to outright ask you if you still want the job? Probably not. They’re instead going to ask you to tell them a bit about why you want the job. Maybe ask you what elements in your past experience make you think you’d be a good fit. Ruh roh. Yeah, that’s right, it is still an INTERVIEW. And you need to be ready.
Your main focus is different though. Instead of knowledge or abilities or personal suitability factors, they’re mainly judging two factors – indirectly your experience (it will be what you use to populate your stories and flesh them out) and more directly your interpersonal skills.
But you have to make a choice at this point in how you choose to respond.
Some people will say, “If you want the job, you have to be the duck.” Just like in the rest of the competition. Don’t deviate from that message. What do you like about the job as a duck? Being able to quack. What did you like in your past jobs? Whenever you got to quack. Quack, quack, quack. You’re still going to answer the questions, but every third sentence should be about quacking. It’s safe, it’s conservative, it’s traditional.
However, what if you’re actually a swan? Then you have three options.
First, if you REALLY want the job no matter what, just quack. Less risk.
Second, if you want the job but you also want to be yourself, quack and also show off your swan features. Let your wings unfurl. Strut a bit. It’s a compromise of being true to yourself while still pursuing the job strongly.
Third, if you are interested in the job, but you aren’t going to be happy if you can’t be a swan, then fully unfurl and strut. You have to. Because you don’t want them thinking you’re a conforming duck and hire you into a job that is a bad fit for you.
But this also leads to some good news.
You get to interview them too. You can ask what it’s like to work in the unit. Chances are they will tell you anyway before you ask. They’ll often describe the job in detail, or the division, or the branch. They’ll give you a bunch of info you didn’t get reliably earlier…and you may or may not like it.
Some people have thought the job was like X and then found out in the best fit interview that it was mostly about Y. Which they had no interest in, and now they’ve wasted a huge amount of time to get that far and they’re not interested in the job anymore. It happens. Mostly to people who applied for anything and everything without finding out what the job was about at least in general terms.
You also get to see the manager and / or director in an informal setting and see if you want to work for THEM. You can see how they describe files, people, the work, etc, and decide whether there is a whack job in the room, and it’s not you.
Those are the basics, and the challenge for giving advice on this section is so many of the questions you might have are “what if…” scenarios. Too many to address in their entirety, but I’ll attempt to address some common general themes.
Option 1: What if I’m invited but I actually don’t want the job?
Remember all those other factors I mentioned above? Life happens. You can politely decline the best fit interview and say you’re not interested in the job at this time, with or without an explanation, no harm, no foul. They might be a little annoyed, but they’ll get over it. If you have something else, just say so and move on.
However, I advise against declining. First of all, they ran a competition, invested a lot of time and resources in it, and you DID apply. The least you can do is here their pitch at the end.
Second, you actually don’t know what they’re considering. Tons of pools get used to fill OTHER jobs than the first one posted. You might think it is about training programs, and you’ve decided it doesn’t interest you in general, but in reality, they have a new initiative looking at training geared towards gender equality that is one of your passions. You don’t know, and you won’t know unless you go and have that little interview. And after you hear from them, if you don’t want it, email them the next day and thank them politely for their consideration but tell them it doesn’t seem like the best fit for you at this time. Even if they offer you the job, you CAN say no.
Option 2: I had the interview, seemed to go well, and I want the job. Now what?
Ideally, they offered you it on the spot and you said, “Quack yeah!”. More likely, they said, “Thanks for coming in, we’ll let you know.”
But you should also give them an extra bit of info – you WANT the job, now that you’ve heard more about it and met your potential bosses. So email them the next day and say thank you for considering me, and that you remain very interested in the position if they think you would be a good fit in the team. Lots of people think this is redundant, but the reality is that it is new info for them. They may THINK you will say yes if offered, but they don’t know for sure – they know you’re interviewing them for best fit too. So telling them you’re interested (or very interested) lets them know that for sure if they offer you the job, you’re going to say yes. You’re a sure thing. All uncertainty is gone. And there is a small psychological element in there too – just like in dating or friendships, it’s nice to be wanted, and you’re telling them you want to work with them.
On both the upside and downside, their response will likely tell you which way they’re leaning. Now they may have to interview lots of others too, you can often tell by their response if it is GREAT, thanks for letting us know, or just okay thanks.
Option 3: I had the interview and I don’t want to even KNOW them, let alone work there
So email them the next day and politely tell them it doesn’t seme like the right fit for you at this time. No harm, no foul.
Option 4: I want the job, but one detail is a dealbreaker for me, when do I tell them?
The short answer is whenever you feel comfortable raising it. Not very helpful, I know. So let’s tease that out a bit more. It depends a bit on what the detail is about.
If it is about the job, you need to at least raise it as a concern in the best fit interview because that is pretty clearly linked to your best fit. For example, if you hate public-speaking and you find out that there is a component of that in the job and you didn’t realize that previously, try and probe a bit to find out how extensive it is. They’ll be able to tell that you don’t like or have a problem with that component and the conversation will address that to some extent.
Or perhaps there is a need to do a lot of outreach during the week, but every Tuesday at lunch, you are doing Toastmasters. You could mention that as something you do, and ask if that would likely be an issue. You aren’t trying to say “no”, because they’re not offering you anything yet to say yes or no to anyway, you’re just working out the ramifications of the job and another commitment you have. You can do all of this in the best fit interview.
However, if the detail is something about YOU, not the job, then you can wait for an actual offer before raising it. They’ll call you to let you know they want to choose you, at which time you can ask to meet to discuss a couple of issues you just want to clarify before you say yes fully. You’re still telling them it’s a likely yes, you just want to mention a couple of things.
Some of these things might be highly personal. For example, suppose you have to pick up your son every Tuesday at 4:00 without fail. It’s not an everyday thing, as that could have been discussed at any time in terms of the workhours for the team, etc. Instead, this is a dealbreaker for you. Will that be a problem? Usually it isn’t. But you want to know before you say yes.
Or perhaps you have a one-week trip planned in six months where you’re taking your great grandmother back to the home country. It’s planned, booked, and you’re going no matter what. If it is that important to you, you may say, “Is this oging to be a problem?”. Usually not, particularly with advanced notice, but this category is about something YOU decided was a dealbreaker for you, so you need to know if it is a problem or not.
After that, there are a huge number of potential really personal issues you might want to raise. Maybe you have a religious ritual that you do at certain times each day, and while they’ll accommodate you, maybe you want to know it isn’t simply accommodations but they are actually supportive and would never ask you to do it after you finish some urgent task. Many of these areas could even get into questions of human rights, but you want them to know before you start.
Which takes me back to the original response. Tell them what you want to tell them when you feel comfortable doing so.
Now, lots of activists out there will tell you that you don’t need to share, and I agree. You don’t HAVE to tell them. But you also don’t want to necessarily be faced with having to fight for something with neanderthal bosses…you want to know their views before you accept.
For me, it is the blog I write. I tell them in my best fit interviews, if not earlier, that I have a blog. And give them the URL if they want to check it out to see the types of things I write. Am I allowed to have a blog? Yep. Does that mean a boss might not give me a hard time about it? No, they could, and if that’s their attitude, I want to know that before I agree to work for them…mostly because I won’t accept the offer. I’m also going to feel them out about HR, training supports for employees, ways to approach certain types of situations. And all of that will be informally during the best fit because that is where I feel comfortable sharing it. Others might wait for an actual offer, but to me, that’s a waste of time. But I’m also not looking for just “any job” or trying to get a promotion. I will only accept jobs that are the right fit for me.
hi Paul,
Thank you for your website.
I have completed a written exam and finally have an interview coming up. Do you think the 2 criterion that were evaluated in my written exam, will also be evaluated in my interview? Should i solely focus on the criterion that have not been evaluated in the written exam?
Thank you,
Connie
Hi Connie,
Each process is unique in how the manager chooses which ones are being tested only once, or perhaps twice, or perhaps even three times. Traditionally, perhaps up to 2016 or so,the standard was generally (but not exclusively) that you tested things once. If you tested ability to make recommendations in the written, you wouldn’t repeat it in the interview; if you tested interpersonal skills in the reference check, you wouldn’t repeat it in the reference check.
Around 2016 or so, HR advice from consultants and around govt shifted a bit…people started to recommend to hiring managers that the most important element be tested through more than one step. The idea had been around for years, but very few people did it. The premise is that, for example, if interpersonal skills is really important for the job you’re hiring for, then it’s a bit risky to ONLY assess it through an interview OR a reference check — why not assess it in BOTH? Then you can be sure.
The downside for the candidate is you get assessed on same element twice; the downside for person running competition is that it makes your process more complex to assess and some people might be screened in longer (i.e., more candidates continue to be assessed even though you already have signs they probably won’t pass on that element — it’s a little complicated to explain, but let’s say you get tested for four things in your interview, one of which is initiative and that’s the only place it is tested, and one is interpersonal skills. And let’s say you fail initiative — you get 3/10. You’re out of the competition because you failed it. By contrast, if you passed the other four and only got 1/10 on interpersonal skills, they can’t screen you out yet — because you can still get marks in the reference check. Now further suppose you could get 10 more marks in reference, and therefore the BEST you can get is 11/20, and suppose the pass mark is 13/20. You cannot possibly pass because you did so bad on that element in the interview, the reference check can’t bring your score up enough…but if it is not fully assessed yet, because the ref check is going to assess it too, even though you can’t possibly pass no matter how well you do the second part, they can’t screen you out.
Let’s go with an even more complicated example where they had three elements — ability to make recommednations, initiative and interpersonal skills. And let’s assume that they assess them all three times — once in written, once in interview and once in reference check. Everybody who passed experience will do the written exam. At the end of which, where people who failed would normally be screened out, NOBODY could be eliminated — because all three elements are only partially assessed so far. So everyone does the interview too — and again, even if a bunch fail, they can’t be screened out. You would have to do the reference check too…and THEN combine all three scores together for each element. 70% of the people could be massive failures up to that point, but because the elements are not fully assessed until the last stage, EVERYONE would have to do all three steps. The end result of which is massive extra cost, including for people who mathematically likely can’t pass after the first stage but have to still be fully assessed to the end.
Now, that’s the complicated theory between the pluses (assess the most important aspect through more than one tool) and minuses (extra cost, hard to administer).
The reality is simpler for your question in two aspects:
a. They SHOULD tell you for the interview is going to be assessed in the invite, and if they don’t, you can ask;
b. In almost all cases, anything in the written is hard to reassess in an interview, so rarely would written be duplicated.
Most of the time if something is duplicated and tested a second time it is WRITTEN+REFERENCE (like their writing ability) or INTERVIEW+REFERENCE (like interpersonal skills).
Good luck!
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your website, it is the most clear out of all the guides i have found online.
In one of your replies below to a comment asking about, Analytical thinking, you wrote the following headings:
Interpreting (Example: NRCan client survey)
Linking (Example: HC stakeholder review)
Analysing (upstream/downstream, best practices, focus on results.
My silly question:
You used 2 different work experience examples per heading. However, do you think it is a good idea to use 1 same work experience example for each heading? For example i worked on 1 PSPC project and i use this example for the interpreting and linking headings… Or do you think that 2 different examples will give a more rounded response…. or is it case by case… i might be overthinking sorry!!
Hope my question is clear-rish.
Thank you
Stacy
Hi Stacy,
Glad you’re finding it helpful…and a good question, to which there is no “right” answer. Let’s assume basically it’s an experience question, aka “tell us of a time when”…in those cases, you SHOULD try to keep it to one example. It allows the fullness of a situation to come through, multiple dimensions, everything links up linearly. And, if I go a step further in thinking, you’re demonstrating Competency X. You should have it abundant capacity, and you should have tons of examples to draw upon (from hiring manager’s perspective), so you should be able to pick one example and display all of the headings you’re going for through that example. If you CAN do that, great.
If by contrast you get the question, “What would you do in THIS situation?”, your answer is generally about what you would do and why. Now, in that case, you might say “I have dealt with lots of situations like this, and I find that it is best to start with Step A. For example, in example X, I did blah blah blah, and I would do something similar here. For Step 2, I would do X because blah blah blah. After that, depending on the situation, I would do Step 3A or Step 3B. In example Y, I did blah blah blah, and that works well most of the time, but there is an aspect of this situation where I think I might go for 3B instead.”…in this type of response, you can use multiple examples that fit. You won’t go into much detail on them, they’re just supporting evidence that you not only know WHAT to do, you HAVE DONE it before. Soooo, in this style, you can use more than one example. You don’t want to go insane and mention 22 times you did consults, of course, you’re still staying true to the question, not doing a brain dump.
Now, going back to the first option…if you have example A and it is pretty good but doesn’t cover everything and Example B is a little less appealing but also covers another aspect, you CAN use two. In short, if one example won’t cover what you need to say, use two.
ULtimately, the goal is to cover what you need to cover in the best way possible.
Does that help?
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thank you very much for your detailed website.
I think i have 2 pertinent questions for you:
1. During which interview will we be asked about Asset Experience as listed in the job description/Application?
2. During our interview, is it okay if we re-use examples that we have already provided in the initial Job Application and Written Exam? i practically used all my juice in those, haha!
Thank you
William
Hi Will,
Your experience SHOULD be repeated as examples when handling questions in written or interview…the first was just against experience; now they’re asking how you handled /would handle something, so they’re looking for similar examples to illustrate your approach.
Assets can be introduced at any stage, but you specifically said EXPERIENCE — they only do experience through the screening process. They won’t “ask” you about in the formal process (written/interview) unless there’s a knowledge/ability/personal suitability related to it.
Paul
Hi Paul!
Thank you so much for your website and for responding to me in a previous question.
I have another quick question: following a written exam, i have an upcoming formal interview and they listed the 6 merit criteria that will be assessed (initiative, planning and organizing etc etc).
However, i am wondering if they will be asking about Asset Experience in this interview? i.e. in the job posting: “The following may be applied / assessed at a later date (may be needed for the job)
ASSET EXPERIENCE: AEX1 Experience working in an emergency management environment, AEX6 – Experience in preparing and delivering presentations, etc etc.” In the GC jobs application, i had to indicate how and if i met those asset experiences (which essentially helped me get a written exam i guess).
Just wondering if i should prepare myself for this too for the upcoming interview, or if i should save this preparation for the “best fit” interview if i make it that far.
Thank you!!
Sara
Hi Sara,
Experience is almost always done through and only through the application process. Even though it is an asset, it is an asset EXPERIENCE. So they can decide to screen on it later based on what you said in your application. If it was some other asset — asset ability, asset personal suitability — they would tell you that they plan to ask; in this case, they’ll only ask you about the six they mentioned. Good luck!
Paul
Hi Paul!
Happy Holidays and hope you are doing well.
Thank you for your website – it is truly insightful, I have read it all throughout my application for a PM position and have made it to the “last step” thanks to you!
I have a quick question:
I was informed that interview documentation will be sent to me 20min prior to the interview for preparation.
The word “documentation” threw me off a bit. Based on your knowledge, will they be sending out a lengthy document (2-3 pages) explaining a scenario along with questions, or should I expect “shorter” scenario/questions of type 2 Process (situational or present)?
I know regardless of the answer, the questions/answers will end up having the same structure like you previously mentioned, but I am just wondering if I should be expecting to receive a few pages of a scenario OR rather shorter ones…. I have had a few interviews in the consulting filed (non gov), and often these interviews require reading a 2-3 page document. I was going to prepare for this as well but after reading your Chapter on Interview process, I am not sure anymore if I should include this in my preparation…
Thank you for your help!!
May
Hi May,
My suspicion is they will send you a written form of the questions in advance. Let me know!
Paul
Hi Paul, Happy new year. I hope your are doing well!
I just received a response from HR after the interview. ” Dear Candidate,
Upon completion of your interview, I am pleased to inform you that you have been placed in a pool of partially qualified candidates (pending Second Language Evalualtion (SLE) results) that will be valid until January 14, 2027.You will be contacted should you be selected for further assessment and considered for future opportunities.”
What does this mean? Is it good or bed ?They didn’t ask for references!!! does this mean that I will have no offer ?So I don’t understand if they will continu considering me or not!. Thank you so much
Hi Chara,
Thanks for your email. Partially-assessed pools are very hard for outsiders to understand, and I actually was inspired to write a post about them here. https://polywogg.ca/understanding-a-partially-assessed-pool/
Basically, they aren’t going to finish assessing EVERYONE, only those that they choose to move forward in the future. I’ll ignore the ref check for a moment in the scenaro. So, let’s say a hiring manager comes along, and the only thing missing is language…they’ll look at the results so far, likely look at the best scores for people, pick 2-3, maybe call them for a right fit interview, pick one, and send them for a language test. If they pass, they’ll hire them; if they fail, they’ll move on to someone else and send them for a test. Overall, HR is going to save money by not doing language testing for everyone.
As for whether this is good or bad, I can’t tell from your description:
a. If the ONLY thing left is language testing, that’s not bad. Not as good as being tested, but it means ANYONE who is interested can refer you to language testing and most people will be in the same boat (aka untested) if they are outside the public service. Equally, if you talk to another manager, you can say, “Hey, I made a pool, but would need language testing still”. That’s a minor and easily understood step for all managers, not as good as being in fully assessed pool, but if language is the only thing missing, still pretty good.
b. If on the other hand, there were other elements that WOULD have been in a reference check (note that not all processes have ref checks), and thus you have say LANGUAGE **and** INITIATIVE left untested, then if someone wants to pull you from your partially assessed pool, now they have to test language AND do a reference check. It’s an extra step. I just can’t tell from what they told you if there are any other outstanding elements. The only way to know is to ask them, and sometimes the answers aren’t very clear.
Now, having said that, there’s bad news and good news.
On the “bad” front, at the moment, NOBODY is getting an offer. They can’t make offers on partial pools, they have to finish the steps for whoever they want to hire (generally). And I want to remind you that you can do everything right, pass everything, and still get no offer…I hope that’s clear. Suppose you get to the end, and there are 40 of you who made a full pool. THat’s great, but they might only hire 5 of you. You were fully qualified, but so were the other 39. Making a pool doesn’t mean you’ll get an offer.
On the “good” front, everyone is in same boat, you all made it this far, they’re just pausing for now. You’re still in consideration, just like anyone else who made it this far. If they move forward, they can ask you to do language test or something else, and then be considered for a possible offer. There are no guarantees until they offer you something or screen you out. Otherwise, you’re still playing. Kind of like Dodge Ball.
Good luck,
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thank you for taking the time to reply and clarify things. Thank you for the link, which I find very useful, especially for those coming from outside.
Reading your message, I understand that nothing is certain, and it’s especially unclear which direction to take, except to be patient. What I don’t understand about these processes is that they are being carried out without seeing any actual job openings. And these processes are very long, really long. I believe a fundamental overhaul is needed in this area.
If I may ask, would it be appropriate to start contacting other managers and mention that I am partially qualified in a pool for the advisor position, or would that be a bit awkward considering I applied for AGR-NCR and am supposed to be interested in working with them?
Thank you again for your advice!
Regards
Absolutely appropriate, start marketing yourself!
Thank you, Paul
I need help for accountant 1 interview questions by SETA Sacramento
Sorry Hanae, my guide is focused on Canadian Government interviews. I have no idea how Sacremento does things 🙁
Good luck!
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the amazing and selfless work you’ve been doing and I have tried as much as possible to incorporate your advice to processes I’ve applied to.
I have two separate questions I’m an external candidate)
First Question:
I have an upcoming interview through vidrecruiter in a few days for an AS04/AS05 process. I’ve gone through Asset Validation & SOMC (competency) Written Exams, and now the interview which will be used to assess the following:
. C1 – Demonstrating integrity & respect
. C3 – Working effectively with others
. C4 – Showing initiative and being action oriented
. C5 – Client Services
. C6 – Communication
The interview will consist of two questions and for each question, I will have 15 minutes of preparation time, 5 attempts, and 5 minutes of recording per attempt.
I’m surprised there is 15 minutes preparation time for a 5 minute answer question. I assume how I answer will take care of the communication, I’m more concerned about C1 but can you also share advice on the other merit criteria’s as well
Second Question:
I applied for a process and I’ve received two different emails indicating I’ve been placed in a shortlist for further consideration which then includes the job summary and location. However, they both indicate that they are for bilingual positions and my profile clearly states that I’m unilingual in only English. I am interested in the role but if I indicate my interest, I will be sent a second official language test. They go further to say if the position does not interest me (which it does), my application can still be considered for other job opportunities.
I declined the first invitation as I’m not bilingual but I’m torn about this second invitation as to whether I should accept this one and then explain I’m open to taking french classes. Is this a normal practice?
Thanks for your response!
Hi Dan,
Glad you’ve been able to incorporate some of the techniques, fingers crossed for you.
For VidRecruiter, interesting, I’ve never seen them give 5 attempts. That’s quite a lot. Normally I ever only see 2. However, once I see the 4 elements over 2 Qs plus Comms, it makes a bit of sense…Likely Q1 will do 2 of the first four, Q2 will do the other 2, and C6 will be marked globally.
You seem surprised that there is 15m to prepare for a 5m question. This will likely seem too short. Usually you get 30m prep for the whole test. I’m going to guess randomly that C1 and C3 are done together. Sooo, perhaps a Q about working with someone who is difficult to work with and may be playing office politics or doing something unprofessional in the workplace, maybe something against another person. Doesn’t particularly matter the scenario, and it will likely be a scenario-based Q (once they combine competencies, it often goes to being a scenario question). But in your 5m, you will have to:
1. Respond to the Q aka what would you do?
2. Showcase what integrity and respect means to you in this situation aka what headings are the most important that you want to incorporate into your answer – transparency? fairness? compassion? inclusion? client service? workplace well-being? safe? healthy? respectful? diversity? bilingualism?
3. Showcase what working well with others means to you in this situation aka relationship building? openness to others ideas and perspectives? sharing info? active listening? recognizing others work? working collaboratively? understanding roles and responsibilities and workloads? building trust? proactively address problems? respecting work-life balance?
Soooo, let’s say you choose 2 from the first one, 2 from the second and your headings will be around:
– diversity
– compassion
– others ideas
– info sharing
Which leaves you 30s of intro, 30s of conclusion maybe, and 4 minutes for a minute on each, sharp, crisp, well-structured AND not sounding like you’re on speed as you talk. It may take you at least 10m to figure out what you’re going to say for that Q, and then when doing it, I could easily see you wasting the first 2 attempts either talking too fast or going over time.
The two biggest challenges in interviews (after staying calm and answering the actual Q) is fighting time (too long or too short) and covering more than one competency in your answer. You could go big on C1 and fail C3, or big on C3 and fail C1, or go even on both and fail both. It can be really hard.
I cover initiative in my guides, client service depends on the dept, some have actual definitions on their websites.
For your second situation, they are caught a bit between a rock and a hard place. Let’s say they started the process 6m ago and perhaps you have been on training for language the last 6m. They don’t have any way of knowing. Sooooo, now that there’s a position available, and it’s bilingual, the only thing they can do is ask if you’re interested or not. If you say yes, they’ll send you on a language test. There’s no option on these ones if it requires bilingual for you to say “yes” and go on language training. If it requires French, you have to have french to be chosen. Other jobs won’t have that option, which is presumably why you applied. For now, the ones that are coming up are French only. It doesn’t hurt to TRY to say you’re willing to learn, but their hands are likely tied. However, who knows, maybe they have some other options OR maybe they have NO other options and it might trigger their interest. Completely unlikely. I am 99.9% sure they’ll say “thanks but no”, but why not try? Doesn’t cost you anything. Just make it clear though that you cannot pass the french test currently. Note that they may say, “Hmm, well, let’s send you and get tested anyway” so they know where you’re at.
When I went for my very first french test, they were doing two things — a level test (to see if perhaps you’re a false beginner, as many people had some french in school but have forgotten it, but can remember je m’appelle or mon stylo est bleu. I had none so I came back at level X; some false beginners may get level A. That tells them something significant. If you also get a diagnostic test as I did, they’ll ask you something in, say, Urdu after teaching you some basic words in Urdu, and then ask you what they said. They basically take a highly tonal language to see if you can learn tonal languages which tells them how fast you might pick up languages…so then they apply your aptitude to french and say, “Based on where he is, and the speed with which he can learn, he can pick up French in 18w of group training to level B” OR “he’s already B, really good, and only needs maybe a month of 1:1 to get C”. It’s a bit subjective, more art than science, but they COULD send you for testing even if you won’t pass. Note that whatever diagnosis/level they get back, it also gives them a proxy for how muhc it will cost them to train you or how long until you’d be ready.
But that is extremely rare, and almost never happens if it says required bilingual. You could be wasting your time and theirs, but if they gave you a # for the person, call them and tell them where you’re at.
Paul
Hello Paul,
I wanted to update you after my interview. Honestly, I’m 99% sure I’ll be kicked out of the process because it didn’t go very well. I’m really angry with myself for not performing better!
Your advice was incredibly helpful. Thanks to the preparation I did by reading your blog, I managed to get through the interview without stopping after just 10 minutes (I want juste to stop it).
The 4 questions, were so specific. For example, to assess interpersonal skills (active listening, problem-solving, collaboration…), they asked me to provide a specific example of active listening (I can’t disclose the exact questions, but it was something like that). The problem is, I had prepared an example that covered all those sub-skills, and faced with such a focused question, I froze.
Later, they tested the Cote-P in French with simple questions like “Tell us about yourself” or “Why do you want to leave your current job?” These icebreaker questions weren’t evaluated for their content.
Then, I was asked to teach and the interviewers (3) were the students. I had to teach a specific topic in 20 minutes (explain the objective of the cours, deliver the theoretical and practical parts of the lesson). Unfortunately, I ran out of time because I also had to listen to the students production and provide feedback.
And to top it, at the end, they asked if I wanted to revisit my answers to correct or add anything. Like an idiot, I said no! I could have at least gone back to the simulation and explained how the course should have ended, but I was so disappointed in myself that I didn’t. A BIG ERROR
At the end informed me that there are currently no positions available and that successful candidates would be placed in a pool. To me, it felt like a polite way of saying “don’t get your hopes up” (haha). They also said candidates would receive an answer by early January.
So, that’s how it went! VERY BAD
Thank you again for your valuable advice.
Hello Chara,
If we were in person, I’d have to start with an apology because I’d be laughing. Not meanly, but at the fact that EVERYONE almost always thinks they did badly. But here’s the thing…you weren’t the one judging. They were. And they were judging your performance in the context of 20 other candidates perhaps who were equally nervous, and all of them thought they did terrible too. We are terrible at judging our own performance because we were a little busy with actually performing. There are actors and actresses who won awards for performances they thought were rubbish. 🙂
I would also note that preparation for a role involves two things that are often like an individual sport. You’re trying to increase your overall performance average AND trying to have your best performance on a specific day. The metaphor works well for something like figure-skating, gymnastics or diving where you have difficulty levels for specific moves. Suppose you are generally able to do all level 2 moves, and often most of the 3s. So your average is about a 2.75 or so. But, on a good day, you land all your level 3 moves, and for that day, you ARE a 3.00. Awesome! But your average is a bit below that. You keep working and working and working and eventually you can generally land almost all the level 3 moves every time. A couple are still a bit wobbly, but every once in a while, you catch a ray of moonbeams and you nail a level 4 or you do a series of 3s flawlessly. You’ve moved up your average. And then comes the big day — you are nervous, perky, excited — and you can either do Level 10s (which don’t exist, but go with me on this) or you can barely do Level 1. French fluency is very similar. You learn the language, you can communicate, and you are trying to raise your average level. Let’s say you’re mid-B, you go for the test and — you come back as A, B, or C. It’s a snapshot of how you were that day. Tons of people are convinced they screwed up french tests with PSC because they only notice their own flaws. Not the 12 other things they said right. Your french levels and your performance in an interview is not about perfection. It’s a bit difficult nuance to convey, but in addition to you wanting to have a good day, maybe even a personal best, the interviewers are mostly interested to know your average level over time. In a sense, they want to know you can do the job, not if you can pass tests well. 🙂
Now some thoughts:
– You prepared for all the interpersonal skills but found it hard to do one more narrow? Everyone else probably froze too. 🙂
– French questions were interesting, was curious how they would do that;
– Huh, never thought they would leave the “teaching” test so open but makes sense…you likely lost marks from not finishing, but likely not fatal, others might hae done the same);
– The “don’t get your hopes up” thing is standard bumpf. They started assuming they’ll need bodies, but they may not. It’s proactive, not specific to a current need. By contrast however, they wouldn’t do all that work for nothing. They THINK they’ll need at least some bodies.
I’ll close with one last thought about the “revisit” thing. My short advice to everyone is under most instances, NEVER go back. The reason is that almost everyone who goes back does so BADLY. They’ll go back, they’ll repeat a whole bunch of stuff they already said, and mess up their original answer. It makes them look disorganized without adding anything. The one exception I tell people is IF they know they missed something specific (like you said you did because of time), then YES you can go back but ONLY to add that point, 30s max, get in – say it – get out, and finish. Maybe 45-60s, but do not address anything else in the Q. Just say what you missed, pick up a point or two, and get out without messing up your original answer. In this case, I don’t know if they would have let you go back for that part. When they asked you, that’s like a standard Q, but since you ran out of time on that Q, they may have stopped you again, and said, “Sorry, we cannot add anything to that as you ran out of time.” While you feel it was a big error NOT to go back, I’ve literally only seen two people in my entire career who didn’t mess up when going back — one was me hehehe I realized I missed part of a Q’s sub element and went back for 30s, apologized that I was returning, made it seem like my answer was implicit but I hadn’t spelled it out, got in and got out, closed it off. Not rushed, just a conversation. Another candidate taht I was interviewing did it very similarly which is the only reason I did it myself later, otherwise I would have thought “NEVER!!!”. But it can work if you do it right. In this case, I expect they wouldn’t have taken it because that element was timed.
Good luck, and as per the metaphor, keep working on raising your average.
Paul
Hi Paul,
I sincerely appreciate your philosophy and your way of interpreting the situation. Your advice are extremely valuable, and I deeply thank you for that. I will do my best next time 🙂
I will get back to you as soon as I receive feedback from them.
Wishing you an excellent weekend
Chara
Hi Paul,
Thank you for this information! This is super helpful. I have a question.
I found out my term will be ending next March. As a result of the news I cold emailed the chief of a section I had my eyes on since I was in university five years ago asking for a chat, and my manager also emailed them recommending me for various positions. It’s also worth noting I have an extremely specific and rare masters degree, and I did the exact same work for my masters that this unit does.
They offered to have a casual conversation, which later changed to an “informal interview” with an additional member from the group.
Initially I was expecting to just network — but the updates (interview and addition of an additional member) make me think there could be a position available, especially because I found out there were two retirements in the unit.
Do you have recommendations for how I should prepare or what questions I should ask to get more information tactfully without seeming desperate (though I am; I won’t have a job in March).
Hi Will,
It sounds like you’re doing what you need to do — networking, proactively having conversations, etc.
There are lots of pundits out there who will tell you about varous ways to win them over, impress them with your knowledge of their situtation and their needs, etc. The general “consensus” is that if you show them how you can solve a problem for them, you’re golden. I disagree with just about all of it.
The truth is that you have no idea what their needs REALLY are, what they have covered, what they don’t. I like to use an IT example as it is really obvious. Let’s say they’re running support network, and they need people to cover PC, MAC, mobile devices and mainframes. YOu know they have a gap or planned retirement from their mainframe person, so you could go in and talk up all your mainframe experience. BUT what you wouldn’t be able to know in advance is that they have someone working on mobile who is going to move into the mainframe area, has been waiting to do that for over a year, manager already told them they could. So their “problem” of a “mainframe gap” is already solved. What they REALLY have is a mobile gap. Or maybe they’re phasing out mainframe and MAC, and really need to build up PC and mobile. You might get HINTS of where they’re going, but not what the manager is going to actually do.
I love the original “pundit consensus” except for the fact that it relies on accurate and complete info, which we never have. Maybe their boss said to them on Friday, “Hey, we really are going to need to know how to setup new sites, cuz we’re going to be doing a ton of expansion for sites in the next year”. Not public, not known, no way for you to anticpate that.
Instead, you need to focus on two things. First and foremost, what are your true demonstrated strengths from your experience? If someone said, “Hey are you a hardware guy or a software guy” for an IT position, would you know? YOu have a unique MA area, so it’s already partly defined, it fits their needs, great start. But are you really innovative, always looking for an out of the box solution even when the existing option works OR are you “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” kind of guy? Only you can describe how to describe YOU.
While it is easy to say it’s bad to get a job with a bad fit if you already have a job, so you can’t be as picky as you might want, BUT selling yourself to an imagined need isn’t as useful as saying “Hey, here are my strengths and I have a lot of experience in X, Y, Z”, etc. is always useful.
The second thing to focus on is your ability to focus. If they say, “Well what is your epxerience with MAC…” and then they say, “Oh, well, we really need one to know PC” and you have to pivot a bit in your presentation. Or they say they need X and W but not Y or Z, and you say I have X and some W too. I feel almost like C3PO in Star Wars when he meets Uncle Owen and is told that he doesn’t need a protocol droid, and C3PO responds about other skills he has like speaking Baachi. It comes off arrogant, but it sells him.
I suggest you focus ON YOU, and on having a good conversation. Ask them about their top 2-3 files, then maybe ask them later about what their biggest gap would be in the coming year. Not in desperate mode, just saying “Hey I could help with that” by saying, “Oh, right. I get it. I worked on pop-up sites when I was doing blah, it’ll be an interesting challenge to see what support and direction you get from the corporate folks and how much flex you have to tailor solutions to the site’s users”. Basically showing you have insights into how their world works without saying you have that insight. In writing, it’s called “Show, don’t tell”. It’s an interview, but it’s also just a conversation. You learn about them, they learn about you.
Now, the last piece I’ll mention is that they may not know what they want yet. If anything. You can be honest about your timelines, and that you’re looking for a good fit for the future. They’ll understand the need for a job. But often what happens is the hiring manager has three things on their mind:
a. Can they solve an immediate problem I have right now?
b. Would they fit in the future?
c. If they did join us, even if it doesn’t solve my immediate problem, could I reconfigure things in the team to make it all work?
The last one is key…some managers are more like “I’m losing a widget, I’ll get a new widget” for their HR planning. Most are more like “Hey, this person seems good, they may not be perfect for X, but would be really good with Y, can I make that work?”. In other words, they get sold on the person, not the specific solution. I confess that as an experienced manager I’ve hired people that I don’t need right now but I’ll figure out how to use them over the next year.
Soooo, those are my thoughts. Focus on who you are and what you have to offer, with some flex when they describe what they need. I wouldn’t worry TOO much about finding out all their details. On the other hand, anything that is online (in departmental priorities / departmental results reports) is completely fair game 🙂
Good luck, let me know how the interview plays out…
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for this. I took your advice and focused on my experience and what I had to offer. I found out there is a position I’d be filling from someone who retired (lateral move), and I would be doing exactly what I did for my MSc. I made sure to point how similar my MSc work was to their program.
It was a lot more casual than I expected. I showed up in a dress shirt – they in T-shirts and jeans. They basically asked for my experience, what type of work I am interested in, stuff I want to learn, and my hobbies. I was able to talk shop a bit, they thought my research was cool, and totally in their wheelhouse. They also let me know they are informally interviewing 3 others. But I know that no one else has the same specific type of experience I do, so I am hopeful something will come out of this, but if nothing comes out of it, I lost nothing! Plus, my cold-email was truly a work of art.
Thank you once again for your valuable insights and for this site. I cannot tell you how many times I have referenced your info during processes.
Hi Will…sounds like it went well. And even if this one doesn’t go perfectly, they’ve chatted with you, so you’ll be on their radar. And as I mentioned, you have no idea what other things they’re looking for. You’re likely on their viability list, but someone else could come in with huge experience in, umm, stakeholder relations and they have some huge project that is about to kick off with that need. If it goes otherwise, don’t assume it’s something you did wrong. Best fit really is about people who perhaps all COULD fit, but which one is the best fit for the all the obvious and non-obvious things they need.
Paul
Hi Paul,
You are just amazing. Thank you so much for your answer and your help. It is very clear now. I am just going to follow your advices in preparing the interview. I’ll give you a feedback juste after.
Thanks again
Hello,
Thank you, Paul, for this very interesting and informative blog on the hiring process from A to Z. I’m reaching out because, after 5 months of silence, AGR has finally contacted me for a one-hour interview for an AS-01 position. I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit anxious, as I’m not currently working in the government sector and I’m not very familiar with interviews in these types of organizations.
They provided me with the qualifications that will be assessed during the interview and informed me that I will receive the questions 1.5 hours before the interview. There will be three people present, and the interview will take place on Teams.
Here are the qualifications to be assessed:
Code P in the language of instruction – Oral proficiency.
Demonstrating integrity and respect – Serving through integrity and respect.
Maintaining interpersonal relationships – Working effectively with people, organizations, and partners.
Showing initiative and being action-oriented.
Ability to identify French training needs, design French lesson plans according to the needs of adult learners.
Ability to deliver courses and provide feedback in a continuous learning context.
Here are my questions:
How many questions should I expect?
What type of questions could they ask me?
Should I prepare for 10-minute or 6-minute responses?
Thank you so much for your valuable help.
Hi Chara, glad everything has helped so far and that you have made it to interview stage. So let me do a quick refresh of what’s in the guide…
First and foremost, they’re sending you the Qs in advance just to make things simpler. There’s no benefit to anyone if people are sitting there saying, “Oh, thank you, umm, that’s a good question, hmm…” and they’re just stalling while they think of an answer. It is more efficient for people to get Qs in advance so you can say, “Thank you for that question. My answer is going to cover three aspects…” No muss, no fuss, no dancing.
Second, you already know the six things they are going to cover:
1. Oral proficiency
2. Integrity and respect
3. Interpersonal relationships
4. Initiative
5. Training needs
6. Deliver and provide courses
(I just shortened them, you’ll want the full original wording). If it was me organizing the Qs, I’d probably combine #2 and #3, #4 would be separate, and maybe #5 and #6 would be together. Soooooo, expect between 3 and 5 questions (I don’t quite understand the first one what it’s referring to…they don’t normally test proficiency in this manner so I’m not sure exactly what that is referring to…could just be another way of saying “comms” or it’s their way of testing E/F).
Now, based on my guide, you know that they ask three types of questions (past/experience, present/scenario, future/abstract), and if I was to do the testing, I would likely do:
#2 Integrity and Respect — This is hard to mark in any normal form, so most people “testing” this in an interview ask you for a time where you have had to demonstrate integrity and respect. Now, you know from the guide, you are going to research what those headings mean, come up with good headings. Most people will keep it simple — honest candid comms, respect for others views and opinions, etc. Other comments in the site have similar questions and other examples, but you’re looking for “pieces” of what integrity and respect mean to you so you can talk about them easily. And have an example where those values were challenged by a situation in a work environment of some sort. Most people default to some sort of conflict situation like dealing with someone rude without losing your cool.
#3 Interpersonal relationsihps — As I said, I would likely merge this as a Q with #2 but could be separate. If separate, it could be either “tell us of a time when you had a conflict” OR give you a scenario where you have some sort of interpersonal conflict with someone and they want to know what steps you would take to actively resolve it (meet with them, understand their perspective, etc.).
#4 Initiative is easy, I’ve covered it in the guide already. Often it is asked “tell us of a time in the past where you showed initiative”…the being action-oriented part SOMETIMES mean they give you a scenario and ask you to apply what you know to the situation.
#5 Identify needs and design — They COULD ask you an experience question of where you have done that, but the better test would be for them to give you some sort of scenario where you have to look at some materials (included in your 1.5h advance review) and design a response aka a lesson plan for someone.
#6 Deliver and provide feedback — this doesn’t seem well suited as a question in any form other than “tell us of a time when you have done this…”.
For all of them except #5, I would assume a 6 minute response; for #5, if they give you materials to review, I would think more likely 10m for that one.
Good luck! Let me know how it goes!
Paul
Hi Paul!
Thanks for your blog, it helped me get to the pool and I had an informal meeting yesterday. I made a follow up email this morning as per your advice as I really want this job. Very good position in a very good department. I also feel that the interview went very well. What are next steps if they make a decision to hire me? How they will let me know, when to expect LoO and how long usually it takes?
Thank you!
Hi Dan, congratulations on the progress so far! Great Qs, but the bad news is no one knows for sure except the person who is doing the hiring. 🙂
Generally speaking, the process is the same but no idea on timing…note that they may be interviewing 1, 2, or 10 people informally. Some might be on leave, so it may take a week or 2 to lock them all in.
a. If they ran the pool themselves, they go direct to writing a short rationale to HR and starting the staffing process. If they are pulling from a pool that someone else ran in the same department, they might have to check in with them to say, “Hey, we’re goign to pull Dan, any issues?” It’s just polite because someone else did the work, they get first dibs, but might be slower out of the gate to interview people.
b. Once that “greenlight” is received, they might need to re-confirm their budget is still viable and they have their money. You would think that would be obvious, but any day of the week, someone can change something and suddenly the staffing that a manager THOUGHT they were doing went “poof”. Cuts, temporary chills, full-on chills, blah blah blah. Context changes and now it’s delayed, etc.
c. They also will likely to reconfirm with PSC that there are no priority referrals to consider first.
d. THey’ll start a Letter of Offer process, respecting a start date that will avoid any potential mixups with PHoenix / pay system. Internal numbers are that if you let the system run everything exactly in the automated order it is intended, it works 99% of the time to get it right. If you have to manually process something to speed it up, or adjust something, it may go faster but the success rate drops to 80%. So some depts say “Hey, automated system takes 8 weeks, let’s start on week 9”. In that same process, they’ll do two notices that they intend to appoint you (1 for 5d to say “we’re about to appoint” and another one to say “we’re now appointing”). They rarely result in anything that affects you being hired. Even if someone challenges, unless it has some huge issue that seems legit, they leave it to the HR and tribunals to sort out. However, before they start the LoO process, they’ll ask for proof of education credentials, blah blah blah. Maybe security clearance if you don’t have it already.
Lots of steps. Until they verbally tell you that they’re offering and seeing if you’ll say yes, it’s just potential. Even with a verbal offer, it’s not locked in until you get the written LoO.
But a good interview is a good sign. Let me know how it goes…
Paul
Thanks a lot, Paul!
It’s the same position and the same department I applied to, so I believe it’s their pool. After I was fully qualified in the pool, they asked about my interest in provinces, and I mentioned them as well. I spoke with 2 managers and they mentioned “upcoming positions”, and at the end, they told me “We will get back to you in 1-2 weeks with the next steps”. After the follow-up, they told me: “We appreciate you following up. After we completed the remaining discussions with potential candidates, we will determine the next course of action and be in touch with you accordingly”
I really hope it’s a very good and positive sign.
Hi Dan, sounds promising. Good luck!
Hi Paul.
During the competition process, I made it to the exam section and had to prepare a presentation using PowerPoint and I passed. Total surprised me as i thought I could have done better after I reviewed it the following week. haha. Needless to say that I made it to the interview section. Now I am being asked to present my PP.
This is what the process will be…
Preparation time: 40 mins
Interview: Up to 60 minutes:
– Part 1: Logistics, 5 mins
– Part 2: Presentation and Q&A, 30 mins
o 10 minutes to present
o 20 minutes for Q&As
– Part 3: Question to answer, 10 minutes
– Part 4: Question to answer, 10 minutes
– Part 5: End of interview, candidate may ask questions
Do you have any advice? I really really want this position and I would like to make sure that get high marks. I’m not seeking 10/10 but 7, 8 or 9 / 10. Anything you can share would be appreciated. I will be using the method above and rework my answers to have better structure as I did notice that some of my answers in the exam lacked that.
Again, thank you for anything you can share.
Hi Shari, congrats for making it through to the interview!
So, I need to confirm some assumptions. First of all, it is a GoC interview with a main department aka “Ministry of”, “Deparmtent of “, “blah blah Canada”. The reason I ask is that these are part of core public admin, and the standard rules apply. If it’s a crown corp or some form of agency, they can do some wonky things. Not usually, but they can.
Second, in your statement of merit for the job, there would have been a list of criteria, specifically around ability and personal suitability. For Knowledge, let’s assume that you already answered those with the exam. Anything that was NOT tested by the exam is fair game for the interview. Initiative, oral presentation skills (obvious), judgement, whatever was on the original list is fair game.
Third, if there are any knowledge components, separate those out and be very clear if you think something has not yet been tested.
Now, here’s my problem in answering the question…I get that you have a presentation with some Q&As and then two other questions. I am reasonably confident that your presentation will be measuring one or two things. The first, guaranteed, is oral communication. It’s why they had you prepare a presentation, and now you have to give it. So you can look up the standard guides about good oral communications (appropriate language to situation, focused, organized, not repeating yourself, stay on target, when asked questions use paraphrasing or active feedback to confirm your understanding the question as you parrot it back to them, if in person then focus on body language and eye contact, etc.). The second is that the presentation likely had some knowledge content from the exam, and they COULD ask you some knowledge follow-up. Say, for example, “You did a good overview of how to apply that to situation X. What would you do in Situation Y?”. The primary focus of the presentation is on your comms abilities, you don’t have to be perfect on knowledge, they just needed you to have something to present. I once had comms question, limited to 120s, and I tried to cram 5m of knowledge into 2m instead of just calmly focusing on the main point, staying steady, displaying comms ability. I just blanked in my mind and thought I had to get the perfect SUBSTANTIVE answer. But I had already answered that with the deck, I didn’t need to say it again. Live and learn.
Now, for the two secondary Qs, that’s why I was asking what else is on the SOMC. You gave no indication of the other possible areas to mark, but those will be addressed in those two questions. They likely will have nothing to do with your presentation, for example. Without knowing the rest of the list, my guess is something around judgemnet, initiative, or managing multiple priorities, but defer to the real list on your SOMC.
Good luck,
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thank you for sharing such a valuable blog with us. I have my first formal interview for the IT-02 role at IRCC. Although I don’t have much experience, I was a previous co-op student in public service and will be assessed on the following merit criteria:
Judgement/Analytical Thinking
Values and Ethics
Do you have any suggestions that might be helpful?
Thank you for considering my request!
Hi Steve,
As per the guide, basically you google the headings, come up with your own defintions of what they mean (preferably using GoC sites, if there are any such references), and then try to craft a response for three types of questions — experience/past, scenario/current, abstract/future.
For judgment, you’ll likely come up with a definition like “identifies key factors in a situation, weights them appropriately, consider options, makes a decision, follows-up/evaluates decision”. Then you ask yourself, “What situation in the past would give a good example that would include those five hedings?”.
SImilarly for the other two tenses (how would I apply it to scenario X/current, what would I do in a new job to demonstrate these traits/abstract/future).
For V&E, there is the V&E code plus TBS has some key leadership competencies with examples of good V&E.
Good luck,
Paul
Hi Paul,
I’m preparing for an interview for the Program Assistant position at NSERC, and I could use some advice. I received an email saying that “the interview will evaluate your abilities to apply different theoretical and technical knowledge,” which left me a bit confused since it’s not an academic role.
For the technical knowledge part, they’ve already tested my Word and Excel skills during a 4-hour written exam, so I’m not sure what else they want to assess in the interview. As for the theoretical knowledge, I’m not sure what they’re referring to at all.
Additionally, regarding the “knowledge of NSERC’s policies, programs, and objectives,” do I need to memorize everything, or should I focus on specific areas?
I’ve attached the Statement of Qualifications for your reference. I’d really appreciate any advice you could offer!
Thank you so much.
Statement of Qualifications
Education
High School Diploma or equivalent
Degree equivalency (Foreign Credential Validation against Canadian Standards)
Experience
Experience in providing administrative support services;
Experience with current office technologies and standard software packages;
Experience in client relations;
Experience in grants and contributions funding administration would be considered an asset.
Knowledge
Knowledge of administrative procedures;
Knowledge of NSERC’s policies, programs, and objectives;
General Knowledge of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act;
General Knowledge of peer review would be considered an asset.
Competencies
Strategic thinking skills and ability to solve problems
Thoroughness
Reliability
Judgment
Interpersonal communications
Tact and diplomacy
Adaptability
Initiative
Client Oriented
Hi Alice,
As they have already tested Word/Excel skills, they are likely to test your administrative procedures and knowledge of NSERC’s policies, programs and objectives. Do you have to memorize it? Not exactly. You can ask in advance, for example, if you will have time to prepare once you see the Qs or if they are “isntant” after you get them (often with recorded interviews, there is little advance prep time). If you are doing it virtually, are you allowed to have notes? In short, if you can have a cheat sheet beside you that you can write down broad policies, list of programs and key objectives in it, great; you can find them in the latest Departmental Plan and Priorities. They MAY ask you about program and Gs&Cs programs, although that is a bit vague since it’s an asset, not a requirement. Note htough that it specifically notes ATIP etc. so there will be at least one question about that.
Good luck!
Paul
Hi Paul,
Me again! Your content is once again so helpful in my preparation. I have one more request for advice for an EC-05 interview on Vidcruiter (Epidemiologist, Chemical Emergency Management and Toxicovigilance Division, Health Canada). If you have any specific advice on preparing using the information provided to me, I would greatly appreciate it.
“The Interview will evaluate the following Criteria:
• Ability to communicate effectively – Oral
• Effective Interpersonal Relations
• Ability to provide advice and recommendations to Senior Management (Director level and above)”
Thank you very much, I hope you’re having a great day!
Same advice on how to figure out what each subelement means.
Hi Paul,
I have used your guide so many times and I have to say it has never failed me. I can tell how much richer my responses are after visiting your articles on each step of the hiring process. I am currently preparing for an interview for an EC-06 pool and I am a little stomped on “respect for diversity”, which will be assessed in this process. I’d be grateful if you could look at my example and tell me how you would rate it. I was able to find the definition for it in my Department’s competency dictionary and fit the desirable behaviour into the “process” template as follows:
Principal 1: Model flexibility required for working in a diverse environment
Principal 2: Provides feedback and encourages others to support acceptance and accommodation of individual differences in the workplace
Principal 3: Carries out decisions in an impartial, transparent and non-partisan manner (this requires self-reflection and acting upon insights, rather than bias)
That being said, I get stuck when trying to explain how I showed this competency in past experiences. Much like what you said about people sharing leadership examples for initiative, I find my mind going to leadership examples for “respect for diversity”. My other issue is that when I read diversity, I think about ethnocultural diversity, yet the example I have in mind is about difference in “work culture”. If I were to share previous experience showing “respect for diversity” I would start with how I offered to provide feedback into a new employee’s work (a PhD student on FSWEP) , before they sent it for approval, as an opportunity to coach them on management’s preferred style of presenting written material. Would you agree that I hit principal #1 as my offer was based on the understanding that without prior experience Government experience they might find it difficult to adapt? I can’t see how to justify principal #2 or #3 with this example. To supplement this, is it strong enough to also say that being bilingual, I always express to my interlocutor that I am comfortable conducting exchanges in the official language of their choice to hit #2? As for #3, I thought about mentioning that I have provided GBA Plus training sessions to policy analysts in the past, which centered on helping them develop a gender- and diversity-sensitive approaches that challenge their biases and help them provide impartial and transparent policy advice.
Thank you!
A very grateful analyst.
Hello “guest” 🙂
I feel like I already answered this, but I don’t see my response. Maybe it was someone else. Or someone by email. The short version is that respect for diversity is really hard to “demonstrate” in past, present, or future. Often, they do it by asking references about it and tailor it around, “hey, do they work well with people of colour, religion, ethnicity, etc.?”. Then they ask for examples and the reference says, “Yeah, so we have 3 visible minorities on the team, and s/he works well with all of them. They just did a project X, went well, etc.”. If YOU were to say the same thing, it would come off badly, and sound like the classic cliché, “I don’t dislike black people, some of my best friends are black.”
As for your examples, they can work. However, IF you are doing those examples, you need to contextualize your answer to avoid possible negative interpretations. For example, offering to help new employee — if it is you’re offering as (maybe) white man helping minority student, it’s bad. If you say, one aspect of diversity that I focus on is helping people integrate into the work culture of the team to make sure their ideas get the maximum possible uptake they can. For example, I see people coming in, great ideas, but they don’t know how to write a memo in the form our dept uses. So then their ideas don’t land as well as they could. I like to help with onboarding, some informal training or review, maybe even review their memos going up to make sure any idiosyncracies in the memo don’t detract from the ideas they bring to the table. Help them adapt some of their presentation to the culture they’re in, so they can shine. You could then talk about making sure that whether new hires are English or French, you welcome them in the language of choice, and speak to them regularly in their preferred language (while also modelling that behaviour for others perhaps). For the GBA, you could frame it as also modelling or helping build internal capacity for diversity by promoting a GBA lens with training, etc.
Pitched THAT way, it works. On the other hand, if you were a white person lecturing everyone else on the way govt works, insisting on reviewing their work for deficiencies cuz they are young / foreign / whatever and virtue signalling by saying you’re gender-sensitive, all those same points could be said, but you’d come off racist/anti-diversity/etc. On diversity, as with most other competencies, you need to explain WHAT you are doing, WHY you are doing it, and HOW you are doing it. Context matters as does the motivation. If you start with the right context, the actions make obvious sense. The easiest way to do that is to start by saying, “To me, diversity is about three main things. X, Y and Z. I do X by this, I do Y by this, and I do Z by this.” You’ll automatically word X, Y and Z right, it’ll be obvious if you’re not. Then when you talk about actions, A/B/C, and they FLOW from X/Y/Z, the actions will make sense, context is clear, no room for ambiguity.
It’s a tough area to handle, it’s a tough area to describe. I used an example of kind of the opposite, but even that seems offensive.
Good luck,
Paul
Hi Paul, just a quick follow-up on the competency dictionary. Is it possible that certain department don’t have them? I’ve been searching for Global Affairs Canada’s dictionary with no success. My interview is on Friday. Thanks Karl
Hi Karl,
Sooooo…the short answer is there likely isn’t one online. Competency dictionaries are tricky things to explain. And without a full explanation, they often lead people down a garden path to nowhere. Let me back up a bit.
First, you know that in order to launch a competition that managers need to say in advance how they are going to rate each and every element. So, as per examples in my guide, if they have judgement as a criteria, they likely have it in an interview, some form a of a question (past / present / future), and then the headings for measuring/rating the answer. It will say things like “Identifies the key variables in the situation, weights them appropriately,…” etc.
Second, most departments will have the same general competencies for jobs like an EC position. Relatively generic. So for most EC jobs, there will be common rating headings shared around internally in the department. They may or may not be public. Not every manager is required to use them, it’s not mandatory, they could create their own. But it isn’t uncommon for a manager to say to HR, “So, running a -05 process, can you tell me who ran the last 3? Do you have copies of their rating guides?” and then curating their own based on previous ones.
So there may be a set of stock definitions at that department aka your competency dictionary that is official or unofficial and private or public. That’s scenario 1 and source 1.
Scenario 2, with a similar source, might be that the department has a strong public facing element. And hence they have created their OWN definition of what Customer Service means. And they usually WANT to share that definition outwards because it is almost marketing for them. “Hey, we take CS so seriously that we have created our OWN detailed definition!”. And so again, you can have a partial competency dictionary that is official and public. Scenario 2, source 1. They may or may not include any other generic competencies in that list. Service Canada, Procurement Services, Immigration, etc. all have special “service delivery” competencies that they use separately.
Scenario 3 is a separate agency situation. So those orgs that are not part of the core public administration (i.e. not “Department of” or “Ministry of…”) often make up a series of definitions and they usually do publish them. Not likely to be called a dictionary. But usually on the HR side of their website. Googling “(org)” name plus “(competency)” will usually give you the definition page in a few clicks. Call it Scenario 3, source 2.
Scenario 4 is the standard compilation at TBS. The “Key Leadership Competencies” are the biggest and generally applicable to all EX positions, BUT also includes examples for people at Manager and Supervisor levels too. It isn’t called a dictionary, but it is applicable to all of government for anyone wanting to use it. It is usually very obvious in a poster if they are using the 6 KLCs. Scenario 4, source 3.
Scenario 5 is an internal thing. As part of your Performance Agreement, as an EC for example, it will ask me as the manager to rate the person against 4 key competencies that are universal for ECs across government. PMs, similarly. AS too. As an employee, you CAN ask as part of the process for PAs to see the definitions. HR will often hem and haw a bit, as they may or may not have full job descriptions, but generally they DO have generic descriptions of each of the key competencies. But the kicker is that the wording is NOT always the same as what might be in a rating guide. The descriptions and verb tense are often softer, more prose than pointed bullets. These are rarely public, but might be available to employees internally. Scenario 5, source 4.
And lastly Scenario 6. For me, this is the most common. If you search GAC and the name of the competency, you’ll likely see some examples in the search engine. It might not be a formal dictionary, and it might nto even be GAC as the source. But usually it doesn’t take too much to find some relevant good examples. If you search GAC and customer service, and nothing comes up for GAC, then you know they don’t have their own definition. So you can make your own, or borrow from one of the other departments that DOES have a unique and public version. What you’ll often find is that the headings are a mix of both generic CS and something specific to that other department. Scenario 6, source 5 (although very close to Scenario 3, source 2).
If you search for GAC and “competency” you’ll find very little that is definitional for them; but there are some for KLC and IRCC. Plus GAC has their list but undefined:
– Respect for democracy
– Respect for people
– Integrity
– Stewardship
– Excellence
The last four are relatively generic and can be found anywhere. R for D is a bit unique to GAC, and would include both generic domestic public admin values, non-partisanship, V&E, as well as broader issues like rule of law, human rights, etc. Similar to UNDP’s core values for promoting good governance for the second part.
Sooooo…Does GAC have a competency dictionary? Welllllll… 🙂
Good luck!
Paul
Hello,
thanks for the wonderful resources! I have an upcoming behavioral interview and they are assessing based on the following:
Essential Ability:
Ability to communicate orally effectively
Ability to plan and organize workload
Ability to analyze and solve problems
Essential Personal Suitability:
Dependability
Flexibility
Innovative thinking
Effective Interpersonal Relationships
Since this is for the civilian role with RCMP, I cannot find the competencies/keywords they would use to grade my responses. I already plan to answer using the STAR method. Any ideas?
Thanks a lot!
Hi RS,
I’m not sure what you mean that you can’t find the keywords. For example, if you google “Effective Interpersonal Relationships” (EIR), Google will show you a bunch of words, and it will let you even narrow it down to “in the workplace”. I found 21 words that it thinks are components of EIR. I would personally group them as:
1. COMMS: Active listening, solicit feedback, nonverbal communication, communication, communicate often
2. THE WAY YOU TREAT OTHERS: Conflict resolution (aka not escalation), negotiation, teamwork, collaboration, maintain fruitful relationships within the workplace, empathy, be respectful, responding positively to communications from others, get a mentor
3. YOUR MENTAL APPROACH: Positive attitude, controlling emotions, motivation, practice mindfulness, start with self-awareness, dependability
4. FOCUS ON ISSUE, NOT PERSONALITY: Leadership, keep interactions focused, establish your goals
Then in an answer, I might start with saying “effective interpersonal relationships start with me and my own mental approach to work. I want to motivate myself with a positive attitude, remain self-aware and mindful of my own actions.” I might then segue into talking about the overall way I treat others (collaborate, respect, positive responses). Then for individual interactions, I want to focus on the work and not personalities and ensure that I focus heavily on two-way communication, etc.
Some depts have defined subdefinitions for things like client service if that is their main area, but most depts use either elements of the Key Leadership Competences at TBS or generic definitions. Sometimes you can get better results on your search if you append “(competency x) Government of Canada”. If you go to this link: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/services/staffing-assessment-tools-resources/human-resources-specialists-hiring-managers/management-toolkit/competencies.html they have a breakdown of interpersonal competencies as:
– empathy
– consensus building
– networking
– persuasiveness
– negotiating
– diplomacy
– conflict management (resolving conflict)
– respecting others
– being a team player
Three of those are different from above, but they are all variations on a theme. Consensus building and diplomacy could go into the THE WAY YOU TREAT OTHERS; persuasiveness could go in comms.
If you do the same for the other competencies, you’ll be able to build YOUR list of headings. Plan and organize workload is likely better labelled “prioritization” or “organization”. Dependability and Flexibility are odd ones because they are hard to “test”. Normally, dependability is asked of references, as opposed to trying to ask a candidate to “demonstrate” it. Not sure what they mean by flexibility in this instance…adapting to change? Innovation? Dealing with difficult people?
But regardless, you can research them the same way…
Good luck!
Paul
This was helpful, thanks, Paul!
Hey Paul,
Thanks for your helpful guide and tips. I’m so glad I came across your site!
A few weeks ago, I received an email for a PM-01 invitation regarding a written assessment test (applied back in Feb/2024). I gladly accepted and attended this past week. Here’s the kicker: after a few hours of completing my test, I received another email stating that I had been selected for a virtual interview. Is this normal? Also, can you please guide me on how to prepare using the competencies defined section?
Working well with others, Oral Communication and Client Focus. I’m unsure if you covered virtual interviews in your guide. Thank you in advance!
Hi DJ,
Sounds good re: invite for interview, likely means you passed. They COULD move you along without marking it first, but that would be rare.
So I’ve mentioned in the guide the basics, and they apply here. Take “work well with others”, come up with headings to explain what that means to you (perhaps respect, integrity, good listening, etc.), and then figure out what you would say if asked one of the three forms of questions for that one…aka “tell us of a time when you had to work well with others” or “here’s a situation, what would you do to work well with the people in this scenario” or “working well with others is a key component of this job…how do you approach work so that is a successful factor?”. If your biggest piece is respect, you might start all three types of answers with, “The most important aspect to me in working well with others is respect for each other.” Then, your answer will change based on which of the three types of questions you were asked. For example, “Previously, I demonstrated this by…” OR “In this scenario, I would focus on….” OR “In my approach to work, I do this…”.
Client Focus can be done the same.
Oral Comms is already covered in the guide.
Virtual interviews are generally the same as regular interviews “on steroids”. The worst parts of govt interviews is that once they ask the question, they generally won’t say anything until you are done your answer. It’s more like a monologue by you than a conversation. In virtual, they might not even have their cameras ON. If recorded, there’s ZERO interaction. The only real trick is to know that you are going to be more artificial than you expect, and it is worth recording yourself to see if you do things you might want to avoid — like touching your face, staring at the wrong monitor, not looking at the camera, etc. Ideally, you’ll be a bit like a newscaster when you answer — focused, looking into the camera, sincere.
Good luck!
Paul