Tag Archives: HR Guide

FFF: My updated guide to HR competitions

PolyWogg.ca
March 21 2025

Last week, I mentioned that I would start doing FlashForwardFriday (FFF) where I will talk about upcoming projects. At the time, I outlined my plans for an introduction to astronomy. This week, I’m revisiting my first, only and original guide, Be the Duck: Succeeding in Canadian Federal Government Competitions.

The current version

The short version of the long history is that, way back in 2004 or so, a friend asked me to present to a bunch of new, young civil servants on how to prepare for competitions. Two weeks later, I got an email from someone asking me about my deck. Except I didn’t know them; they hadn’t been at the presentation nor on the distribution list for it. They weren’t even in the same department! Somebody had shared my deck with 2 friends, and they told 2 friends, and the next thing I knew, I was a shampoo commercial.

My friend Vivian and I called it the Completely Unofficial and Totally Unauthorized guide so that HR people wouldn’t get nervous that I was kind of, sort of, a little bit talking about HR, but not THEIR version of HR, rather about how we get ready as applicants. I subsequently put it on my website, I’ve done dozens of presentations over the years, and my guide has been downloaded about 15,000 times now from the Polywogg.ca… Read the rest

An unusual type of interview

PolyWogg.ca
December 29 2022

When people ask me about HR interviews for government, my answer is pretty standard. As per the guide, all interview questions are tied to the statement of merit criteria. And, in almost all cases, that means they are focusing on Experiences, Knowledge, Abilities, or Personal Suitability. Seems relatively straightforward, right?

Now, if you add in the fact that your cover letter / initial screening deals with experience, and a written exam normally knocks off most knowledge if there was a knowledge component identified at all, then the interview becomes more about abilities or personal suitability. In those instances, the popular but dangerous approach is to use the STAR method to structure your answer — Situation, Task, Action, Results. I consider it dangerous because if the question was “What would you do in situation X?” i.e., a hypothetical situation, then talking too much about your past experience doesn’t actually help you answer the question. They don’t care what the situation was, or the tasks, and only the actions or results that are applicable to the question they ask. However, while that is true for hypothetical situations, it is EQUALLY true for “tell us of a time when…” that LOOKS like an experience question but isn’t.… Read the rest

HR Guide – 12 – Special Tests

PolyWogg.ca
April 15 2019

PolyWogg’s (Completely Informal and Totally Unofficial) Guide to Competing for Jobs in the Canadian Federal Government

This section is an incredibly difficult one to design and write for two reasons. 

First and foremost, there are a lot of special tests administered by the Public Service Commission. According to their website as of July 23, 2019, they have six tests designed for administrative support; eleven tests for officer level (plus two others that have been retired or replaced); twelve more for management level; and six “other” ones including three forms of second language ability, plus some other unique ones for management. That’s thirty-five possible tests that the PSC offers. All of them ranging from slightly to radically different, all of them separate tests. It is hard therefore to describe strategies that fit them in groups as opposed to analysing each test.

Second, and this is the really challenging part for giving advice, the methodology is quite soft for a lot of them. Almost all of them are designed to be automated to reduce cost, but in doing so, you force people to choose one of two or three or four options in multiple choice exams. If the test designers make the “right” choice obvious, then everybody gets it; if they make it more nuanced, people often argue with themselves (and others) about what the “right” answer is, including the hiring managers themselves.… Read the rest