The Nine Civil Service Behaviours, Explained

Success Profiles in one minute

The Civil Service recruits through a published framework called Success Profiles. It assesses candidates across five elements — behaviours, strengths, ability, experience and technical skills — with each vacancy choosing the mix relevant to the role. For most applications the element that dominates the written stage is behaviours: "the actions and activities that people do which result in effective performance in a job", in the framework's own words.

The practical consequence: a Civil Service application is not a CV exercise. The advert names the specific behaviours being assessed, you write a statement evidencing each one, and the sift scores those statements. Understanding the behaviour definitions — and writing to them — is most of the game.

The nine behaviours

The framework defines nine Civil Service behaviours: Seeing the Big Picture, Changing and Improving, Making Effective Decisions, Leadership, Communicating and Influencing, Working Together, Developing Self and Others, Managing a Quality Service, and Delivering at Pace. Each behaviour is defined at every level of the Civil Service, from Administrative Assistant through to Director General, so the same behaviour name expects different evidence at different grades — Leadership at EO level is not Leadership at Grade 7.

A vacancy assesses a subset, not all nine — typically the advert lists between three and six, chosen by the recruiting manager for that role. Read the level-specific definition for the grade you are applying at (the GOV.UK behaviours document sets them out per grade cluster) and write your example to that definition, not to the behaviour's name in general.

How behaviour statements are assessed

Behaviours are assessed through application questions and interviews, and official guidance recommends structuring examples using the STAR method — situation, task, action, result. The scoring emphasis is on what you personally did: departmental guidance is explicit about preferring "I delivered / I did / I implemented" over "we", because the panel is scoring your behaviour, not your team's.

Word limits are normal at the application stage. They vary by department and vacancy, but as a concrete example, the Department for Transport's published recruitment guidance allocates 250 words per answer and recommends using the full count; DfT also describes scoring standard elements on a 1-to-7 scale with 4 usually required to pass. Other departments publish different specifics — always work from the vacancy's own instructions — but the pattern of tight limits and per-behaviour scoring is common across the Civil Service application process.

Our Full Application Service writes behaviour statements to exactly this discipline: one self-contained STAR example per behaviour, first-person evidence from your real experience, within the stated word limit — checked mechanically before a human reviewer signs off.