Principal Officer 2025

Straight after the interview I took some notes trying to recall as many questions as I could:

How do you motivate your team? Teams was brought up a good bit throughout the interview.

What do you do if somebody in the team is underperforming?

What does empathy mean to you?

Tell us about a difficult negotiation you had to conduct?

When did you have to change your communication style? (as previous style was not working).

What is a difficult decision you had to take?

How do you communicate with individuals and then also groups?

What would you bring to the civil service?

Something about research and analysis???

How do you measure the results of a project?

When you have multiple projects how do you prioritise?

It's my understanding they're reviewing applications now to re rank people based on those, and following that there'll be an interview call. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the application review step by the end of this week.

that was a two year competition so think they were a little lax. Hopefully we’ll get news much faster for this one.

No clue but would love to be put out of my misery soon

I also expect/hope for this timeline, we've holidays in mid/late September booked!

in previous competitions everyone got a message advising if they passed shortlisting or not.

Friend also in this comp emailed public jobs re stage 2, shortlisting currently happening.

They probably are shortlisting all. The test is the first cull and from that shortlisting based on form is the second. Looking at the form weeds out those who may have just been lucky at tests.

Is there anyway of finding out if this is true? Would seem an awful waste of only looking at 150

would be a bit mad to go through 1800 applications now when realistically they’ll only need to interview max 100 to get 30-40 on a panel

Have a passing interest in this as a good friend threw their hat in the ring. The new application process, as explained to me, would seem to indicate that they would go through all the applications and see if they match to specific departments/areas. Or have I gotten that totally wrong?