Executive Officer in the Civil Service 2026

Saw someone on Reddit say that they asked and were told that 19 were called from the open comp for Limerick.

Have now been called for interview mid May for Dublin open panel, (must confirm slot by May 1st).
Interview details:
40 minute live Zoom, 2 board members | 1 public jobs rep, info sheet provided, basically the focus is the EO capability framework. (First Boards.ie post so I’m not allowed to paste a link yet apparently.) Once you find those, breakdown is as follows:

Red/blue - 10 mins each
Green/yellow - 6 mins each

(For anyone else with a Gmail account that does whatever it wants, it went into my Updates tab. FYI)

😊

Mid teens here. No idea of the groupings for interview, but maybe if they get a drop off via no replies by Fri, they’ll expand the pool for this round?

I emailed PAS about this today and received a response regarding it just before my interview invite. They said they try (depending on requirements) to bring approx 80 to 100 forward for interview per batch. FYI this is Dublin specific.

No particular methodology. I think I spent most of the SJ test in a temper, continuously thinking I need more context/information to decide if that’s a reasonable action or not. So I probably skewed to a negative, or at least not very impressed, judgement on most of them, but my logic was basically if I was a manager of a dept, would I find this course of action needlessly alarmist, annoyingly shortsighted, or otherwise irritating? and generally speaking, the answer was yes to at least one of those options and I marked down accordingly. I can’t remember the specifics, but not sure if I put the most positive option down for anything. That said, SJ was also my lowest score of the three, so not sure that’s my opinion is that useful. 😄

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Thanks. Cond

Thanks considering Dublin got to 1500 I did presume that cork would get closer to 150 or whatever.

Some analysis on the PAS report, if that helps answer any of the doubts people might be having.

Based on the latest annual reports from the Public Appointments Service (PAS), the body responsible for civil service recruitment in Ireland, here are the figures for Executive Officer (EO) and general civil service appointments.

While reports do not always provide a specific "Dublin-only" breakdown for every single grade, the vast majority of Civil Service headquarters and EO vacancies are located in the Dublin area.

Annual Appointment Statistics (Civil Service)

Total assignments for the Civil Service (all grades) have remained high in recent years:

• 2023: Approximately 10,033 people were assigned to roles across the Civil and Public Service.
• 2022: There were 7,521 assignments specifically within the Civil Service.
• EO Specifics: In a typical major recruitment cycle (like the 2022 EO campaign), thousands of candidates are placed on panels. The EO grade is one of the "large volume" grades. Historically, the Civil Service appoints between 800 and 1,200 Executive Officers annually nationwide, with Dublin typically accounting for 60-70% of those placements.

@Kellyf17

I emailed large volume recruitment about this as I'm also on the Kildare panel and their response was:

"The OOM for Kildare for Executive Officer 2024 competition had reached:"

Open:69

Inter:17

Hi,

I would loke to knoe which stage is more important in the EO competition the online tests or the interview?
And does your Order of Merit (OOM) really affect your chances, or is the interview the main deciding factor?
Thanks in advance!

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You can email and ask what OOM was reached and that will give an idea then of how many were interviewed, also be a number higher than that by the way. If OOM 79 was reached, you can be sure OOM 91 was interviewed.

LargeVolumeRecruitment5@publicjobs.ie

That was it for the last panel, so they should be able to help I presume.

Currently working as CO and just wondering if you are successful at interview stage, do PAS contact my Dept HR to do necessary checks etc. How exactly does it work? I know I’m jumping ahead but just curious to know. Thanks

Interesting read. Give those on the line some hope.