Busting the Myth That the Panel Has Already Decided Who They Are Going to Hire

One of the recurring comments I see when people discuss Australian Public Service recruitment, particularly in response to posts about applications, interviews and my book The APS Recruitment Game, is the belief that the panel has already decided who it wants to appoint before the recruitment process begins, with the process being largely a formality to validate a decision that has already been made.

I can understand why people arrive at that conclusion, particularly when they see someone who has been acting in a position for several months apply for the substantive role and subsequently secure the appointment. From the outside, the process can appear to have a predetermined outcome, especially when the person acting in the role has considerable experience doing the work and already has relationships with the people around them.

There is also a genuine advantage that comes with acting in a role, and I think it is important to acknowledge that rather than pretending every candidate enters the process from an identical starting point. Someone who has been acting in the position may have developed highly relevant skills, knowledge and experience, may understand the operating environment in considerable depth, and may have a substantial collection of examples that demonstrate their capability against the requirements of the role.

While these factors can make a candidate extremely competitive, they do not, make the outcome inevitable.

Brendon le lievre

I know this from personal experience because I have been the person acting in a role who subsequently applied for the permanent position and failed to secure it.

I had already been doing the job, so I knew the work, understood the environment and had experience dealing with the issues and stakeholders associated with the position. I had what appeared to be a strong foundation from which to approach the recruitment process, and I could draw on direct experience of the role when preparing my application and interview examples.

Then I bombed the interview.

I did not demonstrate my capability well, I did not provide the panel with the evidence they needed in a sufficiently clear and convincing way, and I did not get the job.

That experience has stayed with me because it demonstrated something important about recruitment that is easy to overlook when we focus too heavily on whether someone has already been doing the work.

Doing a job and demonstrating your suitability for that job through a selection process require related capabilities, although they involve different things. Someone can be highly capable in their day-to-day work and still struggle to communicate that capability effectively in an interview, particularly when they have assumed that the panel already knows what they have achieved.

The Australian Public Service Commission’s guidance on merit provides an important framework for understanding this. The APSC states that engagement and promotion decisions in the APS are based on merit, with candidates assessed through a competitive selection process against the work-related qualities genuinely required for the role. The assessment of relative suitability is central to the employment decision. Guide on merit in the APS

That principle has practical implications for anyone applying for an APS role.

The recruitment process creates opportunities for candidates to provide evidence about their suitability, and the panel uses that evidence to assess candidates against the requirements of the position. The application provides one form of evidence, the interview provides another, and other assessment activities may provide additional evidence depending on the recruitment process.

The interview therefore matters because it gives the panel an opportunity to assess what you can demonstrate in that particular setting.

This is especially important for people who are already acting in the role because there can be a temptation to assume that the panel already knows what you have done. You may have worked alongside the panel members, delivered significant outcomes, managed difficult stakeholders and demonstrated leadership over a considerable period, so it can feel strange to sit in an interview and explain those things to people who may have watched you doing them.

The problem is that the selection process still requires you to provide evidence.

The panel may know that you have been acting in the role, yet they still need to assess how your experience demonstrates the capabilities and outcomes required for the substantive position. Your knowledge of the role gives you valuable material to work with, while your preparation determines how effectively you turn that material into evidence during the selection process.

This is one of the reasons I encourage people to think carefully about the difference between having relevant experience and demonstrating relevant experience.

If you are acting in an EL1 role, for example, you may have developed excellent examples of leading a team, managing competing priorities, influencing stakeholders, exercising judgement and delivering outcomes in a complex environment. Those examples can provide extremely strong evidence of your suitability for the substantive position.

You still need to explain the situation, the challenge you faced, the actions you took, the reasoning behind those actions and the outcomes you achieved. You still need to make the connection between your experience and the capability the panel is assessing, particularly when the panel is comparing your evidence with the evidence provided by other candidates.

Someone else in the process may have less direct experience of the role while having a stronger ability to articulate their capability in an interview, and that can influence the relative assessment of the candidates.

The APSC’s guidance on interviews recognises this broader assessment process, explaining that candidates can be assessed through their application, interview and other assessment activities, with selection panels using the evidence available to determine the candidate who is most suitable for the position. Interview and other assessment activities, APSC

This is why I am wary when I see people telling APS candidates that there is no point putting effort into an application because the panel has already decided who they want.

There are certainly recruitment processes that candidates experience as frustrating, opaque or poorly conducted, and there are undoubtedly occasions where candidates will have questions about how a particular decision was reached. Those experiences deserve to be discussed and organisations should continually improve the quality, consistency and transparency of their recruitment processes.

They do not establish that every APS recruitment process has a predetermined outcome.

For a candidate, assuming that the panel has already decided can also become a self-fulfilling problem because it changes the way you approach the process. If you believe the outcome has already been determined, you have considerably less incentive to prepare thoroughly, practise your examples, understand the capabilities being assessed and think carefully about how you are going to communicate your evidence.

My own experience of acting in a role and then bombing the interview is a useful reminder of what can happen when we assume that our existing experience will carry us through the selection process.

I had the experience.

I had the knowledge.

I had been doing the work.

I still needed to demonstrate my suitability through the recruitment process, and on that occasion I did not do it well enough.

For anyone applying for an APS role, particularly someone who is already acting in the position, I think the most useful approach is to recognise the advantage your existing experience gives you and then focus on converting that experience into compelling evidence of your suitability.

Your experience gives you material to work with, your understanding of the role helps you identify relevant examples, and your preparation allows you to communicate those examples in a way that helps the panel assess your capability.

That is a much more productive approach than deciding before the interview that the outcome has already been determined.

If you are preparing for an APS recruitment process, assume that the evidence you provide matters, because the recruitment framework is designed around assessing the relative suitability of candidates and because your performance in the process is one of the ways you give the panel that evidence.