Application process
Civil Service Statement of Suitability: A Full 750-Word Example
Published
A Civil Service statement of suitability is a departmental name for the personal or supporting statement. It is not a Success Profiles term. It is scored at sift against the essential criteria in the advert, and adverts that use the name usually ask for your motivation and evidence against the criteria in one document of 500 to 1,000 words.
The criteria-led method for a short statement, with fail-and-pass excerpts, lives in the personal statement guide. This page is the longer, combined document, written out in full.
What the name actually means
Success Profiles, the framework every Civil Service advert is built on, never uses the phrase "statement of suitability". It describes Experience, the element this document assesses, and says a supporting statement should "further highlight how you meet the essential criteria required to do the role". Departments name that document as they like: personal statement, supporting statement, or statement of suitability. gov.uk publishes no definition separating them.
The scoring is the same under every name. The Department for Business and Trade puts it plainly: "at sift, we score experience against the essential criteria set out in the advert". A statement that reads well but leaves a criterion untouched scores nothing for it.
The combined format these adverts usually ask for
Adverts that ask for a statement of suitability, and many that ask for a personal statement at HEO and above, want one document doing two jobs. A Department for International Trade Grade 7 advert, quoted in a Civil Service Commission decision, put it this way: "In your personal statement, please explain your motivation for applying for this role and the extent to which you satisfy the essential and preferred requirements of the role. Maximum word count of 750 words."
That sentence is the whole specification: motivation first, then essential criteria, then preferred (or desirable) criteria, inside a hard cap. The cap varies. 500, 750 and 1,000 are the common figures, DWP Digital has described a typical DWP personal statement as 1,200 words, and gov.uk gives no number.
Two features trip people. Motivation is part of the brief, so it is read against the role and has to be about the work rather than about you; the motivation question at interview fails on the same point. And the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which also caps its statement at 750 words, says it "does not need to be written in a standard competency answer format such as STAR". That is not a courtesy. A 750-word STAR story evidences one criterion well and the others not at all.
A full 750-word example for an HEO policy role
The advert is of the kind these campaigns use: an HEO policy adviser in a homelessness prevention team. Essential criteria: analysing evidence from several sources to produce written advice (EC1); building working relationships with stakeholders inside and outside the organisation (EC2); managing competing priorities to deadline (EC3); communicating complex information to non-specialists (EC4). Preferred: knowledge of local authority housing services. Maximum 750 words, motivation included. The candidate coordinates a council housing options team; organisations and figures are illustrative.
PassStatement of suitability: 750 words, motivation first, then EC1 to EC4 and the preferred criterion
I am applying for this role because the work it describes is the national version of the work I have done locally for four years. As a housing options caseworker and then team coordinator at a London borough, I have seen how the Homelessness Reduction Act plays out at the front desk: which duties are workable, where the statutory guidance leaves officers guessing, and what the data councils return to the department does and does not capture. I want to bring that grounding into the team that writes the guidance, and to learn how evidence from hundreds of local authorities is weighed into decisions that reach every one of them.
EC1: I analyse evidence from several sources and turn it into written advice. In 2025 my head of service asked why our temporary accommodation spend had risen 40% in a year when case numbers had risen 12%. I pulled three years of placement data from our case system, cross-checked it against finance's invoice records, which used different reference codes and needed matching by hand, and interviewed four officers about how placements were actually being made. The analysis showed the rise was driven by a small number of long-stay nightly-rate placements, not by volume. My four-page paper recommended a weekly review of any placement over eight weeks and a lower sign-off threshold for nightly-rate bookings. The service manager adopted both, and long-stay placements fell by a third over the following two quarters.
EC2: I build working relationships across organisational boundaries. Our prevention work depended on referrals from the local hospital's discharge team, who saw us as slow and sent patients to us only at crisis point. I asked to sit in their weekly multidisciplinary meeting for a month, which showed me that their timescales were measured in hours while ours were measured in days. I agreed a named-contact arrangement with the discharge lead, a shared one-page referral form to replace their free-text emails, and a 48-hour response commitment from my team. I kept it alive with a monthly one-line summary of what had happened to each patient they referred, which gave them a reason to keep using the form. Referrals made before the day of discharge rose from under a quarter to over half within six months, and the discharge lead now attends our quarterly review.
EC3: I manage competing priorities to deadline. In the fortnight before a quarterly statutory data return was due, two of my six-person team were off sick and a Housing Ombudsman information request arrived with a ten-working-day deadline. I separated the work into what only I could do, what I could delegate with a short briefing, and what could legitimately move, and told my manager on the first day what would move and why. I negotiated a one-week extension on an internal audit action, delegated the return's validation checks to two officers with a written checklist, and handled the Ombudsman response myself because it needed case history I already knew. Both deadlines were met and the return passed the department's validation first time.
EC4: I explain complex material to people who do not work in it. When the cabinet member for housing asked for a briefing on why prevention outcomes had dipped over two quarters, she had twenty minutes before a scrutiny committee and no housing background. I wrote a two-page note that opened with the three questions she was most likely to be asked and a direct answer to each, put the data tables in an annex rather than the body, and replaced every internal acronym with the plain term. She used it unchanged at the committee, asked for every housing briefing in the same shape, and the format is now the service's standard for monthly member briefings.
Preferred criterion: four years in a local authority housing service has given me a working knowledge of Part 7 of the Housing Act 1996, the statutory guidance and the quarterly data return from the side that completes it, and relationships with officers in neighbouring boroughs who would tell me within a day whether a proposal from the department will work at a front desk. I also know where the returned data is weakest, which is where a policy team is most likely to be misled by it.
I would bring the team a tested understanding of how its guidance lands, the habit of checking a conclusion against a second source before writing it down, and the ability to say plainly what I found and what I recommend.
Why it scores, paragraph by paragraph
The motivation paragraph is about the role, not the candidate's career. It names what the applicant has seen that the policy team cannot see from Whitehall, and what they want to learn, which tells the sifter the application is aimed rather than scattered. It takes a hundred words and stops.
The four EC paragraphs each open with a label and a one-line claim in the advert's own language, so a sifter scanning for EC2 finds it in a second. Each then gives one compact incident: the situation in a clause, first-person actions with the reasoning attached, and a result with a number in it. None is a STAR answer, and that compression is what fits four criteria and a preferred one into 750 words with room for a close.
The evidence is sized to HEO: analysis owned end to end, recommendations a service manager adopts, a small team steered through a pinch point. Nothing is inflated to a directorate-level decision, which is the usual way a strong statement starts to read as unreliable.
The preferred criterion gets its own paragraph rather than a clause buried in EC1, because preferred criteria are often the tie-breaker between two candidates on 4s and a sifter cannot credit what they cannot find. The close names three transferable things and repeats nothing.
How it is scored at sift
Where departments publish their sift scale it is the same 1 to 7 used at interview. COPFS defines 4 as "Acceptable Demonstration: Adequate positive evidence and any negative evidence would not cause concern", with 1 Not Demonstrated and 7 Outstanding. The Office for National Statistics, answering a Freedom of Information request, confirmed that "the sift pass mark for all roles is 4" and that "only the evidence in the personal statement was scored". The interview scoring guide describes the scale in full; at sift it is applied to paper, at speed.
Two variations are worth checking your advert for. Some departments assess the CV and the statement "together, as a whole", in the Scottish Government's words, so evidence can sit in either document but should not be duplicated. And the pass mark is not fixed: the ONS advert said that "in cases where there is a high number of applications the sift pass mark may be adjusted", and the Scottish Government ranks applications "in merit order", so a 4 in a crowded campaign may not reach interview. How long the sift takes depends largely on that volume.
A word budget for 500, 750 and 1,000 words
The budget assumes four essential criteria. With five, take the words from motivation and the preferred section, never from an essential criterion.
| Element | 500 words | 750 words | 1,000 words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motivation | 60–80 | 100–120 | 130–160 |
| Each essential criterion (four) | 85–100 | 120–140 | 170–190 |
| Preferred criteria, combined | 30–40 | 50–70 | 90–120 |
| Close | 0–15 | 20–35 | 30–40 |
At 500 words the motivation is three sentences and the close is optional; the 500-word worked example shows how tight the criterion paragraphs get. At 1,000 words the extra room buys a second incident on the two heaviest criteria, not longer versions of the same incidents.
The mistakes that lose marks
- Writing one STAR story. One project told in depth evidences one criterion and leaves three blank. The sifter scores coverage first.
- Leaving a criterion unevidenced. It scores nothing and caps the total. The nearest transferable evidence always beats silence.
- Motivation about you, not the role. "I have always wanted to work in policy" gives a sifter nothing to mark. Name what you know about the work and what you would bring to it.
- Exceeding the limit. Some application systems cut the text at the cap, so the words lost are your close and your last criterion.
- Headings that eat the budget. Restating each criterion in full as a heading can cost 60 words before any evidence appears. The EC1, EC2 labelling DBT recommends is the right version of the device: three characters and a colon.
- Repeating the CV. Where the two are assessed together, a chronological walk through job titles spends words the CV has already spent. Organise by criterion, not by date.
Common questions
A departmental name for the personal or supporting statement. The Success Profiles framework does not use the term. It is scored at sift against the essential criteria listed in the advert, assessing the Experience element, and adverts that use the name often ask for your motivation and your evidence against the criteria in one document.
For scoring purposes, yes. gov.uk publishes no definition that separates the two, and departments use personal statement, supporting statement and statement of suitability for the same document. Read the advert's own instruction for what it must contain, because that varies more than the name does.
Whatever the advert caps it at, and no longer. 500, 750 and 1,000 words are the common limits; DWP Digital has described 1,200 as typical for DWP. gov.uk sets no standard length. Treat the figure as a ceiling the sifter may enforce, not a target to approach.
Against the essential criteria in the advert. Where departments publish their scale it is 1 to 7, with 4 as the usual pass mark, as the Office for National Statistics confirmed in a Freedom of Information response. Some departments assess the CV and statement together as a whole. Pass marks can be raised when application volumes are high.
Not as the structure of the whole document. One STAR story evidences one criterion in depth and leaves the others blank. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service says its statement does not need a competency format such as STAR. Use compact incidents with an action and a result inside each criterion paragraph instead.
If the advert asks for it, yes, and briefly. A real Grade 7 advert asked candidates to explain their motivation for applying and the extent to which they met the essential and preferred requirements, within 750 words. Keep motivation to one paragraph about the role and the work, not about your career hopes.
Short labels are a legitimate device. The Department for Business and Trade's digital recruitment blog recommends using each essential criterion as a heading and labelling them EC1, EC2 and so on, so the sifter can find the evidence. Keep labels to a few words, because headings count towards the limit.
It scores nothing for that criterion. The sifter cannot infer evidence that is not on the page, and a blank criterion caps your total however strong the rest is. The nearest transferable evidence, written honestly, always beats silence, even if it comes from outside work.
Practise before the real thing
Reading how panels score is step one. The candidates who pass are the ones who practised saying their answers out loud — and got scored feedback against the official Civil Service Behaviours framework before interview day.
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