Soft skills and qualifications

Civil Service goes back to in-person interviews amid flood of AI applications

The Civil Service is ramping up its use of face-to-face job interviews to sift candidates after a deluge of applications completed using AI chatbots.

Senior Whitehall bosses have ordered an overhaul of recruitment over concerns that the standard Civil Service application forms are easy to complete with chatbots.

Civil Service hiring managers report a remarkable increase in the number of applications filled out using ChatGPT, which can use online guides to complete the “perfect” form.

Applicants are also using AI to complete hundreds of applications for different roles, increasing the number of candidates each manager has to read at the early “paper sift” stage.

Since 2019, aspiring officials have been assessed using the “success profiles” model, which asks them to demonstrate their use of nine Civil Service “behaviours”, which include “seeing the big picture”, “making effective decisions” and “working together”.

More technical jobs may also require applicants to complete a test, but most roles are assessed mostly on soft skills and qualifications, and assessors are initially not even allowed to know which university a candidate attended.

Maybe we have a clue to Swamp Folk culture here.

seeing the big picture
making effective decisions
working together
soft skills and qualifications

It's weird though. The Civil Service generally projects a sense of -

not seeing the big picture

not making effective decisions
not working together

Presumably soft skills are mostly about evading responsibility, so qualifications may as well be solidly technical - it's worth a try. No climate science of course.