What publicjobs Boards Assess: More Than STAR Examples

Almost every piece of interview advice you will find, Irish or otherwise, teaches you the STAR method and stops. Prepare ten examples, structure them as Situation, Task, Action, Result, practise them aloud. That advice is not wrong. It is just a lot narrower than what you are being assessed on.

The Capability Framework’s own introduction says that exploring capability means considering “the whole person, their skills, behaviours, values, motivation, strengths, knowledge, and interests”. Seven factors. STAR is a structure for evidencing one of them well and a couple of others by accident.

The seven factors, and what each one looks like in a room

Behaviours. How you actually act, evidenced by what you have done before. This is the territory STAR was built for, and the “tell me about a time when” questions live here. It is the best-prepared area for most candidates by a wide margin.

Skills. What you can do. The framework publishes example key skills for each sub-dimension at each grade, and they are more concrete than people expect: things like project management, risk management, data analytics, influencing and negotiation, or process improvement. A skills question is often direct rather than narrative. It wants to know whether you can do the thing, not a story about a time you did it.

Knowledge. What you know. Your policy area, the context your work sits in, the wider Civil Service developments relevant to your grade. Boards do ask about gaps here, directly, and they expect a real answer rather than a deflection.

Values. What you hold to, and how it shows in your decisions. The useful version of this is not reciting an organisation’s published values. It is being able to say why you handled something the way you did when a faster or easier option existed.

Motivation. Why this role, this grade, now. A board can usually tell the difference between someone who wants a job and someone who wants this job, and the difference is specificity.

Strengths. What you are genuinely good at and energised by. Distinct from skills, which are learned and can be listed. A strengths question is often about what kind of work you seek out.

Interests. Where you want to develop, and what you are drawn to. This connects to the framework’s emphasis on upskilling and continuous learning, and it is the factor candidates most often treat as small talk when it is not.

Why STAR alone leaves marks on the table

STAR is a container for a story. That makes it excellent for behaviours and reasonably good at surfacing skills in passing, because a well-told example does show what you can do.

It is a poor fit for the rest. A knowledge question does not want a narrative. A values question wants the reasoning underneath a story rather than the story. A motivation question is about the future, and STAR is entirely past tense.

The failure mode is specific and common: a candidate arrives with ten well-drilled examples, handles the behaviour questions confidently, and then visibly stalls when asked what the biggest gaps in their knowledge are. The examples were not wasted. They were just built for a third of the interview.

Getting more out of the examples you already have

You do not need a separate set of material for each factor. You need to interrogate the examples you have already written from more than one angle. For each one, answer three further questions and write the answers down:

What skills and knowledge does this actually demonstrate, and what did it expose that I still do not know? The second half of that question is the one worth sitting with. It is also the honest answer to a gaps question.
What did I value in how I handled it? Particularly where you chose the slower or harder route.
What did I learn, and what would I do differently? This is the bridge into both the values and the interests territory, and it is the part most people leave out of their examples entirely.

Three answers per example turns a behaviour bank into something that covers most of what a board will actually ask.

A caveat worth taking seriously

The balance between these factors varies by grade and by competition. Your call-up letter states which areas are being assessed for your specific competition, and it is the authoritative document for your process, not a general guide like this one. The framework itself is published grade by grade on publicjobs.ie, down to sub-dimension and key element level, and it is worth reading the version for the grade you are actually going for rather than a summary.

Read that letter first. Then prepare against what it names.

FAQ

Is the publicjobs interview a STAR interview? STAR is the recommended structure for the experience and behaviour questions. It is not the structure of the whole interview, and boards ask question types that STAR does not fit.

What is the difference between skills and strengths? Skills are learned and demonstrable. Strengths are what you are naturally good at and drawn to. A board may probe both, and they are not interchangeable.

Will I be asked about my weaknesses? Boards do ask about knowledge gaps and development needs. An honest, specific answer paired with what you are doing about it lands far better than a deflection.

How many examples should I prepare? publicjobs suggest around ten drawn from different areas of your life. Depth matters more than count: see how many interview examples you should prepare.

Where do I find the framework for my grade? The Capability Framework pages on publicjobs.ie, published per grade. The 2024 Capability Framework explained covers how it is structured.

Working through it properly

The civil service interview preparation guide sets out the three kinds of question a board works through and how to prepare for all of them. If you want to build your examples against the framework for your own grade and get written coaching on them, the pricing page has the detail, or you can try the free taster first with no card.