APS 6 Interview Questions and Sample Answers

Situation: my branch head asked me to "look at why our processing times have blown out" with no further definition. Task: I had to turn that into a piece of work. Action: I started by separating the question into three that could actually be answered — volume, staffing, and rework — and pulled six months of data on each. Rework accounted for most of the movement, and within rework two request types accounted for the majority. I wrote the scope down and tested it with the two team leaders before doing the analysis, which changed one of my assumptions about seasonal volume. Result: I recommended a change to the intake form for those two request types. Rework on them fell by roughly a third over the following quarter, and I had ruled out staffing with evidence rather than assertion.

Situation: I recommended deferring a system change until after peak season. My recommendation was not accepted and the change went ahead. Task: I was the officer advising. Action: I asked my director for the reasoning and learned there was an external commitment I had not been aware of, which genuinely outweighed the operational risk I had flagged. Rather than repeat the advice, I rewrote it as a risk-mitigation plan for going ahead — additional support cover for the first fortnight, a rollback point, and a daily error check. Result: the change went in with those mitigations, we used the rollback point once on day three, and the peak period completed without a service failure. Being overruled was correct on the information available to my director; my job was then to reduce the downside.

Situation: a data-sharing arrangement with a state agency stalled because their privacy area and ours read the same clause differently, with a program launch date depending on it. Task: I was the departmental contact. Action: I stopped the email chain and set the two readings side by side in writing so both legal areas were looking at the same words, convened one short meeting with both, and proposed narrowing the dataset to the fields that both readings clearly permitted. I kept my director briefed with a two-line update each week so nothing arrived as a surprise. Result: we signed the narrower arrangement six weeks later, the launch went ahead, and the fuller dataset was added at the next review.

Situation: a question on notice arrived requiring a costed answer within 24 hours, drawing on data our team held. Task: I owned the response. Action: I established immediately which figure carried the most risk if wrong, and put my own time on verifying that one against source rather than spreading it evenly across the response. I used an existing extract instead of commissioning a new one, noted the extract date in the response so the figure was not overstated, and told my EL2 at the four-hour mark exactly which parts were confirmed and which were still open. Result: the response cleared the assistant secretary with no amendments and the figure held when it was checked afterwards.