EL1 Interview Questions and Sample Answers

Situation: an APS 5 in my team was missing internal deadlines and the quality of drafting had dropped over about two months. Task: I supervised her. Action: I raised it within the fortnight rather than saving it for a cycle conversation, and I came with three specific instances rather than an impression. It emerged the workload had shifted to work she had never been trained in. We agreed a plan: two named pieces of work with me reviewing at draft stage, a fortnightly 20-minute check-in, and training on the new subject matter. I recorded the plan in writing so the expectations were not open to interpretation, and I kept my director informed. Result: her drafting was back at standard within six weeks and she stayed in the team. Had it not moved, the documented plan would have been the basis for a formal process.

Situation: my section of seven had three commitments landing in the same fortnight — a submission, an audit response and business-as-usual casework — with one person on unplanned leave. Task: I owned the work program. Action: I ranked the three by consequence of being late rather than by who had asked, put the two people with audit experience on the audit response, and went to my director with a specific proposal: the submission moves by a week, casework holds at the service standard, audit lands on time. I named the cost of each option instead of asking her to sort it out. Result: she agreed and negotiated the submission date with the policy owner. All three commitments were met on the revised plan, and no one in the team worked a weekend.

Situation: six weeks after publication I found an error in a figure in our annual report. Nobody had queried it. Task: raising it meant a formal correction and some discomfort for the area that supplied it. Action: I verified the error against source data before saying anything, took it to my director the same day with the corrected figure and a one-paragraph note on the cause, and drafted the correction notice myself rather than handing the problem over. Result: the correction was published, and I added a two-person verification step for published figures. Accountability mattered more than the awkwardness of the correction, and the process change meant it was not just an apology.

Situation: my first assistant secretary had to decide whether to pause a program while an eligibility issue was resolved. Task: I was asked for a recommendation within two days. Action: I set out two options with the consequence of each for participants, the legal exposure, and the communications position, and recommended a targeted pause on the affected cohort rather than the whole program. I had the legal reading confirmed before it went up, and I flagged the one assumption I could not verify. When she pressed on why not a full pause, I held the recommendation and explained the participant impact, because the reasoning had not changed. Result: the targeted pause was adopted, roughly 90% of participants were unaffected, and the eligibility issue was resolved in three weeks.

Situation: my team reconciled two systems manually every month, roughly two days of effort, and it was accepted as normal. Task: it was on nobody's work plan, including mine. Action: I had a team member document where the discrepancies actually came from. Most traced to one field entered inconsistently at intake. I wrote it up with the estimated annual time cost and took a proposal for a validation rule to the system owner rather than building a workaround locally. Result: the rule was implemented at the next release and the reconciliation became a half-day task. I also used the piece of work as a development opportunity for the officer who did the analysis.

Situation: our program relied on data from a state agency that had stopped responding to requests. Task: I needed the data flowing again without any authority over their team. Action: I asked for a meeting with their manager and listened to why. Our requests had been arriving ad hoc and unprioritised. I agreed a quarterly data schedule with them, and we each set up a single point of contact. Result: within two quarters every data request was met on time, and they invited us to co-design their next collection.

Situation: halfway through the year my team lost one of four staff and 15% of our contractor budget. Task: I owned the team's work program. Action: I mapped our work against the branch's priorities and recommended to my director that we pause one low-impact review. I redistributed the remaining work based on each person's strengths and set fortnightly check-ins to catch overload early. Result: we delivered all three priority projects on time, and the paused review restarted the next quarter with new funding.