Does an APS panel score your resume?

No. In an APS selection process the scores are awarded against the selection criteria, through assessment methods the panel chooses and writes down before anybody applies. Your resume is a required upload. It isn't one of those methods.

That matters most if you're three evenings into polishing the resume and about to give the written response an hour. So here's what an assessment plan actually contains, and what it says about where your time should go.

Agencies build their own assessment plan for each vacancy. The APS Commissioner's Directions require a selection process to be documented, transparent and applied fairly, and those plans are official records, so an applicant can ask for the one used on them. Here is an APS5 plan from a federal department, with the department left out of it.

It opens with a checklist of the assessment methods a panel can use. Three were ticked:

• Applicant response, ticked
• Interviews, ticked
• Work sample test, ticked
• Cognitive testing
• Personality and emotional intelligence testing
• Other, with a blank space to name it

Nothing on that list is your resume. It isn't an unticked option either. The checklist has no box for it.

Underneath sits a grid. Six selection criteria run down one side, five of them capability clusters and a sixth written for this particular job. The three ticked methods run across the other. The panel marks which method tests which criterion, and it does that before applications open.

At the written stage the panel scored the answers to three questions, capped at 250 words each, against three of the six criteria. Every criterion carries its own mark, and each point means something specific:

• 5 highly suitable
• 4 very suitable
• 3 suitable
• 2 requires development
• 1 unsuitable

You need at least a 3 on every criterion being assessed. A 2 on one of them ends it however strong the rest were, because the benchmark is applied criterion by criterion rather than averaged across them. On this plan, panel members score on their own first, and the panel then agrees a score together.

Look at the grid again and you can see the trap in it. Three criteria were never touched by the written stage. They were waiting at the interview, and the plan had said so all along.

So what is the resume for?

It's the evidence behind the claims. Your written response says what you did. Your resume is where a panel checks that the job you did it in exists, at the level you say, for the dates you say.

Say your response describes a procurement you ran that cut four months off a delivery date. A panel member reads that, then looks at your resume for the role it happened in. They either find it, with dates, or they don't. If they don't, the claim starts to look thin and the resume starts to look incomplete.

That isn't our theory. The federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water publishes a guide to writing a pitch, and it lets one or two examples cover all the criteria instead of one example each, on the condition that every example is easy to link back to the resume. The same guide tells applicants not to spend pitch words repeating the CV, because your contact details, qualifications, referees and current job title are already sitting in it.

So they aren't two independent documents. One makes the claims. The other backs them up.

Where your time should actually go

This next part is ours rather than anybody's published guidance. Get the resume clean and true, then stop, then put everything you have left into the written response.

Clean and true is a shorter job than it sounds. Reverse chronological order. Scope stated inside every role, so caseload sizes, budgets touched, team sizes and delegations held, because scope is how a panel places you against a classification. One to two pages for APS1 to APS6 unless the pack sets its own cap, in which case the pack wins. And nothing claimed in either document that the other one can't account for.

Then the response takes the rest of the evening. In a 250-word answer we'd spend about 60 words on Situation and Task and the other 190 on what you decided and what changed because of it. That split is our recommendation rather than a measured average, and the full working, along with what a question tied to a single capability is really asking for, is in our post on selection criteria and STAR.

What if the pack asks for a pitch rather than criteria answers?

Then write a pitch, because it's a different document with different rules, and a department's own published guidance outranks every general rule including ours. That same guide sets the budget at 750 to 1,000 words or two pages. It puts motivation first, opening on why the role or the organisation attracts you before it gets to your points of difference. It never mentions STAR, asking instead for what you did, how you went about it, and why you did it that way. And it warns against shrinking the font or the margins to fit, and against going over the count at all, which it says makes an application stand out for the wrong reason.

We checked that guide against the Australian Public Service Commission's national advice and the two agree. Read your pack before you write a word of either document.

Who puts the number on it?

People do. Some agencies use AI tools somewhere in recruitment, and the Commission's principles say plainly that no agency may let a tool make the assessment or the decision, and that agencies must disclose when one is used. Scoring individually and then agreeing collectively, the way the plan above describes, is what the alternative looks like. We've written the AI question up separately in our post on AI in APS recruitment.

The short version

• Your resume is required with the application. The marks are awarded against the criteria, through the methods the panel names in advance.
• At least a 3 on every criterion, applied one criterion at a time rather than averaged. Lift your weakest answer before you polish your best one.
• Get the resume clean, scoped and consistent with your response, then stop working on it.
• Every claim in the response needs a role on the resume a panel can find, with dates on it.
• Criteria can be held back for the interview, as three were on the plan above, so prepare an example for every advertised criterion rather than only the ones you answered on paper.

The marks go to the criteria. Your resume's job is to make every claim you make about them checkable.

We'd like to help with this

Honestly, this is the part we enjoy. Send us your resume and your written response through the free review and a writer will tell you plainly which of the two needs the work. That costs you nothing and there's no catch in it.

If you'd rather read the whole thing yourself, The APS Application Handbook sets out an assessment plan in full, including how to request the one used on your own application. And if you'd rather not do it alone, the selection criteria service, from $290, writes your response from your actual pack at your actual classification, APS4 through EL2, and our APS hub has the rest of what we offer for job packs, pitches and interviews. We'd love to make you the shoo-in.