How to address selection criteria in an Australian job application

If you have applied for a government, health, education or university job in Australia, you have met selection criteria. A list of statements at the end of the position description, each beginning with something like "Demonstrated ability to" or "Proven experience in", and an instruction to address them.

Most people answer them the way they would answer an interview question at a barbecue. They describe their job. Then they never hear back, and assume the role was already filled internally.

Sometimes it was. More often the application was scored, came up short against a rubric the applicant never saw, and lost to someone who understood the format.

What selection criteria actually are

They are the assessment tool. Not a formality, not a covering note.

A panel takes your response, reads it against each criterion, and scores it. Depending on the agency you might be rated on a scale, sorted into met and not met, or ranked against every other applicant. Some agencies will not shortlist an applicant who fails to address a criterion at all, however strong the rest of the application.

This is the part that catches people out. Your resume can be excellent and your criteria response can sink you, because they are assessed separately and the criteria usually carry more weight.

The two formats you will be asked for

Individually addressed criteria. Each criterion gets its own heading and its own answer, commonly 250 to 350 words each. Older format, still very common in state government, health and education.

A pitch, or statement of claims. One continuous piece covering all the criteria together, usually capped at one to two pages or 500 to 1,000 words. Increasingly the norm in the Australian Public Service.

Read the instruction carefully and do exactly what it says. Sending four separate responses when the ad asked for a one page pitch signals that you did not read the position description, which is itself a data point about your attention to detail.

The structure that scores

Every criterion needs the same three things, in this order.

A claim. Open by stating plainly that you have the thing. One sentence. Not a wind-up.

Evidence. A specific example, structured as Situation, Task, Action, Result. This is where nearly all the marks are. Panels are trained to look for what you personally did.

A result. Something that changed, ideally with a number attached. Not "the project was successful" but what was actually different afterwards.

Here is the same claim, written badly and then properly.

Weak:

I have excellent communication skills and have worked with a wide range of stakeholders throughout my career. I am able to adapt my communication style and always ensure that all parties are kept informed.

That is a description of a personality. There is nothing to score. A panel reads it, finds no evidence, and marks it down even though the person may genuinely be a superb communicator.

Strong:

I regularly communicate complex information to non technical audiences. When our department replaced its patient booking system, clinical staff were resisting the change after a poor rollout two years earlier. I was asked to lead the communications. I ran eight short floor sessions rather than one large briefing, wrote a one page reference card for each ward, and set up a daily drop in for the first fortnight. Uptake reached 94 per cent within three weeks, against a target of 80, and help desk tickets fell by roughly half compared with the previous rollout.

Same skill. One is scoreable and one is not.

Say "I", not "we"

The single most common error, and it costs real marks.

Panels cannot give you credit for what a team did. When your response says "we redesigned the intake process", the assessor has no way to know whether you led it or attended the meetings. Write "I" for your own actions and reserve "we" for genuine context.

This feels boastful to a lot of Australians. It is not. The format requires it, and every applicant who understands that is scoring above you while you are being modest.

Mirror their language

If the criterion says "stakeholder engagement", use the phrase stakeholder engagement. If it says "continuous improvement", use continuous improvement. Not because a panel is scanning mechanically, but because many agencies now run applications through a system such as PageUp or Workday first, and because a busy assessor with forty applications is looking for the words they were told to look for.

The same principle applies to your resume, which is often loaded into recruitment software and searched. You can check your resume against any Australian job ad for free and see exactly which terms from the ad you are missing.

Answer the whole criterion

Criteria often hide two or three requirements in one sentence. Read this one closely:

Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities in a high volume environment while maintaining accuracy and meeting deadlines.

That is four things. Competing priorities, high volume, accuracy, deadlines. An answer that covers only busyness has missed three quarters of what is being scored. Break each criterion into its component parts before you write, and make sure your example touches every one.

Practical rules that matter more than they should

Use their headings, in their order. Do not reorganise. Assessors work down a form.

Respect the word limit. Going over reads as an inability to follow instructions, and some systems simply truncate you mid sentence.

Pick recent examples. Within about five years where you can. An impressive story from 2011 raises a question you do not want raised.

Vary the stories. Using the same project for all five criteria makes a career look thin. Prepare six or seven distinct examples and map them across.

Never say "as per my resume". It reads as though you could not be bothered, and it gives the panel nothing to score.

If you genuinely lack the experience

Say what you do have, honestly, and then show the closest transferable thing.

Do not invent. Public sector panels check, referees get called, and probation exists. An honest partial answer with real evidence routinely outscores a vague answer that gestures at experience the applicant does not have. Panels are experienced readers and they can tell.

Build a library, not an application

The most useful hour you will spend is not on any single application.

Write out six to eight strong examples from your working life in full STAR form and keep them in one document. Different situations, different skills, results with numbers where you can find them. Then every future application becomes a matter of selecting and reshaping rather than starting from nothing at eleven o'clock the night before it closes.

People who do this apply for more roles, apply better, and stop dreading the process.

Where to go next

If you are applying for a Commonwealth role, the pitch format has its own conventions and its own capability framework, which we cover in the guide to writing an APS pitch.

If you are applying for state government health or education, the criteria tend to be more prescriptive and the credential requirements are strict. That is covered in selection criteria for NSW Health, Queensland Health and state education roles.

And once your criteria response is written, the resume that goes with it should use the same language as the ad. Score it free against the ad, no account needed.