Want to write an amazing job application for Citizens Advice?

Here are 5 tips for making your application stand out

It’s hard to know how to write an application. At Citizens Advice, we get a lot of great applications for our jobs. But we also get plenty of applications from people who clearly have the right skills, but haven’t been able to properly showcase them.

We want people who don’t have access to careers advice, or who are a bit rusty on writing job applications, to be able to navigate the application process more easily. That’s why we’re sharing how we score applications, along with some tips for writing them.

1. We care about evidence of your skills

We score all applications on a numerical range between 1 — no evidence and 5 — excellent evidence.

Take this criteria from a recent job pack for our internship programme:

Ability to research issues from a variety of sources

If you write ‘In my degree, I’ve developed an ability to research issues from a variety of sources’, we’d score this as a 1. It might well be true, but we need to see evidence of that ability.

There are lots of different techniques for providing evidence based answers to job specifications. We recommend using the STAR method:

1. Situation — what’s the context in which your example took place?
2. Task — what was the piece of work and its objective? How does the example evidence the criteria?
3. Actions — what actions did you undertake in order to complete the task?
4. Result — what was the outcome because of your actions?

Using this method, a better answer might look like this:

Situation: When I was a full-time carer for a member of my family, I had to support them when they were making a benefits claim.

Task: In order to help my family member, I wanted to understand as much as possible about their eligibility for disability benefits. In particular, I wanted to understand whether they were eligible for Personal Independence Payment (PIP), a benefit which helps with the extra costs that disabled people can face.

Actions: To achieve this, I first reviewed evidence from advice pages and other eligibility information produced by the government. Then I accompanied my relative to their local Citizens Advice who advised on what evidence would be needed for a PIP claim. I used this research to help my relative collect the relevant evidence and fill out the application form. I also read government and disability advice charity guidelines on what the process for appealing an application would be if needed.

Result: I used my research from these sources to assist my family member in making their application. As a consequence of my research and the advice I received, my relative felt supported. They were also better prepared for their assessment and the questions they were asked. They ultimately were successful in receiving a Personal Independence Payment.

Using an approach like STAR makes it much easier for you to explain your evidence, and much easier for us to make a fair judgement about your application. It’s also how we’d recommend you structure your answers if we invite you to interview.

The example above is from our internship programme. But we use the same approach, regardless of the seniority of the position we’re advertising for.

2. Be as concise as you can, while getting your point across

You’ll want to do justice to your example and make sure you set out why it’s excellent evidence for the criteria. But, once you’ve done that, stop writing. Typically, we’ll only need to see one good example for each criteria — there’s no need to write more than that.

We won’t mark you down for long answers. But well written, concise answers are easier to read and understand — and get across to us how you demonstrate your ability to meet the requirements for the role.

We also only need to know about the aspects of your example that are relevant to the criteria. In the example above, people are often tempted not just to tell us about how they used different research sources, but also how they met deadlines or had to manage multiple priorities. Again — we won’t mark you down for this, but there’s no need to do it either. You won’t get any marks for anything that isn’t directly relevant to what we’re asking for.

3. You can reuse examples

Feel free to re-use examples if they’re relevant to more than one criteria. Just make sure you explain clearly how the example shows the criteria in each case. We’d expect many applicants to our intern scheme to be at the start of their careers, or coming to policy for the first time, so you may not have as many examples to draw on.

What matters is how your examples meet the criteria, not how many you have.

4. We care about the quality of your evidence — not where it came from

We know that relevant experiences can come from all walks of life. What matters is whether it’s evidence for our criteria, not that you got it in a particular way.

For example, you can develop the ability to research different sources in lots of ways — perhaps you’ve had work experience of it, or you’ve got examples of it from family life.

That’s why our job ad doesn’t require that you have a degree — we’re interested in your skills, not your credentials.

5. Final tip: proofread!

Make sure you read over your application before you apply. Ideally, get someone else to read it through too. You’d be amazed how many applications we get which get our name wrong, copy and paste an application for a different job, or make other easily avoidable errors.

We want to be a more diverse, inclusive employer

We hope that being clear about how we score applications will open up our jobs to a wider pool of talented people.

We want to improve the diversity of people who work for us. As part of our commitment to becoming a more inclusive employer, we do 2 specific things if you do make an application:

1. We judge the application, not the person. When we shortlist, we don’t see any personal details. We only score the evidence you provide in your written statement, against our job criteria.
2. We run a Guaranteed Interview Scheme. If you’re disabled and you request for your application to be considered under our guaranteed interview scheme, we’ll interview you if your application meets the minimum criteria for the post.

We’re also very happy to consider flexible working, which may include arrangements such as part-time working, formalised flexitime, fixed (non-standard) working hours, working from home and job-sharing.

We particularly welcome applications from disabled and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates as BAME and disabled people are currently under-represented throughout Citizens Advice. We are a member of the race equality campaign at Business in the Community, the Prince’s responsible business network and are committed to improving employment opportunities for ethnic minorities across the UK. We also welcome applications from, LGB and Trans and non binary candidates.

You can find all our current job opportunities here: https://www.jobtrain.co.uk/citizensadvice/

To find out more about what it’s like to work in our policy teams, hear from 4 of our team members.