Police Competency Based Interview: The Questions and What Is Marked

How it works: five questions, one minute to think, five to answer

• One of three exercises. The interview sits alongside a written exercise and a briefing exercise in the same online assessment. You reach it after your force has checked your eligibility and you have passed the sift, the screening stage that comes first.
• Five questions. Each appears on screen with prompts to consider, and a pre-recorded assessor reads it to you.
• One minute to think, five minutes to answer. Nothing you say in the thinking minute is recorded. Once you start an exercise you cannot restart it, so you record each answer once.
• Around 40 minutes in total. It is sat online, at home, on the College’s assessment platform, within the window your force gives you. You need a laptop, desktop or tablet with a webcam, a microphone and a stable connection, and you take a photo for identification before you start.
• No prepared notes, no script. You can make notes once a question appears. Evidence of notes or a script prepared beforehand can mean an automatic fail.
• Examples from anywhere in your life. Work, study, the military, caring for family, volunteering. The setting is not marked; the behaviour is. The College suggests one example per question, told in detail.
• No policing knowledge needed. The College states you do not need to know the law or police procedure to pass. You are assessed on behaviour and judgement.
• Adjustments if you need them. If a condition, temporary or permanent, would put you at a disadvantage in a timed spoken exercise, you may be entitled to a reasonable adjustment. Ask your recruiting force before your assessment window opens, not on the day.

How are the answers marked?

Trained assessors, a mix of police officers, police staff and people from the community, score each exercise against the Level 1 behaviours. They see only your name and your recording. The College publishes no pass mark and no pass rate. Whatever the outcome, you receive a personalised feedback report with your score for each exercise and a description of what separated the stronger performances.

The assessor is listening for the Level 1 behaviours, not for a dramatic story. A quiet example told with clear evidence of the behaviour outscores a big one told vaguely. The College sets out STAR as the common approach: the situation in brief, the task you faced, the actions you personally took, and the result. Most of your five minutes should go on the actions, told as I rather than we, because the assessor can only credit what you did.

The prompts that appear under each question are the closest thing to a marking guide you will see. They tell you what the assessor wants to hear about. Read them before you speak. A line of reflection at the end, what you would do differently or what the situation taught you, is direct evidence for the open-minded area and rounds off almost any answer.

What separates a strong answer from a weak one

The difference is almost never the story. Two applicants can bring the same example, an angry customer at the end of a long shift, and score differently on it.

A strong answer is specific about what the applicant personally did, and in what order. It says what they noticed, what they decided, what they said, and why they chose that over the obvious alternative. It gives the assessor a behaviour to credit in almost every sentence, and it ends with a result and a line of reflection.

A weak answer is a summary. It spends two minutes setting the scene, describes what the team did, jumps to the outcome, and leaves the assessor to infer the behaviour. Nothing in it is untrue. There is simply not much to mark.

The test to run on your own examples is simple. Read a sentence and ask what a marker could underline in it. If the answer is nothing, that sentence is scene setting.

Where applicants lose marks

• Describing what happened, not what they did. Two minutes of scene setting leaves too little time for the actions that carry the marks.
• Saying we. Team stories are fine, but the assessor needs to hear your part in them.
• Answering a different question. A strong ownership story does not score on a respect and empathy question. The prompts on screen tell you what the question is reaching for. Answer that, not the story you most want to tell.
• Running out of road at four minutes. Practise to time. Five minutes is longer than it sounds until you try it aloud.
• Sounding scripted. Practise your examples until they come out naturally. Reading from anything you wrote before the assessment is what the College’s automatic fail policy is aimed at.

How to prepare, in four weeks

Week one, map your examples. Take the five areas above and write down every situation from your life that could evidence each one. Work, study, the military, caring for someone, volunteering, a Saturday job. Aim for two or three per area, so a question that does not suit your first choice does not leave you stuck.

Week two, cut them down. For each one, note what you personally did and the order you did it in. These notes are for learning, not for the day, because you cannot take anything in with you.

Week three, say them out loud, on a timer, five minutes each. This is the step almost everyone skips and it is the one that moves the score. Knowing an example is not the same as speaking it.

Week four, practise switching. Have someone read you a question at random and answer it cold, once, with no restart. That is the condition the real exercise runs under.

If you have less than four weeks, do week three.

Are you asked about weaknesses, or why you want to join?

Not in the online assessment. Its five questions are competency questions on the five areas above, and the College states you do not need to know the law or police procedure to pass. Where applicants meet the weakness question, the why policing question and the why this force question is a force’s own interview, which nearly every force runs after the online assessment.

Prepare the CVF examples first, because they are what the national stage marks and they carry over to the force stage. For a weakness, if you are asked, the version that works is a real limitation you have already done something about, said plainly, followed by what you changed. A strength in disguise gives a panel nothing to credit.

What happens after the online assessment?

If you pass, your recruiting force contacts you about the next steps, and those steps are the force’s own: vetting, a medical, the fitness test, and at nearly every force an interview of its own before an offer. The College does not set that stage, forces do. Our review of the published recruitment pages of all 43 forces in England and Wales found almost all of them run one. It is usually competency and values based, so the same preparation carries over. Your force’s own page on State6 shows its current inspection picture, which is worth knowing before a force interview.

If you do not pass, you can resit from three months after your assessment window opened, and you can attempt the process twice in any twelve months. Which entry route you are applying on does not change any of this; every route sits the same assessment.

Questions applicants ask