By Byte Bright, the team behind Ace That Interview · Last updated October 2026
In Australian government, public health, university and many not-for-profit applications, the thing that decides who gets shortlisted is a list called the selection criteria — and most applicants lose marks on how they answer it, not on how much experience they have.
Here is what a strong response looks like, how long each one should be, and how the same criteria come back at you in the interview.
Selection criteria — often written as key selection criteria, or KSC — are the specific capabilities the employer says the role requires. Rather than asking you to send a resume and hope, these processes ask you to address each criterion in writing, and they score your responses against the list before deciding who to interview.
The reason to take that seriously is that it changes what you are writing. This is not a cover letter, where the goal is to sound impressive. It is an assessment instrument, and each criterion is marked separately, usually against a template. A response that sounds good but never says what you personally did, or what changed as a result, scores low even when the writer has done exactly the work described.
Take a criterion phrased the way employers actually phrase them: "Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities under tight deadlines." The difference between an answer that scores and one that does not is not the quality of the writing.
The second response is not longer because the writer is better at prose. It is longer because it contains the three things a panel needs in order to award a score: the specific situation, the decision you made, and the outcome. The first response could have been written by anyone about any role, which is exactly why it cannot be marked.
If the advertisement states a limit, follow it exactly — the limit is itself part of what is being assessed, and running over it is read as an inability to be concise. Where no limit is given, aim for roughly half a page to two-thirds of a page per criterion, and do not go under four or five sentences. A structure that reliably works at that length is one sentence of context, three to five sentences on what you personally decided and did, and one or two sentences on the outcome. If you have more evidence than fits, keep the example that maps most directly to the wording of the criterion rather than the most impressive one. Longer is not stronger: a panel reading forty statements rewards the statement where the evidence is easy to find, not the one that takes longest to read.
You will see the acronym STAR attached to selection criteria constantly — Situation, Task, Action, Result. It works in writing too, but the proportions shift, because a reader can go back and re-read in a way a listener cannot.
| Part | What it does in a written response | Roughly how much |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | One sentence that places you in the role and in the moment. | About 10 per cent |
| Action | What you personally decided and did, in order. This carries the score. | About 60 per cent |
| Result | What changed afterwards, with a number if you have one. | About 30 per cent |
The single most useful edit is the shift from the team to yourself. Write "I asked", "I decided", "I escalated", rather than "we". Panels are not trying to catch you out, but if they cannot tell which parts were yours, they cannot award the criterion to you — and in a competitive field that is the whole difference.
Yes, and in the order they appear. Use the employer own wording as the heading for each response, keep any numbering, and answer each one as its own section. If the application form gives you a box per criterion, use those boxes rather than attaching a single document, because that is how the responses will be distributed to the panel. Panels commonly score criterion by criterion on a template, so a paragraph that blends two criteria into one argument is hard to mark and usually gets awarded against only one of them. If a criterion has two parts joined by the word "and", say explicitly that you are covering both. It is safer to write a slightly thin response under every heading than a strong response under half of them, because a criterion that is missing or unattempted is treated as a fail rather than as a gap.
Sometimes, but treat it as the exception rather than the plan. Reusing one strong example across two closely related criteria — "manage competing priorities" and "work under pressure", for instance — is normal and defensible, because the same incident genuinely demonstrates both. Reusing the same example for five criteria reads as having no other evidence, which is the opposite of what the exercise is testing. If you do reuse one, change what you emphasise: lead with the prioritisation decision for one criterion and with the pressure of the deadline for the other, rather than pasting the same paragraph twice. Panels compare responses across criteria, and an identical block repeated down the page is easy to notice. A useful test is whether you could defend the reuse out loud if asked about it at interview.
If you are invited to interview, the criteria do not go away. Panels in criteria-based processes generally work from questions mapped to the same list, which is why preparing the written responses properly pays twice: you already have the examples, and you already know what each one is meant to prove.
What changes is the delivery. In writing you can be dense and precise; out loud you have about two minutes before an answer stops being easy to score. The examples carry over almost unchanged — what needs practice is saying them so they land without a reader ability to go back.
Selection criteria are the specific capabilities the employer states the role requires. In Australian government, public health, university and many not-for-profit processes you address each one separately in writing as part of the application, and the panel scores your responses against that list to decide who to interview.
The number is set by the employer and varies by role and organisation, so read the advertisement rather than assuming. The practical point is that every criterion listed must be addressed under its own heading, in order, using the employer own wording.
Yes. It is what most panels expect, and it maps cleanly onto a score. Spend about a tenth of the response on context, most of it on what you personally decided and did, and the last part on the outcome. In writing you can be denser than you would be in an interview, but the structure is the same.
Yes. In criteria-based recruitment the interview questions are typically mapped to the same criteria, so the examples you build for the written response are the same examples you will be asked about out loud.
Only if the advertisement allows it. Most criteria-based processes expect the responses in a separate statement, or in the spaces the application form provides. Folding them into a cover letter usually means they are never scored at all.