References for Civil Service Jobs

When I first joined the Civil Service I used two personal referees and just put addresses at the bottom of my CV. No issues were had as I’m still there 6 years later. Now I have one professional (ex line manager) and one personal.

One is a work email and the other is a personal email.

I’m also an interviewer for the service and take part in the Sift stages of recruitment and I’ve seen CVs with both kinds of references and many of those people were recruited.

Fantastic.

What kind of roles would you recommend for a Maths grad (PASS grade) with customer service, Account/data admin and some analysis under her belt?

Perhaps have a look at the civil service jobs website and see what is being advertised. See if anything rings a bell and attracts you.

In my case, I’m an engineer, I came to the Civil Service via an Apprenticeship and sort of stayed. We get a lot of grads joining either via the various graduate schemes or directly through normal job campaigns.

Fair enough.
Is there a limit to how many times I can apply? E.g. I have to wait a month between applications or can I apply to as many as I want at a time?
If you were to give a piece of advise to someone moving in from the private sector to a government position, what advice would you give? What should I brace myself for?

We do things differently, sometimes maddeningly so. It’s a different pace and different challenges but there’s something to be said for that sometimes. A change being as good as a rest etc.

Pension is still good and flexible working too.

I’ve never regretted becoming a Civil Servant, though sometimes my jobs have been a chore.

Is there a limit to how many/often you can apply?

Not that I am aware of. Depending on the organisation, a job will either be a single or couple of posts being advertised or it might be a campaign to hire a larger number of people to fill posts across multiple teams.

Do you know if CS jobs are doing interviews/recruitment over Zoom/online or in person?

I'm not sure what the other Departments (Home Office, DoJ etc) are doing but, at the moment, all interviews for the MoD (Main, SDA and DE&S) are done virtually via Teams/Skype. I;ve no idea how long this will be the case for but they have all been online since Covid.

When submitting CVs in applications, do I need to anonymise? i.e. leave out name, email, phone, date and locations?