Well done Sean. Sadly so true,what a worry, what a danger and the Ruddites are listening to them.
However 20/20 will go a long way in making up the shortfall, particularly with tangle tongue Tim in a leadership role.
Wait a year or so Sean and they will be chasing you in order to get re-elected.
Bruce Haigh

This article was yet another that I wish I'd written myself. Loved it.

On a much lower note in the bureaucratic hierarchy, I was going through the touch screens in Centrelink one day and, as usual, pressed The Arts. There was only one entry: Sandwich Artist.

Naturally my mind went into overdrive so I flicked into it: it was an advert for a kitchen-hand in a take-away deli.

Sean

I enmjoyed your article Sean. But as a public servant I can only say you were much too lenient in your criticisms.

Outsourcing for example was such a joy in my organisation that it ensured wrong people for the wrong jobs as a matter of course. My area now does it itself.

I'd hate to criticise selection criteria, because I am good at using the right rubbish lingo in both applications and interviews. But let me have a go.

The Public Service is pretty keen on strategic thinking. A study showed that 92% of really senior public servants had no strategic thinking skills whatsoever.

And what about that OH&S and EO nonsense? As if someone is going to say they don't support them.

The public service is organised along Stalinist lines. Power is concentrated in the hands of the agency head and his or her politburo.

They issue decrees from on high which the apparatchiks implement. The workers grin and bear it, wondering when this crap will ever end.

To get on, to get promoted, you adopt party speak and parrot the nonsense expected.

Yes, yes, yes. But you forgot that by the time of interview the successful candidate is already known and thata the 14-day advertisement and shortlisting is merely so that due process has been done. And forget getting a job in Ausaid if you know anything about the country of the desk you are applying for and are over 40.

Passy and HenryVIII I concur heartily.

The Public Service for all its selection criteria has no built-in bulldust metre which suggests they like people who can waffle. I have learnt to waffle with the best of them to get jobs, if you don't speak the speak you don't even cross the line. Most public servants have set up criteria 'fall back paragraphs' which they tweak a bit depending on the job they are applying for. Public Service departments provide training about how to address selection criteria and you can even employ outside consultants to provide advice. It has become an industry in itself.

Many public servants know the 'speak' so well and the jargon (which changes just like the fashions) necessary to get over the line that it is entirely possible to obtain a position without knowing anything at all about the subject matter and without any experience in that field.

When I was younger I applied for a job for which I had no relevant experience, it sounded good and even though I thought I was not a contender was encouraged to apply. Lo behold I got it! Yikes! I declined the position and took up another lower ranked offer because I knew I did not have what it took to perform that role and certainly did not have the experience to cope with the challenges. It was the best decision I ever made - by taking the more junior role I learnt from the ground up and became more experienced over time.

While some positions do ask for experience in the job particulars, generic criteria like: strategic thinking, high level oral and written communication skills, ability to achieve results and good interpersonal skills etc without any other specific criteria risk recruiting less than suitable people into the roles, unless of course the successful applicant has already been decided beforehand.

Having worked for both public and private sector organisations, this is one area the private sector does better because they are not restricted by narrow parameters and can probe interviewees on their 'actual' experience.

I've gone for plenty of these jobs [though not at SES or managerial level]. Here's my experiences:

referees questioned about my personal background/lifestyle/sexuality;
the surprise on their faces when I come in, even the scribe can't keep a poker race;
the perfunctory state of the interviews;
the finding out in feedback after being unsuccessful, that there is always a more experienced person even for a semi-skilled role because the criteria are tweaked so its easy for the boss to exclude the culturally or socially undesirable;
the knowledge that if I could tick any other boxes about my background, language etc, I'd be a shoe-in.

And as for the private sector, its even worse. The interviewer has carte blanche and their condescension practically jumps out at you. Australia, even in this day and age is still a deeply intolerant, misogynistic, discriminatory and heterosexist society.

The nagging realization that to keep trying only keeps subjecting yourself to the same. Despite skill, and being prepared to work, I have never been offered any kind of decent ongoing employment [in line with my capacities as they were] in my entire lifetime. The market's signal was you are a leper and should return to the leper colony.

The rise of the religious right is extremely disturbing, as religion is often used to denigrate people of non-heterosexual-sexuality.

It's not just the PS selection criteria that needs a good kicking, but the whole culture.

Where else can the following happen: people of limited usefulness command the rarefied heights of the bureaucracy totally unmolested; people of talent always moved sideways like billowing smoke that hits the ceiling; money being inanely and enthusiastically spent on the latest operational or cultural fad; talkfests masquerading as important business; and salesmen posing as people of substance.

Welcome to the modern Public Service.

Congratulations to the auther for beginning to expose what has to be one of the most shameful apsects of the public service in Australia.

Shergold is having a lend of himself when he says that he is buoyed by the ability of the PS to select the best and the brightest, because that can only at best, be partly correct.

It hides the hideous consequences of what happens when they get it wrong, which is done with monotonous regularity.

People who are nothing more than corporate psychopaths are appointed to senior positions, where they then decimate their organisations by behaving in a manner that is totally inappropriate, and completely at odds with the prescious selection criteria anyway.

These psychopaths mouth all the right words at interview,their referees are all lined up, and they have all right degrees, but they personally have zero management ability, and zero interpersonal skills, and ONLY do things that enhance their own tenuous existence, and enormous egos. Naturally they invariably have all the right political connections to begin with.

If you want to check this out, one has to only start by looking at high turnover rates in organisations, that by their very nature should be keeping the best and brightest.Some have turnover rates as high as 18%. Suspected early deaths of people is also not uncommon.

But this is not likely to happen because it will mean that those responsible for putting them on their Nero like thrones will be shown to be wrong. Worse still there is great reluctance to have to remove someone, and have to pay out a contract.

Shergold might be a bit more credible if he said that he had instituted mechanisms whereby the destructive ego driven psychopaths had been detected, and weeded out. Something the current processes in both state and federal government dont do, and havnt done so for over 30 years.

No, I am not a victim of this type of behaviour -just an observer.