The new year brings the chance to take a step back and assess where you want your career to go. For many lawyers, the public sector presents an opportunity to explore impactful policymaking. However, if private practice has dominated your career, the application process for the public sector can be daunting and, for the uninitiated, a little opaque. This can be true too even for career public servants.
Enter Lisa Tozer, a career coach with particular expertise in helping candidates prepare for job interviews in the public sector. An experienced assessor on hundreds of Australian Public Service panel interviews, she’s seen what works - and what doesn’t.
We caught up with Lisa to learn how she helps candidates nail their public sector interviews, whether they’re lawyers transitioning to the public sector, or a public servant looking to make a lateral move.
What’s your ‘special brand of magic?’
To land a public sector interview, you need to fulfill two criteria.
“Firstly, you need to show you’re qualified,” Lisa says. “What they usually want to see is that you’ve worked in a similar role for three months or more.”
Look for opportunities to build your dossier, particularly in a role aligned with the public sector level you’re targeting. As always, start with the position description. In a public sector role, this extensively outlines expectations and experience. This may involve team leadership experience, working with senior stakeholders, or exposure to specific types of projects or matters. Study this closely and seek ways to gain this experience in your current role.
“You may need to find opportunities to mentor junior staff or step up to manage larger projects. Spread your wings to show you are qualified,” Lisa says. “You won’t get too far unless you can demonstrate that you’ve worked on something that’s near level.”
Once you’ve shown you’re qualified, you have to demonstrate how you’ll add value in a way no one else will.
“What’s your special brand of magic? What have you got that’s different to everyone else? For example, if you’re going for a Commonwealth job, you might showcase your State and Territory experience.”
After all, everyone can make a spaghetti bolognese, but as Lisa explained, the ingredients that set your recipe apart are entirely up to you. What’s your red wine? Your secret ingredient? Your homemade sauce?
Have you done your homework?
“Whatever role you go for, you need to understand its context and environment,” Lisa explains. “This means understanding the job itself, and where it sits in the food chain. Who is in the team? Who do you manage, and who do you report to? What do you have oversight of?”
Beyond this, a strong understanding of the environment requires research.
“When I have clients applying for departments in which they’ve never worked, I give them a long reading list to complete before our next session,” Lisa says. “Take the time upfront to do your homework. There’s no substitute for this. You need to understand what they do in order to pitch yourself. This helps you think about what you’re bringing to the table from two levels - what makes you qualified, your special brand of magic, or what some might call a USP.”
Public service roles involve capability frameworks that guide behaviour at different levels. “Think about your assessors and what they want to know,” Lisa elaborates. “Unlike other career coaches, I provide a completely bespoke service. This means I look at the job you’re applying for and create a suite of bespoke interview questions against that particular job.”
Established for over eight years, Lisa has helped literally thousands of public sector candidates land their preferred role and is highly regarded in her field.
“I coach graduate level to senior government lawyers. Typically, you will be asked why you’re a good fit for the job in question. To address this, you need to know what the job involves, what the organisation does, and how you can bring your special brand of magic. Consider several matters that showcase your recent work at the relevant level.
Are you answering the actual interview questions?
When many people prepare for a job interview, they tend to focus on what they have done to lead what they talk about.
“People tend to look inward,” Lisa explains. “This means you can forget to answer what is being asked of you. You have to be ready to answer the actual question being posed. For example, If you go to a trivia night, you can’t ask me, ‘Is Napoleon a good answer for a trivia question?’ The question might be, does a carbonara recipe include cream?”
While it can seem appropriate to focus your energy on a series of prepared responses, a better use of time is researching the role and department, and understanding what you would need to do in the role, and what targets you might need to hit. A robust interview would ask behavioural questions like - how do you give advice, or how do you assess legislation and precedents, etc. to provide advice. You might be asked when you’ve worked as a member of a multidisciplinary team, or zoomed-in questions about how you’ve communicated with peers and senior colleagues.
“As a candidate, you need to sell yourself. To know your customer, you need to know what they need,” Lisa says. “That’s how you can answer a question specifically.”
What about career gaps in my resume?
“It’s a bit of an old-fashioned approach to be looking at gaps in a resume,” Lisa says. The traditional expectation that you worked your whole career without any breaks has changed, particularly since the pandemic.
“Often what people identify as a fatal flaw isn’t at all. For example, I had a client who worried that they had been at the Department of Agriculture for seventeen years. That’s the selling point! You understand the different machinery of government, and how change is made. It’s all about framing it positively,” Lisa says.
“You might feel your resume looks like you’ve skipped around a few different places. Another way to see this is that you’ve worked in so many different areas, which informs your point of view. If you’ve travelled widely, what did you learn? How did it help you do your job?”
Every person you encounter has some bias, and the interview process is no different.
“I don’t coach my candidates to think about the bias of a potential interviewer,” Lisa explains. “What I point them to is evidence. Evidence about the job, the organisation, and the evidence you have to bring to the interview. If you want to be a senior government lawyer, what does their legal work look like? What projects or matters are on the horizon? Then you look to the evidence of you. What have you done in your career? What is your lived experience? What are your specialties? What travel or volunteering have you done?”
Leading with evidence helps to focus on what you can showcase and control, framing your experience in a positive light.
Public sector job applications require a markedly different approach to private practice. As an interview coach, Lisa's approach emphasises thorough preparation and a deep understanding of the role and the organisation. By focusing on evidence, tailoring your responses to specific interview questions, and showcasing your ‘special brand of magic’, you can set yourself apart in what’s often a lengthy process of assessments.
Hear more from Lisa Tozer in this webinar with Ruth Beran, National Career Strategist at the College of Law: ‘How to Ace Your Job Interview.’
