How to Write Personal Statements

Personal Statements used to be entirely within the purview of EOIs, however, with the advent of Success Profiles, these are becoming much more common in substantive recruitments. The word count varies from 750 to 1250, don’t feel daunted by this number though, we will walk through a basic model framework below.

You will be required to talk about your suitability for a role, against a handful of assessment criteria. These criteria will be found in the job specification and are loosely based on the Success Profile behaviours. The simplest thing to do is to insert your behaviour statements. Whilst this is the easiest way to produce statements, it lacks flare and doesn’t take advantage of the looseness that personal statements provide versus the rigidity of simple 250 word behaviour statements.

Remember that the emphasis must be on evidence that you are capable of the behaviour, rather than assertions. These sorts of statements are better aimed at ‘strength’ based questions. There is a technique to giving really good evidence, see the behaviours page for more information.

Pay attention for any ‘Lead criteria’ as they will be assessed first!

Structure for 1250 Words

For 1250 words, with 4 criteria we might word it like this:

• Introduction: 100 words
• Criterion 1: 250 words
• Criterion 2: 250 words
• Criterion 3: 250 words
• Criterion 4: 250 words
• Conclusion: 100 words

Key Takeaway

A final thought is to remember that what the marker is looking for is clear evidence that you are achieving at the right level. Making that clear is the best thing you can do to boost your mark.