If you have ever sat down to complete a local authority job application form, you will know the feeling. Whether the competition is with a county council, a city council, or run through publicjobs.ie, the form asks for a specific example of a time you led a team, managed a difficult stakeholder, or delivered a project under pressure. Whether you have five years of work behind you or twenty, the result is the same. Your mind is blank.
The instructions are clear that the form must be in your own words, and rightly so. The examples have to be yours, told by you, because they will follow you into the interview room. But here is the difficulty nobody tells you about: being the person who lived the example is no guarantee you can retrieve it on demand.
Why you cannot remember your own best examples
The short answer: your memory holds the examples, but a blank form gives you no way to reach them. There is decades of research on this from cognitive psychology, and it is reassuring rather than depressing.
A classic 1966 study by Tulving and Pearlstone drew a distinction that matters here: information can be available in your memory without being accessible. In their experiments, people who were asked to recall items unprompted retrieved far fewer than people given a simple category cue, even though both groups had stored the same material. The memories were in there. They just could not be reached without the right prompt.
The same pattern shows up when researchers ask people about their own lives. Work published in Science by Bradburn, Rips and Shevell found that when survey respondents were asked to recall and count specific events from their own past, they frequently could not do it accurately. Instead of remembering, they estimated and inferred, filling the gaps with plausible reconstruction.
So when a form asks you cold for "an example of a time when", you are being set a free recall task. The research says that is the hardest possible way to get at your own experience. Your best examples are available; they are simply not accessible from a blank page.
What I do about it
Before coaching, and before the civil service, I worked in technology as an analyst. A large part of that job was elicitation: sitting with people who knew their own systems and processes inside out but could not articulate them in the structured form a project needed. You do not hand those people a blank template and wish them well. You interview them. You ask, you follow up, you notice the throwaway remark that turns out to be the important one, and you write it all down.
I use the same approach on careers, though with none of the formality of a requirements workshop. It is a friendly, conversational session, and part of the point is that you feel comfortable talking about your own history; people express far more when they are at ease than when they feel examined. Within that conversation, I question you through your work history systematically: the roles, the projects, the problems, the people. The questions act as retrieval cues, exactly the mechanism the memory research describes. In dialogue, examples surface that you would never have produced staring at the form, because a specific question ("what went wrong on that project, and who had to fix it?") reaches memories that "give an example of problem-solving" never will.
Throughout, I take notes. Afterwards, I share those notes with you. What you get is a documented record of your own examples, in far more detail than you could have recalled alone. That is the same idea behind building an example bank before you write: capture the evidence once, then use it on the form and in the interview.
The form itself stays entirely yours
This matters, so I will be plain about it. I do not write your application form, and my notes are not draft answers. They are raw material: your experiences, drawn out through conversation and captured so you do not lose them again. For how those notes become a working evidence file, see Build an example bank for competency interviews. The same approach applies whether you are preparing a local authority form or a civil service application.
You then write the form yourself, in your own words, as the rules require. The difference is that you are writing from a full record of what you have actually done, rather than from whatever happened to surface while you stared at a text box the night before the deadline. In my experience, the writing goes faster, the examples are stronger, and, just as importantly, you walk into the interview owning the material, because it was always yours.
In short
Local authority forms demand your own words and your own examples, but unaided recall is a poor tool for finding them; the research has said so for sixty years. Structured questioning is how analysts have always extracted knowledge from the people who hold it, and it works just as well on a career as it does on a system. The conversation finds the examples. The notes preserve them. You write the form.
If you are preparing an application and the blank page is winning, start with finding and building your examples, email me at sarah@dedico.ie, or book a 15-minute call.
Frequently asked questions
Why can't I think of examples for my local authority or county council job application form?
Memory research distinguishes between information that is available in memory and information that is accessible. Unprompted (free) recall retrieves far less than cued recall, so staring at a blank form is the hardest possible way to retrieve your own experience. Your examples exist; they need the right prompts to surface.
Do you write my application form for me?
No. Local authority application forms must be in your own words, and that rule is respected fully. The career analysis conversation draws out your examples through structured questioning, and the shared notes give you a documented record of your own experience. You then write the form yourself.
How does a career analysis conversation work?
It is a structured dialogue through your work history: roles, projects, problems and people. Specific questions act as retrieval cues, surfacing examples that a blank form never would. Notes are taken throughout and shared with you afterwards as raw material for your application.
How do I get in touch about application preparation?
Email sarah@dedico.ie or book a 15-minute call.
References
Tulving, E. and Pearlstone, Z. (1966). Availability versus accessibility of information in memory for words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5(4), 381–391. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80048-8
Bradburn, N.M., Rips, L.J. and Shevell, S.K. (1987). Answering autobiographical questions: the impact of memory and inference on surveys. Science, 236(4798), 157–161. doi:10.1126/science.3563494