These are the terms you will meet in candidate information booklets, on publicjobs.ie and on the forums, defined plainly. Each one stands on its own. If a term you need is missing, email sarah@dedico.ie and I will add it.
Civil servant and public servant
A civil servant works in a Government Department or one of the State offices that support them, and is recruited mainly through publicjobs.ie in competitions for grades such as Clerical Officer, Executive Officer, Higher Executive Officer and Assistant Principal. Public servant is the wider term. It covers everyone paid from public funds to deliver public services: the HSE, the local authorities, teachers, An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces, the semi-state bodies and the universities. Most of those employers run their own recruitment. All civil servants are public servants; most public servants are not civil servants. The distinction matters when you move between them, because service, pension scheme membership and increments do not automatically transfer from one to the other, and a local authority or HSE employee applying to the civil service is applying as an outsider to an open competition, not as an internal candidate.
Competition
The name for a recruitment process in the Irish civil and public service. A competition is opened for a grade or post, has a closing date and time that will not be extended, runs through a fixed set of stages set out in its candidate information booklet, and ends with a panel. Competitions are the only route into the general civil service grades; there is no direct application to a Department.
Open, confined and interdepartmental competitions
An open competition is one anyone can apply to if they meet the eligibility requirements, whatever their current employer. A confined competition is open only to serving staff of the organisation running it, and is how local authorities and the HSE promote from within. An interdepartmental competition, in the civil service, is open to serving civil servants across all Departments, and is the internal promotion route for grades such as Assistant Principal. The same grade is often recruited through an open and an interdepartmental competition at the same time, with separate panels and separate vacancy allocations.
Capability framework
The published model the civil service uses to assess candidates, which replaced the older competency framework. It sets out, for each grade, the capabilities being assessed under four dimensions: Building Future Readiness, Evidence Informed Delivery, Leading and Empowering, and Communicating and Collaborating. Application forms are shortlisted against it and interviews are scored against it. Local authorities and other public bodies use their own competency models, published in each competition's booklet. There is a full guide on the blog.
STAR method
A structure for answering competency-based interview questions: Situation, Task, Action, Result. The situation is a short piece of context. The task states what your own role was and what you had to achieve. The action is a detailed account of what you did, in the first person, and is where most of the marks are awarded. The result is what changed and how you know. Boards do not require any particular structure; they score evidence against the published framework or competency model, but STAR puts that evidence in the order a board can mark. There is a full guide on the blog.
Shortlisting
The stage at which application forms are assessed, before anyone meets you, to decide who goes forward. Where a competition attracts more eligible candidates than can be interviewed, a board reads the forms against a selection of the competencies or capability dimensions and scores the written content itself. In the civil service, shortlisting usually follows the online tests and draws on the Order of Merit those tests produce. In councils, it usually follows eligibility screening directly. A strong candidate with a thin form does not reach interview.
Order of merit
A numbered ranking of candidates by score at a given stage of a competition. After the online tests, your order of merit within your stream and chosen location decides the order in which candidates are brought forward to shortlisting and interview. After the final stage, a new order of merit based on interview performance decides your place on the panel, and therefore the order in which vacancies are offered. The two are different rankings; a candidate ranked 400 after the tests can finish well ahead of a candidate ranked 40 once interviews are scored. There is no published cut-off at any stage.
Batch
A group of candidates brought forward together from one stage to the next. publicjobs runs large competitions on a demand-led basis, which means it takes candidates from the top of the order of merit in batches sized to the vacancies it expects, rather than progressing everyone at once. Your batch is determined by your score compared with other candidates. Candidates who score higher progress sooner; candidates lower down may wait months, or may not be called at all if demand runs out.
Panel
The ranked list of candidates who succeeded at the final stage of a competition, in order of merit. Vacancies are offered from the top of the panel down as they arise, for as long as the panel is active, which is typically 18 to 24 months in the civil service and a year, often extended to two, in local authorities. Placement on a panel is not a job offer, and there is no guarantee that a panel place will lead to one; it depends on how many vacancies arise in your location during the panel's life. In the civil service, declining an offer of assignment usually means withdrawing from that competition.
Clearance
The pre-employment checks carried out after a candidate is offered a post and before they start. In the civil service this is publicjobs's fifth stage, Pre-Employment and Clearance, and it covers proof of identity and address, academic qualifications, references, health, and Garda vetting or security clearance where the post requires it. It can take weeks. Nothing about the offer is final until clearance is complete, and the start date is agreed with the employing Department afterwards.
If you are working through a competition and want help with the form, your examples or the interview, email sarah@dedico.ie or see civil service coaching and local authority coaching.