Negotiating public service selection criteria

“There are no correct or incorrect answers to these questions,” the chairperson assures them, even as the whole committee prepares to tick off (or not) the list of passwords, jargon and examples they have already decided are the cypher to a successful “outcome”.

The interviews themselves are also scrupulously fair, in that the list of prepared questions is strictly adhered to, no matter what the candidate says or what potentially interesting directions might have been pursued. It also helps that often the interviewers themselves know next to nothing about the job in question. Expertise can so easily prejudice sound judgment, as any human resources professional will attest.

In any case, the crucial thing is to ensure the successful candidate will fit in.

But the real fun begins during the discussions afterwards. Members of the panel get themselves a cup of coffee and turn their respective check-lists and sentiments into numbers. There are, of course, strict guidelines to follow. E=“Excellent”=5; RD=“Requires Development”=2; G-=“Goodish”=3-. Alternatively, A-=“Excellent”; B+=“Clubbable” …

It is at this point the outsider is in the position of a toper at an up-market wine tasting, able only to marvel at the intellectual complexity and subtleties of public service culture. There appears, for example, to be a vocational chasm between selection as an APS5 and APS6 (apart from about $200 a week); and that between an APS6 and EL1 verges on the metaphysical.

On the one occasion I had a reasonable grasp of the policy area in question (having taught it for several years at university and knowing many of the main players personally) the candidate I would have judged easily the brightest and the best was dismissed out of hand as “totally unsuitable”.

Which, undoubtedly, he was. For one thing, he knew what he was talking about. For another, he showed a commendable disregard for “process” - that is, endless meetings to avoid personal responsibility - over competence. The odd thing is he was shortlisted at all.

Having sat on various appointment committees myself, I am no under illusions about the inherently subjective nature of such proceedings and the dangers (and temptation) of purely arbitrary choice. But what I witnessed in Canberra was obdurate conformism masquerading as evenhandedness, self-delusion in motion, bureaucratic abracadabra.

Like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Shergold has a touching, doubtless evidence-based confidence that his own beliefs reflect the purity of whatever sphere he inhabits, in which all counsel is “strongly argued and unvarnished”. He is now back in academe.

In the meantime, the rest of us can be confident that the movers and shakers of the Australian Public Service will continue to appoint and reappointment themselves as the brightest and the best in this best of all possible worlds.