Why “We” Costs You Marks

Read back your last supporting statement and count the sentences that start with “we”. For most people who work in the public sector it is a lot of them, because most public sector work really is done by teams. The habit is honest. It is also one of the few writing habits that published candidate guidance tells you plainly to drop.

The reason is simple. The sift is scoring one person, and it is not your team.

The Grid Scores the Individual

A public sector shortlisting panel works from a marking sheet. Each criterion or behaviour on the advert is a row, and the panel is deciding, row by row, whether the applicant has shown it. The question behind every row is the same: what did this person do?

“We” does not answer that question. “We reduced the backlog by 40 per cent” tells the panel that a backlog came down. It does not tell them whether you designed the fix, carried out someone else’s plan, or were on leave that month. An assessor cannot give you credit for an action they cannot attribute to you, and they are not allowed to guess generously.

This is why “we” costs more than it seems to. A strong example written in the plural can score the same as a weak one, because the part that would have scored, your own action, is hidden inside the group.

What the Guidance Actually Says

The Civil Service’s own candidate guidance on GOV.UK recommends the STAR method because it lets you “set the scene, show what and how you did and the overall outcome”. Read that carefully. The scene can belong to everyone. What and how is about you.

Some departments go further. Wilton Park, an executive agency of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, publishes hints for behaviour examples that say: “Keep the focus on you. What specific steps did you take and what was your contribution?” And then, directly: “Try to use ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ to explain your actions that lead to the result.”

The same paragraph adds a line that matters just as much: “Be careful not to take credit of something that you did not do.” The guidance is not asking you to claim the team’s work. It is asking you to separate out your part of it.

Before and After

Here is an NHS example, written the way most people write it first.

Before: “On the ward we noticed discharges were being delayed until late afternoon. We introduced a morning discharge huddle and we saw a big improvement in patient flow.”

Every sentence is true, and none of it can be scored. The panel does not know who noticed, who set up the huddle, or what “a big improvement” means.

After: “Discharges on our ward were regularly delayed until late afternoon, which held up admissions from the emergency department. I audited two weeks of discharge times to find where the delays sat, proposed a 9am discharge huddle to the ward manager, and wrote the checklist the team used in it. I ran the huddle for its first month and trained two colleagues to lead it. Over the following quarter, the share of discharges completed before midday rose from about one in five to over a third.”

The team is still there. It just stays in the background, where it belongs, while the actions that score are clearly yours.

And a Civil Service example, against a Delivering at Pace behaviour:

Before: “When the new process launched we had a huge backlog of correspondence. We worked together to clear it and we met the deadline.”

After: “When a new process launched, my team of six had 1,200 items of correspondence outstanding against a four-week deadline. I sorted the backlog by complexity, gave the simpler cases to two newer colleagues with a template I had drafted, and took the most complex cases myself. I reported progress to my manager every Friday and flagged in week two that we would need one more person for a fortnight. We cleared the backlog three days early.”

Notice the last sentence uses “we”. That is fine. The outcome really was shared, and by then the panel already knows what your part was.

When “We” Is Legitimate

“We” belongs in the Situation and, sometimes, in the Result. It sets the scene: who you worked with, what the team was responsible for, what the problem looked like. It can report a shared outcome once your contribution is already clear.

It does not belong in the Action. That is the section assessors are marking most closely, and it is the one most people write in the plural. If you only fix one part of your examples, fix that one. There is more on where the words should go in how word limits on supporting statements really work.

Why People Default to “We”, and Why It Still Costs

Three reasons come up again and again. Public sector culture rightly values teamwork, and “I” can feel like boasting. Many good outcomes really were collective, so “I” feels inaccurate. And people often describe work the way they talk about it at work, where “we” is normal.

All three are understandable. None of them changes how the sheet is marked. The panel is not judging your modesty. It is looking for evidence it can attribute to you, and modesty that hides that evidence leaves the row unscored.

The honest way through is to be precise rather than boastful. “I wrote the checklist” is not a boast. It is a fact the panel needs. If your part was smaller, say exactly what it was. A small, clearly owned action scores better than a large, vague shared one.

A Two-Minute Check Before You Submit

• Search your draft for “we”, “our” and “the team”.
• For each one in an Action section, ask: what did I personally do here? Rewrite the sentence around that.
• Leave “we” where it only sets context or reports a shared result.
• Check every criterion still has an action that is clearly yours. If one does not, that is worth knowing. Our guide to essential and desirable criteria explains why a gap against an essential criterion matters most.

A Faster Way

Doing this check by hand works, and for a single application it takes a few minutes. The harder part is the step before it: knowing which criteria your examples actually speak to once the “we” has been taken out, and which they do not.

Zappli’s public sector tool does the mechanical part. Paste or upload the person specification and it reads the advert into criteria, keeps essential and desirable counted separately, reads the word limit off the advert you are actually applying to, and shows which criteria your recorded evidence speaks to and which it does not. Drafts are built only from examples you have given it. It will not tell you that you meet a criterion, because that is the panel’s judgement, and it will not write an example you have not given it. A criterion you cannot evidence stays empty. The empty box is the feature: it is the row you need to think about before the panel does.

Passes are one off: £9.99 for 7 days, £24.99 for 30 days or £49.99 for 90 days. One payment only, never auto-charged, and nothing to cancel. Zappli is paid by candidates, never by employers.

If seeing your own evidence set against each criterion sounds more useful than another read-through, pick the framework you are applying under.