Making Effective Decisions is one of the most frequently tested behaviours in Success Profiles recruitment — and one of the easiest to answer badly, because most people describe a decision without showing any decision-making. This guide breaks down what panels actually score and gives you a structure to build your own example.
What the behaviour is really testing
The panel wants evidence that you reach sound conclusions through a visible process: you gathered relevant information, weighed options against criteria, considered risks and affected people, made a call you can defend, and owned the outcome. The decision itself can be modest — what earns marks is the reasoning being on show.
A STAR skeleton that scores
- Situation: one or two sentences — the context and why a decision was needed.
- Task: your specific responsibility, and any constraint (time, budget, incomplete information).
- Action — the scoring zone: what information you gathered and from whom; the realistic options you identified; the criteria you weighed them against; the risks you considered and how you tested your thinking; the decision you made and how you communicated it.
- Result: what happened, how you knew (a number or concrete outcome helps), and what you would do differently.
Aim for the action section to be well over half the answer. The STAR method guide covers the format generally; for this behaviour, the option-weighing sentence is the one panels listen for.
Mistakes that lose marks
- "We decided…" — panels score you, not your team. Say what you did, recommended and owned.
- No alternatives: if only one option is mentioned, no judgement was demonstrated.
- No risk: strong answers name what could have gone wrong and what you did about it.
- Hindsight framing: "it worked out" is a result, not a process. Show the reasoning you had at the time.
- Choosing a story where someone else made the final call — pick one where the judgement was genuinely yours, even if the stakes were smaller.
Adapting to grade
The same behaviour is tested differently by level. At more junior grades, sound day-to-day judgement with the information available scores well. At higher grades, panels expect ambiguity: decisions with incomplete evidence, competing stakeholder interests, and the confidence to decide anyway — plus how you enabled others to decide. Match your example's scale to the grade you are applying for, and see our wider behaviour examples guide for the other behaviours.
This is general guidance on a public recruitment framework, not insider knowledge of any panel — the advert's candidate pack tells you exactly which behaviours are assessed at each stage.