GOV.UK defines this behaviour as: "Communicate purpose and direction with clarity, integrity and enthusiasm. Respect the needs, responses and opinions of others." (Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours, GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0.) Two words in that definition carry the marking: integrity — panels are alert to influence that shades into manipulation — and respect, which means your evidence must show you listening as much as transmitting.
This page banks the question in its main forms with four marked model answers chosen to span the behaviour’s real range: difficult news delivered face to face, fast written briefing upwards, one-to-one persuasion of a resistant peer, and communication redesigned at scale. Panels rarely tell you which form they want — bring examples from more than one.
A calibration note: at every grade the score follows the audience, not the polish. The question behind the question is always whether you shaped the message around what the receiving person needed — their time, their stakes, their starting point — or around what you wanted to say.
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How the marking guidance works
Each model answer below is marked against the four criteria a live aurate session scores:
See how a full session is scored
aurate is a practice tool. Marking guidance describes what strong practice answers show — it isn't an employability assessment.
Why it's asked: The integrity form. Panels want the news delivered straight, the reasons given honestly, and the person treated as an adult — plus evidence you absorbed the reaction rather than managing it away.
A claimant I had been supporting for weeks became ineligible for a discretionary payment because of a rule change that took effect mid-application. He was owed a decision that week, and the easy version was a letter citing the regulation.
I phoned him instead, because the letter would have reached a man who had already told me he read official post with his neighbour's help. I led with the decision, not the build-up — 'I have bad news about the payment, and I want to explain it properly' — then gave the reason in one plain sentence, and separated clearly what was closed (this payment) from what was not (two other routes he could apply for, one of which the change had actually widened).
He was angry, and I let that be fine — I didn't defend the rule, I explained it, and there's a difference. Before we finished I checked what he'd taken away by asking him to tell me what he planned to do next; he had the two routes right. I followed up with a letter confirming exactly what we'd discussed, flagged the call in his file so the next adviser had the context, and he applied for one of the alternatives that month.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The upward form. Panels score compression under integrity: what you cut, what you refused to cut, and whether the reader could act on it without asking a single follow-up question.
A parliamentary question about our scheme was tabled with our team's answer due to the minister's office by 4pm; it was 1:30, our lead was in transit, and the draft we had was a page of accurate but unusable background.
I rebuilt it around the only two questions the private office actually needed answered: what is true, and what can the minister safely say. Top line first — the figure requested, with its date and one-line caveat. Then three bullet points of context, each one sentence, each there because leaving it out risked a supplementary question we couldn't support. Then, separated and labelled, the line I could not verify by 4pm — flagged as unverified with the name of who was checking it, rather than silently dropped or silently included.
I sent it at 3:20 with a subject line that said exactly what it was, and phoned the private office to confirm it landed. The answer was used as drafted except the unverified line, which they held back — precisely the outcome the labelling was for. Our lead's only edit afterwards was to make my structure the template for the next one.
Marking guide
This behaviour is tested live, not on paper
Communicating and influencing is the one behaviour the panel scores twice — once from your example, once from how you deliver it. A live aurate session runs the delivery half against a live AI interviewer and marks it on the same four criteria as the guidance above. Two free sessions. No credit card.
Try it freeWhy it's asked: The influence form. The respect clause is the trap: panels probe whether you understood the resistance before working on it, and whether the other person's concerns changed your proposal at all. Persuasion that arrives pre-decided scores as transmission.
The manager who owned our shared referral process refused to add the screening question my service needed — she'd said no twice, in writing, citing form length. A third email was going to entrench her, so I asked for 20 minutes and opened by asking her to talk me through what the form's length cost her team, because I realised I'd never actually heard it.
It was concrete: every added field pushed their average call time up, and her team was measured on it. That changed my proposal — genuinely, not tactically. I came back a week later with a version that added my question but removed two fields my service's data showed were duplicated downstream, cutting the form's total length. I brought the duplication evidence on one page and offered a four-week trial with her call-time data as the kill switch: if handling time rose, we'd revert, no argument.
She agreed to the trial, call times held flat, and the change stayed. Six months later she brought me a proposal of her own to trade against — which told me the influence had built a relationship, not spent one.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The scale form — communication as design rather than performance. Panels want evidence of testing with real recipients, a measurable effect, and humility about what plain language actually takes.
Our team's standard decision letter generated more calls than any other document we sent — recipients rang mainly to ask what the letter meant and what they were supposed to do. I got the call-handling team's tally for a month: the same three confusions accounted for most of it.
I rewrote the letter around the reader's three questions — what's been decided, what it means for you, what to do next — with the decision in the first sentence and every action in a numbered list with its deadline. Then I did the part I'd have skipped earlier in my career: I tested the draft with five recent recipients by phone, asking them to tell me back what they'd need to do. Two of my 'plain' sentences failed that test and were rewritten in their words, not mine.
Calls about the letter roughly halved within two months of rollout, the call-handling lead sent the before-and-after to her opposite numbers, and the three-question structure was adopted for two other letter types. The lasting change was the test: no template in our team now ships without being read back by someone it's aimed at.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The open form, and an invitation to be generic — resist it. Strong answers give a working method (what you find out about an audience before writing or speaking) and one before/after example of the same message shaped two ways.
Why it's asked: The failure form. Panels want the mechanism of the miss — wrong channel, wrong level, assumed knowledge, buried headline — and the specific habit you changed. A named small fix outscores a vow to communicate better.
Why it's asked: Integrity under personal discomfort: redundancy consultations, service closures, decisions you argued against. The score follows whether the message stayed whole and honest when softening it would have been easier for you.
Why it's asked: A situational form testing the discipline of uncertainty: what you label as confirmed versus emerging, how often you update, and whether you resist the pressure to sound more certain than the evidence allows.
Why it's asked: The strengths-format variant — under a minute, honest about your grain (writing, explaining live, translating between specialists, calming difficult rooms), anchored by one quick real moment. Authenticity scores; a rehearsed all-rounder answer does not.
It is the Success Profiles behaviour covering clear, honest, audience-shaped communication and legitimate persuasion: communicating purpose with clarity, integrity and enthusiasm while respecting the needs and opinions of others. Panels score audience design, integrity under pressure, and evidence you listened — not eloquence.
One where the audience genuinely shaped what you did: difficult news delivered straight to an affected person, a briefing compressed for a senior reader, a resistant colleague persuaded through their own concerns, or a document redesigned and tested with real recipients. The common thread panels reward is the message rebuilt around the receiver.
The behaviour's respect clause draws the line: legitimate influence understands the resistance, lets it improve the proposal, and leaves the other person's standing intact. If your example shows the other side's concerns changing your position before theirs changed, you are evidencing the behaviour; if it shows a monologue that worked, you are not.
Fully — briefings, letters, consultation documents and templates are all scoreable evidence, and written examples often carry better detail than spoken ones. The strongest written answers include a testing step: someone from the real audience read it back, and the document changed as a result.
Informally, yes — this is the one behaviour you demonstrate while describing it. Structure your answers, keep them inside two minutes, and check in with the panel rather than monologuing. A rambling answer about clear communication marks itself.
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