Selection criteria examples, and how to write your own

I write and speak for very different audiences in my role as administration officer at Riverbend Community Health, from clinicians and managers to patients who are anxious or new to English.

Written: when our clinic changed its booking system in 2024, patients kept arriving at the wrong times. My manager asked me to fix the letters. I rewrote the four appointment letters in plain English, cut each to one page, put the date, time and place in a box at the top, and tested the drafts with six patients at the front desk. After the change, missed and wrong-time appointments fell from about 40 a month to 15.

Verbal: I answer around 60 calls a day and brief the clinical team at our Monday meeting. When a doctor’s sick leave meant rebooking 90 patients in two days, I wrote a short phone script, rang each patient myself, and offered the next three options rather than asking them to choose a date. All but four were rebooked before the week was out.

I work in a team of 14 at the Harbourline Transport contact centre, where we share one queue, so how we work together shows directly in wait times.

In 2025 our team’s average wait time crept above 12 minutes on Mondays, when concession card questions peak. I noticed that three of us were often searching for the same answers, so I suggested to my team leader that we build a shared set of answers. I collected the 20 most common concession questions from our call notes, drafted answers, and asked two senior officers to check them. I then ran a 15-minute session at our team meeting and asked everyone to add to the list whenever they found a gap.

Within six weeks the team had added 35 more answers. Monday waits came down to under eight minutes, and two new starters said the list was the most useful part of their induction.

As executive assistant to the Director of Regional Services at the Department of Regional Affairs, I manage the director’s diary, correspondence and briefings, and I regularly juggle deadlines set by the Minister’s office.

In March 2025 the director was asked to appear at a parliamentary estimates hearing with nine days’ notice, while also running a regional forum I was organising for 120 people. I listed every task for both events with its deadline and owner, and agreed with the director which forum tasks could move to a colleague. I booked 30-minute check-ins each morning, chased the eight briefing notes we needed from other branches two days before our internal deadline, and kept a one-page tracker the director could read in a minute.

All eight briefs were cleared on time, the director went into the hearing with a complete folder, and the forum went ahead as planned. I have since used the same tracker for every major event.

In my three years as a finance officer at Tallis Shire Council I have been the person colleagues bring figures to when they don’t add up.

In 2025 our monthly reconciliation of the waste services budget was out by between $4,000 and $9,000 each month, and the gap had been written off as timing. I was asked to find out why. I exported 14 months of transactions, matched them against supplier invoices in Excel, and found that one contractor’s invoices were being coded to two different cost centres depending on who entered them. I checked my finding with the contractor’s accounts team, wrote a one-page note for my manager with the fix, and updated the coding guide and the invoice template so the error couldn’t happen again.

The variance dropped to under $200 the next month, and the audit committee asked for the same check on two other budgets.

I have worked with the public for six years, most recently as a customer service officer at the Eastvale City Council libraries, where I help around 200 people a day.

Last year an older resident came to the desk upset that she could no longer pay her rates in person at the library after a policy change. Rather than just pointing her to the website, I sat with her, set up a council online account with her, and showed her how to pay by phone as a backup. I then noticed four more people asking the same question that week, so I suggested to my supervisor that we run a short “paying council bills online” session. I wrote a one-page guide and ran the sessions on two Friday mornings a month.

Forty-six residents came in the first three months, and complaints about the payment change at our branch stopped. The guide is now handed out at all four council libraries.

Accuracy is the core of my job as a payroll officer at Southgate University, where I process fortnightly pay for about 1,100 casual staff.

Casual pay is error-prone because timesheets come from dozens of managers in different formats. After two overpayments in my first month, I built a checklist for each pay run: I compare each timesheet with the approved rate and hours, flag anything over 38 hours or with a rate change, and check any new starter’s bank details against their signed form before the first pay. I also asked the three faculties with the most errors to switch to the standard timesheet, and showed their administrators how to fill it in.

Over the next 12 months, errors that reached staff fell from 11 the year before to two, and neither was over $100.

I use Word, Excel and Outlook every day in my role as administration assistant at Kestrel Engineering, where I support a team of 25 engineers and three managers.

Excel: I keep the project tracking spreadsheet for 40 active jobs. When managers said it took too long to find overdue work, I added conditional formatting, a filter for each engineer, and a summary tab with pivot tables. The weekly project meeting now runs from the summary tab and takes 20 minutes instead of 45.

Word: I built templates for our quotes and site reports with styles, headers and fields for the project number, so engineers only fill in the content. Outlook: I manage the calendars of the three managers and book around 30 meetings a week, and I set up shared calendars for our two site vehicles, which ended double bookings.

I have led a team of eight customer service officers at the Service Point Northgate centre for two and a half years.

When I took over, the team had lost three experienced officers in six months and the new staff were not yet confident with complex enquiries, so they transferred them to me. I met each officer one-on-one to agree two skills they wanted to build, paired each new officer with an experienced one for complex cases, and set aside an hour each Thursday for the team to talk through difficult cases. I also started giving each officer written feedback every month instead of only at the yearly review, and I nominated two officers for the department’s leadership program.

Within a year, cases escalated to me fell by about half, no one left the team, and one of the officers I nominated now acts as team leader when I’m away.