Using SFIA skills profiles in your team, function or professional area

This page is for managers and leads who want to use SFIA skills profiles within a single team, function or professional area, typically where you are not part of a broader organisational adoption of SFIA. Profiles built at this level can often be put to practical use straight away - for example in recruitment, development conversations and thinking about team structure.

If you have not yet built profiles for your team's roles, start with Building SFIA-based skills profiles. If you are considering whether to start locally or as part of a wider organisational effort, see Where to start with SFIA skills profiling.

On this page

• Using profiles in recruitment
• Using profiles in development conversations
• Using profiles in career conversations
• Using profiles to think about team structure

Using profiles in recruitment

A profile does not replace a job description. It gives you a more precise basis for writing one. The role purpose, overall level, skills and generic attributes help define what the role requires and what evidence you need from candidates.

Used this way, the profile becomes the shared reference point for the recruitment process. It improves the quality of the advertisement, the interview and assessment design and the final judgement about fit.

Writing the job advertisement

Draw the advertisement from the profile, but translate it into plain language that makes sense to candidates who may never have seen SFIA. The role purpose gives you the core of the description. The skills and levels help you express the responsibilities and expectations more accurately.

The SFIA skills and levels also provide a structured basis for describing the role requirements. Instead of relying solely on generic competency statements or broad experience claims, you can describe the actual activities and responsibilities the role requires at the right level of accountability and autonomy.

The aim is not to reproduce SFIA terminology in the advertisement, but to use the profile to create a clearer and more accurate description of the role.

• You do not need to mention SFIA explicitly in the advertisement, although some organisations choose to reference it.
• Avoid copying full SFIA skill descriptions directly into the advertisement. Instead, use the profile to shape a clear role description and, where useful, provide links to the relevant SFIA skills on the SFIA website.

Designing assessment and interview criteria

Map each important skill or attribute in the profile to at least one interview question, practical exercise or other assessment method. The aim is not to test SFIA knowledge. It is to gather evidence that the candidate can operate at the level the role requires.

For example, if the role requires Influence at Level 4, your questions should explore how the candidate has supported others, advised colleagues or co-ordinated work across a small team. A candidate who can only describe their own isolated contribution may have technical strength, but may not yet be showing the wider pattern of contribution the role requires.

Make sure everyone involved in the process is working from the same criteria. That is much easier when the criteria come from a profile rather than from individual preference or memory. The profile gives the panel a common basis for judgement.

Evaluating candidates

Use the profile as the reference point when weighing evidence. For each important skill and attribute, ask whether the candidate has shown capability at the required level and whether any gap is peripheral, developable or fundamental to the role.

This makes trade-offs more explicit. It helps distinguish between the ideal profile for the role and the minimum someone needs in order to succeed with support and development.

A candidate may meet most of the role requirement and still have one or two gaps that could reasonably be addressed in role. A profile helps make that judgement more transparent and honest rather than leaving it to instinct or post-hoc rationalisation.

An important boundary
The profile describes the role requirement. It should sit alongside your organisation’s normal recruitment considerations, including values, legal requirements, fairness and any formal HR processes. It strengthens those decisions by making the role clearer. It does not replace them.

Using profiles in development conversations

A profile gives manager and team member a shared reference point for discussing current performance against role requirements and for identifying realistic next steps in development. That makes the conversation more specific, more evidenced and usually more useful.

The profile helps shift the discussion away from vague impressions and towards concrete expectations. It gives both people a common language for describing strengths, gaps and likely next steps.

Assessing against the current role profile

Start with the profile for the role the team member currently holds. Review the relevant skills and generic attributes together and ask, for each one, to what extent the person is demonstrating the activities and behaviours the role requires.

This is not a formal SFIA assessment. It is a manager-led development conversation that uses the profile as a structured prompt. Its purpose is to create a shared view of where the person is meeting the role requirement, where they are still developing and what support or opportunity would help.

Specificity matters. Feedback such as “you need to step up” is difficult to act on. Feedback tied to the profile gives the person a clearer picture of what good looks like in the role and what change would actually count as progress.

Using the gap to focus development

Where someone is not yet fully meeting the profile in a particular skill or attribute, that gap becomes the basis for a more focused development plan. The key question is not simply what course they should attend, but what experience, practice or support would help them demonstrate the required activities more consistently.

For each gap, consider what the person is not yet demonstrating, what experiences or support would help and what evidence would show that progress is being made.

Development planning grounded in the role profile is more useful than generic development planning because it connects learning and experience directly to the real expectations of the role.

Using profiles in career conversations

Profiles for more senior roles - or for related roles elsewhere in the organisation - make career conversations much more concrete. Instead of discussing progression in broad or motivational terms, you can compare the current role with the aspired role and look directly at the differences in level, skill selection and scope.

That makes the question “what would I need to do to get there?” easier to answer in a specific and actionable way. It also helps distinguish between being strong in the current role and being ready for a different one.

This is particularly useful for people who are performing well and starting to think about what comes next. A profile-based conversation helps turn aspiration into something clearer and more realistic.

An important boundary
Using a profile in a development or career conversation is not the same as carrying out a formal SFIA skills assessment. It is a structured management conversation based on role requirements. Formal assessment is a separate activity with its own methods, evidence requirements and governance.

Using profiles to think about team structure

Looking across a set of profiles helps you see the team as a capability structure rather than just a collection of posts. It makes gaps, duplication and mismatches easier to identify and easier to explain.

This is a practical analytical use of profiles that any manager can apply. It helps you think more clearly about whether the team is designed to do the work it is actually being asked to do.

Reading the profiles as a picture of the team

Lay out the profiles for all the roles in your team and review them together. Look at the overall levels, the spread of skills and the balance between junior, mid-level and more senior roles. The aim is to understand the team as a pattern of capability, not just as a list of job titles.

A well-designed team will often show a coherent pattern of levels and responsibilities. If all the profiles cluster at the same level, the team may lack either senior direction or junior capacity. If the spread is very wide, the team may be trying to deliver too many different kinds of work with too little depth in each area.

Look at the skill mix across the set of profiles. Does it reflect the work the team is expected to deliver? Are important capabilities missing altogether? Are some capabilities repeated in every profile at the same level, suggesting duplication where clearer differentiation might help?

Identifying gaps

A capability gap is usually easiest to see when the team is responsible for work that none of its profiles really covers. That may point to a recruitment need, a profile that has drifted away from reality, a development opportunity for an existing team member or a case for reshaping roles.

Profiles help make these gaps explicit. They turn a vague sense that the team is stretched or missing something into a more specific statement about what capability is absent and at what level.

They also make it easier to explain the issue to others. Instead of simply asking for more resource, you can describe more clearly what capability is missing and why it matters.

Making resourcing decisions

When a vacancy arises, a profile gives you a clearer basis for deciding how to fill it. It prompts an important question that is often skipped: is this role still defined in the way the team now needs, or has the work changed since the profile was last reviewed?

The same applies when shaping a new hire. The profile gives you a disciplined way to decide whether you need a like-for-like replacement, a revised role or a different balance of skills in the team.

Profiles do not remove the need for judgement. They improve the quality of it by making the discussion more explicit and better grounded in the team’s real capability needs.

An important boundary
Using profiles to analyse your team’s structure is well within a manager’s normal responsibilities. Formal decisions about grading, pay, restructuring or employment consequences remain matters for organisational governance and HR process. Profiles can inform those decisions and make them better evidenced, but they do not replace the process.

Back to Where to start with SFIA skills profiling