Most of what you find on Clerical Officer jobs, pay and interviews is either the publicjobs booklet in full or a forum thread. This guide sits between the two: the job as it is actually done, the 2026 pay from the current circular, how the two competitions run, and what Stage 1 and the interview are marking.
What a Clerical Officer actually does
The booklet lists duties in general terms. The reality depends on where you are assigned, and assignment follows the order of merit and the vacancies that exist in the locations you ticked. A few typical desks:
- Department of Social Protection, the largest employer of COs: Intreo offices and processing centres, claims for Jobseeker’s, Child Benefit, pensions and Illness Benefit. Phones and public counter in the mornings, processing in the afternoons.
- Revenue: taxpayer queries by phone and MyEnquiries, processing returns and registrations, checking documents against rules.
- Department of Agriculture: scheme applications from farmers, inspections paperwork, payments runs with deadlines that do not move.
- An Garda Síochána (Garda Clerical Officer): administrative support in stations and divisional offices, PULSE data entry, court file preparation, correspondence.
- Courts Service, Passport Office, Department of Justice, HSE-adjacent bodies: counter and file work with the public, often with a peak season.
What the jobs have in common is accuracy under volume, systems you have to learn quickly, rules you apply rather than set, and members of the public who are often worried or annoyed. Those four things are also what the interview is really about.
Pay in 2026
Clerical Officer is the only general service grade that DPER prints as a weekly rate. From 1 June 2026 (Circular 22/2026) the PPC scale is:
| Point | Per week | About per year (×52) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | €611.75 | €31,811 |
| 2 | €645.43 | €33,562 |
| 3 | €654.01 | €34,009 |
| 4 | €670.69 | €34,876 |
| 5 | €695.32 | €36,157 |
| 6 | €719.93 | €37,436 |
| 7 | €744.51 | €38,715 |
| 8 | €762.42 | €39,646 |
| 9 | €782.74 | €40,702 |
| 10 | €806.29 | €41,927 |
| 11 | €822.89 | €42,790 |
| 12 | €846.23 | €44,004 |
| 13 | €869.42 | €45,210 |
| 14 | €905.60 | €47,091 |
| LSI 1 | €934.03 | €48,570 |
| LSI 2 | €958.80 | €49,858 |
New entrants start at point 1 and move up a point a year on satisfactory performance. Long service increments are paid after three years at the maximum and after a further three. A Clerical Officer Higher scale exists for staff with certain qualifications or histories; it is not the entry scale. Hours are 35 net a week, with flexi-time in most offices, and annual leave starts at 22 days. The full scales for every grade are in the pay scales guide.
The two competitions
publicjobs runs two nationwide campaigns for the grade. Clerical Officer Nationwide fills permanent posts; the 2026 competition (Vacancy 1998) took applications from 27 February to 3pm on 12 March 2026 and requires you to be 17 by the closing date. Temporary Clerical Officer Nationwide fills fixed-term contracts for seasonal peaks and cover; the 2026 competition (Vacancy 325) ran from 31 October to 18 November 2025, minimum age 16. Both use the same Capability Framework, the same two stages and the same interview format. Many people do a TCO contract first, and a TCO who completed a contract through publicjobs in the previous three years may be moved to references instead of a second interview.
Both booklets describe the selection as: scoring of the application assessment, an online video interview, language tests (for Irish-language posts) and competitive interviews, with publicjobs free to add or remove stages. You sit each stage once. Successful candidates go on a panel in order of merit, and are called in batches as departments request staff, with a choice of locations made at application. A panel stays live until it is used up or replaced by the next competition’s panel.
Stage 1: the Assessment Questionnaire
Stage 1 is done online as part of the application, and it decides two things at once: whether you reach interview at all (there is a minimum pass mark) and where you sit in the order of merit for interview. It has two parts.
Part A: biographical and written questions
Questions about your skills and experience relevant to the role, and then four written questions, each answered in a minimum of 100 and a maximum of 200 words. The booklet says responses “may be verified during the interview”, so treat them as your first interview answers. A strong Part A answer is a specific instance, told in the first person, with what you did and what happened. The framework’s three dimensions are the safest map for the four boxes: one on accuracy and getting work finished, one on handling a problem or a piece of information, one on dealing with a customer or colleague, one on learning something new (a system, a rule, a way of working). At 200 words there is no room for scene-setting.
Part B: situational judgement
You are shown fictitious workplace scenarios and several possible responses to each, and you rate every response as a good, adequate, weak or bad response, using publicjobs’ definitions of each. You are not choosing the best one; you are rating all of them. The scenarios are pitched at CO level: a queue building, a form you cannot verify, a colleague asking you to bend a rule, a customer becoming abusive. The pattern that scores is the one the Framework describes: follow the procedure, check rather than guess, escalate what is beyond your remit, stay courteous, protect the record. Responses that involve ignoring a rule to be kind, or covering for a colleague, are rated bad however well meant.
The honesty rules matter: no online tools, software, plug-ins or AI during the questionnaire, and publicjobs says it may check.
Stage 2: the interview
The interview is against the Clerical Officer Capability Framework, and the booklet is explicit that it has three parts, in wording repeated from the framework itself:
- Experience and examples. “Give an example of a time you have demonstrated capability”, followed by prompts on context, scope and objective. This is where a STAR-shaped answer lives.
- Motivation and values. What motivated you to act that way, what values you relied on. Also why the Civil Service, why this grade, what you know about the work.
- Skills and strengths. Hard skills (IT, spreadsheets, report writing, a second language) and soft skills (listening, attention to detail) with where you used them.
The three dimensions being marked are Building Future Readiness (learning new systems and ways of working, adapting to change, digital confidence), Evidence Informed Delivery (two sub-dimensions: Delivering Excellence, meaning accurate work finished on time, and Handling Information, Problems and Decisions, meaning checking, following procedure and knowing when to escalate) and Communicating and Collaborating (clear, courteous dealings with the public and colleagues, working as part of a team). Leading and Empowering is not assessed at CO. Marks per dimension and the pass mark are not published in the 2026 booklet.
The questions that come up
- Tell us about yourself and why you have applied for the Civil Service.
- Give an example of a time you had to deal with a difficult or upset customer. What did you do and how did it end?
- Tell us about a time you had a lot of work to get through accurately and to a deadline. How did you organise it?
- Describe a time you found an error or a problem in your work or someone else’s. What did you do?
- Tell us about a time you had to learn a new system or process quickly.
- Give an example of working as part of a team to get something done.
- What would you do if a member of the public asked you for something the rules do not allow?
- What are your strengths for this role, and what would you have to work on?
The board does not expect office experience. Retail, hospitality, care work, college and volunteering all give usable examples; the booklet’s own advice page says as much. What the board does expect is that the example is yours (“I”, not “we”), that it has a result, and that you can answer the follow-up about what you would do differently. See the STAR guide for the shape and the opening question guide for the motivation block.
Where people lose marks
- Writing the four Stage 1 answers as a CV summary rather than four specific instances.
- Rating every “kind” response in Part B as good. The Framework rewards procedure and escalation, not improvisation.
- Not being able to say what the department they have been called to actually does.
- Examples with no result, or results that cannot be checked (“the customer was happy”).
- Skipping the “what would you do differently” probe with “nothing”.