Our Hiring Philosophy

Public Service is about serving our nation and developing our communities with service, integrity and excellence.

We are always looking for individuals who possess the right mix of skills and work experience to serve. We have roles to suit all life stages and backgrounds, whether you are a school leaver, mid-career, just returning to the workforce or looking for a career change.


Our careers fit all aspirations and backgrounds

The Public Service spans a huge range of roles – teachers, enforcement officers, urban planners, nurses, data scientists, and policy makers are just some of these.

We need an equally broad range of people to serve in these roles. We are made stronger by having officers from diverse backgrounds, with their own skills, experiences, and perspectives that they can bring to their jobs.

In line with this, we look for a variety of factors relevant to the job when shortlisting candidates. These include work experience, competencies, professional certifications and qualifications (where relevant), personal qualities, character, motivations and overall job fit.




Finding the best person for each job through an open and fair recruitment process

No matter the role, we always seek to find the best person - we want to build a Service filled with competent and engaged officers working together to serve Singapore and Singaporeans.

Our merit-based recruitment process compares and weighs the competencies, abilities, experience and personal qualities of candidates against the job they applied to. This may involve practical tests, case studies, psychometric tests and other evaluations as well as interviews. This allows us to select the best person for each job.




Progression is based on your performance and ability

We progress officers based on their performance demonstrated skills and competencies to take on more or greater responsibilities. Progression is not based on seniority, nationality or any other factors.


Career pathways to fulfil different aspirations

The Public Service offers a wide range of existing career pathways, and the opportunity to chart your own way.

For example, within professional domains (such as tax specialists in IRAS and teachers in MOE), there are choices for career development on a specialist track or the leadership track, depending on a person’s career interests and performance There are options to specialise within a group of agencies (such as security or economic), or even within a function (such as HR or finance). Officers can also choose to transit to other professions based on their evolving career interests and life stages.

We encourage all our officers to take charge of charting their unique career pathway in the Public Service. We help all our officers to do so by empowering them to partner their supervisors and career coaches to identify key career milestones and design a development plan – be it attending training or participating in career postings or short-term attachments – to reach these milestones.

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