Writing a Supporting Statement, Criterion by Criterion

Some applications don’t want a cover letter. They want a supporting statement, or a statement addressing the selection criteria, or a form with a box per requirement — and they hand you the list to work through.

This is common in public sector, university, healthcare and charity hiring, and the conventions vary by country and organisation — treat any single description of it, including this one, as a pattern rather than a rule. Where you meet it, though, the thing to understand is that you are not writing a letter. You are filling in an assessment against a rubric, and most of what makes a good cover letter makes a bad supporting statement.

Why it inverts the usual advice

A cover letter is read once, quickly, by a person forming an impression. So it wants flow, a single argument, and a memorable opening.

A supporting statement is typically read by a panel who are looking for one specific thing at a time, often with a score or a met/not-met mark per criterion, sometimes with each member taking different criteria. What they need is to find things. Elegance that makes them hunt is a cost, not a virtue.

So: no narrative arc, no clever opening, no saving the best for last. Signposting, in their order, in their words.

Use their headings, in their order

Copy the criteria out as subheadings and answer underneath each one. Yes, literally. It looks blunt on the page and it is exactly right — a reader marking criterion four can find criterion four.

Use their wording even where you’d phrase it better. If the criterion says Ability to manage competing priorities in a high-volume environment, your heading says that, not Prioritisation. This isn’t keyword-stuffing for a machine; it’s so a human with a scoring sheet can match a line on the sheet to a block on your page.

One example per criterion, and spread them out

Each answer needs a real example. The default shape, without the interview-course jargon:

1. The situation, in one sentence, with enough scale to be meaningful.
2. What you did — not the team, not “we”.
3. What happened as a result.

The second point matters most. Panels read a great many statements written entirely in the first-person plural, and a criterion answered in “we” cannot be scored — nobody can tell which part was yours.

The other discipline is spreading your material. If your best project answers criteria one, three, four and six, you’ll be tempted to use it four times. Resist: reusing one example makes a narrow candidate out of a broad one. A reasonable example from three different jobs beats a superb example told four ways.

Address every essential criterion, explicitly

If the pack separates essential from desirable, then every essential one needs an answer. Silence on an essential criterion is often marked as not met, and where scoring is used to sift, one unanswered criterion can end the application regardless of how good the rest is.

If you genuinely don’t have an example for one, write the honest partial answer — the nearest thing you have done, plus what transfers — rather than skipping the heading. The reasoning is the same as when you don’t meet one of the requirements, except that here you can’t bury it in a paragraph about something else; the heading is there whether you write under it or not.

Desirables: answer the ones you can, briefly, and don’t invent for the rest.

A weak and a strong answer

Hypothetical criterion: Experience of improving a service using data or user feedback.

Weak:

I have extensive experience of using data to drive service improvements. In my current role I am responsible for continuous improvement and regularly use both quantitative and qualitative insight to deliver better outcomes for service users. I am passionate about evidence-based decision making and have a proven track record in this area.

That is the criterion, paraphrased back, with adjectives. There is nothing in it to score.

Strong:

Our repairs line was rated poorly for “keeping me informed”, and the assumption internally was that people wanted faster repairs. I read six months of call transcripts and found most complaints were about not knowing whether a job had been booked at all — the repair time itself was rarely mentioned. I proposed a confirmation text at booking rather than the faster-triage project that had been planned, wrote the case for it, and worked with the contact centre team to pilot it across one region for eight weeks. Repeat “has my job been booked” calls in that region fell noticeably, and it was adopted across the other two regions the following quarter.

Specific, attributable to one person, and it contains a judgement — the reader learns something about how the work behaves, which is the thing the judgement paragraph does in an ordinary letter. Note also what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t invent a percentage. If you know the number, use it; if you don’t, “noticeably” is honest and a made-up figure is a question you’ll be asked in the interview.

Obey the stated length exactly

These processes usually state a limit — two pages, or 500 words per criterion, or a box that stops accepting characters. Treat it as hard, because it is frequently applied as such, and going over reads as an inability to follow an instruction in a process built entirely out of instructions. If you’re over, cut setup sentences first, then adjectives. What to cut when the letter runs long transfers directly.

If they want a letter and a statement

Some packs ask for both. Divide the labour: the letter frames the application — why this role, why you, why now, in three short paragraphs — and the statement carries the evidence. Don’t put the same example in both. A reader who meets your repairs-line story twice has learned that you have one story.

The failure modes

The eloquent essay. Beautifully written, continuous prose, no headings. The panel has to reconstruct your answers from it, and whatever they can’t find, you don’t get credit for.

Criterion-as-answer. I have excellent communication skills, as demonstrated throughout my career. Every applicant writes this. It scores nothing.

Leftover wording from the last application. Copy-pasting a previous statement and missing one paragraph that still names the other organisation. This happens constantly and it is fatal. Reuse your material by all means, but read the finished document end to end, out loud, before submitting.

Letting an AI supply the examples. A model is genuinely useful for reorganising your own material under a set of headings and for telling you which answers are all adjectives. It cannot know what you did, and criteria answers are almost entirely what you did. Give it your notes first — see what to give an AI before it drafts your letter — and check every fact it hands back.

The whole thing in one line

Their headings, their order, one example each, your own actions, inside their word count. Save the writing for the letter.