"I am an excellent communicator."
"I have strong leadership skills."
"I am passionate about delivering excellent customer service."
These statements appear in thousands of applications every week. They pass through sift and land in the bin without anyone noticing, because they are invisible to the people reading them.
Not because they are untrue. Because they are claims.
A claim tells the reader what you believe about yourself. It does not give them any information they can assess. It does not show them anything. It asks them to take your word for it — and hiring panels, by design, do not take your word for anything.
The only currency the system accepts
The Civil Service. The NHS. Most corporate hiring at any senior level. All of them run on the same currency: evidence. Specific, situated, verifiable evidence of you doing the thing, in a real context, with a real outcome.
The form might ask "please provide an example of when you demonstrated leadership." But the actual question — the question the assessor is marking against — is: what exactly did you do, in what circumstances, and what changed because you were there rather than someone else?
That is a different question. And it requires a different type of answer.
What a scene looks like
The word we use at Submiti is scene. Not summary. Not description. Scene.
A scene has a specific moment. It has a specific context. It has a decision. It has a consequence.
Here is a claim: "I led a team through a period of significant change and kept morale high throughout."
Here is the beginning of a scene: "In March last year, my team found out that the project they had been working on for eight months was being restructured. They were told on a Friday afternoon. By Monday morning, three of them were looking for other roles."
The second version has a moment. It has stakes. It has the beginning of a decision that needs to be made. It is starting to give the assessor something to work with.
The scene is not finished — we still need to see what you did, why you did it, and what happened as a result. But the scene has started. The claim never does.
Why STAR is the floor, not the ceiling
You have probably heard of the STAR method. Situation, Task, Action, Result. It is a useful framework. It is also frequently misused in a way that produces technically structured but still uninformative answers.
"The situation was that we had a tight deadline. My task was to manage the project. I took action by organising the team and delegating effectively. The result was that we delivered on time."
That follows the STAR structure. It contains no information.
The structure is correct. But the specificity is missing. What deadline? What made it tight? Who was on the team and what were they struggling with? What specifically did you delegate, to whom, and how did you decide? What would have happened if you had not?
The model gives you the shape. The scene gives you the substance. Both are necessary.
Where specificity comes from
Most people, when told their examples lack specificity, try to add more words. More context. More explanation of the background.
That is the wrong instinct.
Specificity does not come from adding more background. It comes from going deeper into the decision. From answering the question you actually skip over: why did I do that specific thing, rather than the obvious alternative?
The moment you can answer that question — when you can name the alternative you considered and rejected, and explain the reasoning behind the choice you made — you have found the specific. The decision is always where the evidence lives.
A practical exercise
Take one of your current examples. Find the action part — the sentence or sentences that describe what you actually did.
Now answer these three questions:
One: what was the other option you could have taken at that moment?
Two: why did you reject it?
Three: what would have happened if you had taken it instead?
The answers to those three questions, combined with a concrete outcome, are a story that passes sift. Everything else you have written is context.
Claims tell the reader what you think about yourself. Stories show them what you have done. The system only reads one of those.