NHS Jobs supporting information: the 5,000-character boxes

On NHS Jobs your supporting information is split into boxes, two for each category of criteria in the person specification (one essential, one desirable), and the shortlister has a tick box for each criterion, as the scoring guide from the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) shows. So answer every numbered criterion above a box with one real example, and stay inside the 5,000 characters each box allows, according to NHSBSA.

How the boxes are laid out

The criteria are grouped into categories. Qualifications and Experience are always there; employers can add others, such as Knowledge and skills. Each category has one box for the essential criteria and one for the desirable criteria.

NHSBSA publishes the NHS Jobs guides this page relies on. Its user guide for adding supporting evidence shows an example with the three categories in the table below, so six boxes. In that example Knowledge and skills is "added by the employer", so whether you see a third category is the employer's choice. Its applicant FAQ says you can enter up to 5,000 characters in these boxes and that a character countdown shows how many you have left.

Category	Boxes	Limit per box
Qualifications	Essential, desirable	5,000 characters
Experience	Essential, desirable	5,000 characters
Knowledge and skills (if added)	Essential, desirable	5,000 characters

What to put in each box

The page shows the advert's numbered criteria above each box. In the NHSBSA example the criterion printed above the Qualifications essential box reads "1. GCSE A-C in English and maths". The form then asks you to explain how you meet each one, with an example of putting it into practice where you can. These are the two prompts, as the user guide shows them:

• Essential box: "Tell us how you meet each of these criteria. If possible, give an example of how you put each into practice."
• Desirable box: "If you have any experience or skills that meet the desirable criteria, include them here. Any examples should explain what you did and what the result was."

The desirable box also says you can leave it blank "if you do not have any examples". When you do have one, that is the place for it.

• Work through the criteria in the order they are listed.
• Give one real example per criterion: what you did and what happened.
• Leave out your name and contact details. The form asks you not to include them.

How your answers are scored

The NHSBSA guide for employers, How to score applications in NHS Jobs, shows the scoring screens. In its example they run category by category, one screen for qualifications and one for experience. Each screen lists the advert's essential criteria and desirable criteria as tick boxes. The instruction is: "In the Essential criteria section, select all the boxes they have evidenced." The desirable section has the same instruction.

So the unit is one tick per criterion, not one mark for a whole box. Think of each numbered criterion as a box the shortlister either ticks or leaves empty. The guide's screens show the result as a count of ticks, for example "You scored this application 2 out of 3", split into "2 out of 3 for essential criteria" and "0 out of 0 for desirable criteria". It gives no pass mark and no weighting, so this page does not guess.

Every criterion in the advert is in play. NHSBSA's employer FAQ says: "Any criteria in a job advert will be included when scoring your applications during shortlisting." The FAQ tells employers they can put criteria meant for interview in a different section of the advert. So a criterion in the criteria list is one you answer in your boxes.

The shape of one answer

The three lines below are the structure. The short lines after "Made up" are invented to show how much one line holds, so replace them with things that really happened to you.

Criterion: "Experience of working with vulnerable patients."

• When and where: the setting and the dates (a ward, a care home, a placement, a year). Made up: a six-bed bay on a medical ward, March to September 2025.
• What you did: one task you handled yourself, in plain words. Made up: took the morning observations and reported two early-warning scores to the nurse in charge.
• What happened: what changed for the patient, the team or the service. Made up: one patient was reviewed before lunch and moved to a bay with closer observation.

Do this for each numbered criterion in the box, in the order the form lists them. A few plain sentences per criterion cover the three lines.

Mistakes the form invites

• One statement pasted into every box. Each box prints its own list of criteria, and the essential box asks how you meet "each of these", so each box needs answers to its own list.
• A category's criteria answered in the wrong box. In the NHSBSA scoring example each category's essential answer sits beside that category's tick boxes, so keep each answer in the box that prints its criterion.
• Name or contact details. The form warns you not to include "personal information that could be used to identify you".
• Treating the CV route as a way round the criteria. On adverts where you add a CV, NHSBSA's applicant FAQ says there is no character limit for that text box. NHSBSA's employer FAQ says any criteria in a job advert are included when scoring, so it is safest to cover each criterion in your CV as well.
• Counting words. NHS Jobs counts characters; some other NHS forms, such as Trac (an online recruitment portal), count words. The word and character limits guide sets them side by side.

Before you submit

Check that every numbered criterion has an example, that each box is inside its countdown and that no name or contact details slipped in. You can also check your draft against the person specification to see which criteria still have no example.