The Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland (JABS) holds competitions to recommend suitably qualified and experienced candidates to become judicial office holders.
Calling them competitions is not an accident – the process is competitive and can be challenging.
How many people apply?
Like any other recruitment activity there are almost always more applicants than there are vacancies. The degree to which this is true for JABS often varies on the office being recruited, it is not uncommon to see competitions which attract a significant number of applications for each vacancy.
The competitive nature of judicial appointments are not just driven by the number of applications received. Whether there are 100 applications for a role or just one, the standards to which applicants will be held are the same. To put it simply, you are not just competing against other applicants, you are competing against the standards and thresholds for recommendation agreed by the Board.
JABS recommends on merit. In short, this means that should the Board consider that the applications received for any particular round don’t meet the standards required, they will not make a recommendation, even if this means that a vacancy goes unfilled. Indeed, JABS have done just that in the past.
JABS recommends people to important roles. It is right then that the standard applied to applicants for those roles is high.