About the job

Job summary

HM Land Registry's services form part of the critical national infrastructure, safeguarding land and property ownership valued at £7 trillion. This enables over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales.

It is an exciting time for HM Land Registry as we continue on a major transformation programme. HMLR's ambition is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.

We are looking for a senior content designer to join our Design practice. You will design accessible, easy-to-use public services that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers and platforms.

Job description

As a Senior Content Designer, you will:

• manage and direct content design in multiple project workstreams, delivering content for new and existing services that meet user needs and HM Land Registry policy objectives
• start from discovery and work closely with senior user researchers, service designers and interaction designers across multiple projects and services
• take a data-driven approach to understand users, and turn content concepts into user-centred services
• run content design workshops and design sprints
• manage and make decisions about backlogs of design work on projects
• be responsible for the creation and rapid iteration of low and high-fidelity prototypes to test content concepts with users
• present and deliver the team’s and your own work within your agile team, and at community critique and feedback sessions
• develop and manage content design standards and strategy guidelines in our design system, ensuring consistency, inclusion, tone, accessibility
• be the expert on content design for the wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, participating in services assessments as necessary to provide experienced content design knowledge to support the relevant points
• be responsible for ‘working in the open’ and sharing your project’s design work externally, for example through blogs
• build senior stakeholder relationships across HM Land Registry to focus on the needs of the user and to influence and build maturity in content design
• collaborate with senior content designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government content design patterns and standards

Being a designer at HM Land Registry

Supporting your learning and career progression is important to us. ​

As a designer at HM Land Registry (HMLR), you will have access to mentoring, coaching and a training budget for personal development.​

You will also be part of our maturing design community of practice, benefitting from:

• weekly community meetups​
• regular design reviews (crits)​
• weekly show and tells​
• face to face design away days​
• face to face design and user research away days

The content design team

You will also be a member of our friendly content design community of practice, taking part in things like: 

• content design reviews (crits) ​
• knowledge sharing ​
• show and tells ​
• face to face content design away days 

HMLR believe that a blended approach to where you work that enables some time working from home, as well as in the office may give you an improved experience and has clear business benefits.  We expect everyone to typically spend at least 60% of their working time in the office. 

Person specification

Throughout the selection process, we will use Success Profiles to assess the following essential experience, technical skills and behaviours. We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the skills defined in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for the Senior Content Designer role. 

Essential skills and experience:

• significant experience designing content for services, from concept to final delivery
• knowledge of what good end-to-end public services look like and the importance of designing content in an inclusive, accessible way
• experience of making evidence-based decisions to meet user needs
• developing and contributing to a high-level content design strategy for one or more projects, that may include activities such as audits, plans and quality assurance activity
• setting the guidelines and key performance metrics for content performance and show how you and the team have used that to create actionable insight
• show an understanding of how the projects content design strategy is linked to organisation’s objectives
• translate user research insights to identify and collate user need evidence, identify constraints and communicate these effectively to senior stakeholders in the project team such as delivery managers, service owners, senior product managers or the senior responsible owner
• the ability to listen to the needs of senior technical and business stakeholders and interpret them in a way that is clear for everyone

Essential technical skills 

• Creating content strategies and plans for services
• Creating clear and accessible content that meets user needs

Please see the attached candidate pack for more information. 

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £41,887, HM Land Registry contributes £11,309 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Strengths and Experience.

We want to keep this process as easy as possible for you so just upload an anonymised CV to include your qualifications, career history, skills and experience when prompted. We ask that you do not include any personal details.

The Personal Statement section (in no more than 750 words) should be used to provide details of how you meet the essential criteria listed within the Person Specification on the attached Candidate Pack.

The sift will take place shortly after the closing date.

If you are successful at sift, then you will be invited to attend a blended video interview, week commencing Monday 29 January 2024, which will be held remotely through MS Teams.

Further information will be provided to those who are selected to interview. This will include completing a design task which you will present at interview.

The blended interview will assess the behaviours, key skills, experience, and technical skills listed in the Person Specification, as well as the strengths associated with the role.

Please note, the Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expect all candidates to abide by these principles. Please ensure all examples provided throughout the entire recruitment process are of your own experience. HM Land Registry take any incidences of cheating very seriously. Any detected instances of plagiarism or other forms of cheating, including the use of artificial intelligence, will be investigated and, if proven, the relevant applications will be withdrawn from the process.

HMLR is accredited to the Disability Confident Scheme, which denotes organisations which have a positive attitude towards disabled people. Disabled applicants who meet the minimum essential criteria at the shortlisting stage are guaranteed an invitation to interview.  If you require the panel to consider a reasonable adjustment or there is anything else you would like the panel to take into consideration, you are asked to notify us of this at application stage where possible or during the process as soon as it becomes a requirement.

If you would like further information about the use of your personal data, please click on the link below: 

Job Applicant Personal Information 

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.