Permanent: 39 hours per week

Salary range: £30,000 - £45,000 per annum, plus benefits

Based in Westminster

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is looking for an exceptional candidate to join as an Advisor to work in the local government team. The role is part of the Communities, Health, Employment, Equality and Revenue team based in BIT’s London office.

The local government team was set up in BIT last year to consider the scope for behavioural insights to improve outcomes at a local level. This includes a very broad range of policy areas and the team has worked on issues such as increasing voter registration, reducing domestic violence and increasing recycling. Our future work is likely to focus on social care because of the significant opportunity to achieve social impact. This is likely to include building on existing work such as our two reports on children’s social worker decision making. It will also include moving into new areas such as identifying behavioural ways of improving health and social care integration and keeping the elderly independent in their own homes.

The then Prime Minister created BIT in 2010 to apply behavioural science to public policy in the UK. In February 2014 we became a social purpose company, owned by the Cabinet Office, Nesta (an innovation charity) and our employees.

The Behavioural Insights Team works with governments around the world in almost every area of policy. Whilst the subject and output of our projects varies considerably, there are common threads: we try to understand the contexts in which people make decisions; we notice small details; we find out what has and hasn’t worked before; we come up with innovative ideas for solving policy problems and we measure everything we do as robustly as we can.

As well as displaying professional excellence, BIT selects staff on the basis of our company values: always prioritising social impact; empiricism and humility; fresh thinking, collaboration; and public service.

As an Advisor you will support a wide range of projects, providing expert advice and project management. You will lead aspects of projects working to a Senior or Principal Advisor. You will also undertake discrete pieces of work (such as literature reviews, quantitative analysis or qualitative field work).

You will get regular exposure to a range of senior stakeholders and be expected to actively contribute to company development. Most of our advisors have prior work experience in either a policy, academic or consultancy role.

• An understanding of local government services ideally including children’s and/or adults’ social care
• An understanding of the behavioural science literature and how it can be applied to help solve complex policy problems;
• Excellent written and verbal communication (for example ability to write short, to-the-point policy papers);
• Strategic thinking and creative problem solving;
• Strong teamwork skills ¬ - as a part of a small team you will need to be reliable and willing to take responsibility for the driving projects forwards;
• Good stakeholder and project management skills;
• Ability to interpret quantitative data and use it to inform policy recommendations; and
• Ability to support the design and implementation of rigorous evaluations, including but not limited to randomised controlled trials.

• Masters or PhD in a relevant subject area (including, but not limited to behavioural economics, psychology, evaluation methods); and
• Experience developing or delivering national or local government policy (for example, having worked in government or in public sector consulting).