‘New Europe’ struggles to grab top jobs

By Tim King

Date: 04/05/05

The recruitment to the ranks of European Commission staff of citizens from the EU's new member states has broken through the 1,000 mark.

But the Commission itself admits that recruitment is "uneven" and that it is lagging behind several of the targets set before enlargement of the EU.

There have been grumblings in some of the national administrations which fear that parts of the Commission are reluctant to recruit outsiders.

Posts were specifically reserved for candidates from the new member states at the most senior levels of the bureaucracy. There were ten posts reserved at the ranks of director-general and deputy director-general. So far, five deputy directors-general have been recruited: two Czechs, one Hungarian, a Slovenian and a Cypriot.

These senior level appointments have a certain political importance. Even though Commission officials are supposed to work in the interest of the institution, not of their nation, it is symbolically important to indicate to domestic audiences that officials from, say Poland, are welcomed in the highest levels of the Commission and are participating in decision-making. And yet there are still no officials at the top of the Commission from Poland, the three Baltic states or Malta.

At director and principal adviser level, only seven appointments have been announced, from 2,400 applications and more than 260 interviews. In addition there have been five heads of cabinet appointed, which are regarded as at an equivalent level.

At middle management level, the list of applicants who passed the selection rounds to be considered for recruitment as heads of unit was not published until April 2005. The number of people on that list (80) is not enough to meet the 2004 and 2005 targets (126 in total) and the next selection competition will not be complete until next year.

Siim Kallas, the commissioner for personnel and administration, said that the Commission's efforts must be "further increased".

He was adamant that individual merit must be the abiding principle determining recruitment. The Commission has set itself a target of 3,400 posts by 2010, across the range of administrator, assistant and secretarial categories. For 2004-05, the target is 1,529 of which 1,081 have been recruited. At administrator level, there have been 728 recruited, against a 2004-05 target of 1,084.

Where the number of officials recruited from a particular member state falls below two-thirds of the indicative target, the Commission will, Kallas said, take "corrective action", though he was coy about what that action might be.

The Commission has already identified certain specific problems. The recruitment of linguistic staff (interpreters, translators, lawyer-linguists) from some small countries is greater than the country's overall target for recruitment. If the Commission stuck firmly with that target, it would be deprived of non-linguistic staff from some countries.

The number of candidates successfully passing some recruitment competitions is below the number of staff sought from those competitions. There are particular difficulties with auditing staff and lawyers, Kallas said.

The recruitment process is too slow in the case of senior management and too cumbersome in the case of middle management and non-management posts, he added.

Not all of these difficulties are as negative as they might seem. Ahead of enlargement, some Commission officials dealing with incoming states expressed fears that, after accession, national administrations would haemorrhage staff to the Commission. That would be damaging, particularly to the administration of regional and agricultural aid. Slow recruitment suggests that that scenario has not happened. Similarly, slower recruitment will have made it easier for the Commission to "digest" its new recruits.

Maros Sefcovic, Slovakia's ambassador to the EU, said he was not happy with figures which showed that, aside from two cabinet members, there were no Slovaks in senior grades of the Commission in middle or senior management posts.

Slovakia was seeking "an equilibrium" he says, of good people in the national administrations, the permanent representation and the member states.

Lithuania is also represented thinly at the senior level. A spokesman for the Lithuanian permanent representation said that the government had always tried to encourage applications. The government was looking at ways to prepare its candidates better.

Sefcovic said that Slovakia too had taken steps to improve the preparation of candidates. But the fact that some competitions had produced no successful candidates of whatever nationality, might suggest that the Commission was being inflexible in its selection criteria, he said.

It was, he said, important to get officials into the Commission both to broaden its perspective and because "our country benefits if it has compatriots in the institutions - they have inside knowledge, there is an informal exchange of views".

But some Slovak civil servants had been obliged to enter the institutions at a lower level than they merited, he suggested, because they were often young and did not have the length of work practice stipulated by the Commission for its higher grades.

The inflexibility of the Commission's recruitment practices has other effects.

It is still the case that staff who pass a specialist recruitment competition can take up a post in the Commission even if they abandon the specialism. So the sought-after lawyers and auditors need not work as lawyers or auditors once they have joined the Commission. Equally, the staff are free to migrate from one institution to another, from the European Parliament, for instance, to the Commission.

The Secretary-General of the European Parliament Julian Priestley has expressed doubts about whether the salary levels are high enough to attract sufficient high quality applicants to the EU institutions.

But the disparities in staffing levels are not confined to the new member states. The figures released by the Commission show that the UK now as 94 staff at A8, an entry level grade for administrative staff, compared with 263 for Belgium, 258 for Germany, 245 for France, 233 for Italy and 192 for Spain.

Article reports that the European Commission was having difficulties to find staff from the new Member States, especially for senior positions, and was lagging behind several of the targets set before enlargement of the EU.