EU sees a recruitment boom

By Tim King

Date: 13/10/05

Applications for jobs with the EU institutions have been booming, whatever the doubts about the future of the Union.

Figures released by the European Personnel Selection Office, EPSO, show that the number of applications to take part in five recruitment competitions this year for admini-strator jobs was 47,185, for a recruitment target of hiring 750 people, a rate of 63 applicants per post.

The competitions were the first for non-linguists open to applicants from all 25 states and the open competition for public administration was the first since 1988.

A breakdown of the applicants by nationality shows that almost 20% of applications for the administrator posts were Italians, with 14% from France and 10% from Belgium. For the administrator competitions, the fewest applications were received from Estonia (123), Luxembourg (125) and Latvia (176).

In an assistants' compe-tition, of the 5,645 applicants, most were from Belgium (1,593), France (900) and Italy (898). The fewest were from Estonia (12), Malta (17), Latvia (23) and Slovenia (24).

In both categories, there were more applicants from women than from men.

The European Personnel Selection Office, EPSO, reported high numbers of applications for posts within the European Commission in five recruitment competitions starting in 2005.