The beating heart of Europe - Viewpoint - careers advice blog Viewpoint careers advice blog

The beating heart of Europe - Viewpoint - careers advice blog The institutions of the European Union represent millions of citizens. Its the job of the European Personnel Selection Office to ensure that the people they hire are up to the task. THE EUROPEAN UNION (EU) is a complex political body. A heaving mass of people, its 13 institutions and 40 agency bodies govern 500 million citizens across 28 states. Its corridors of power are a complex network of arteries, where tens of thousands of civil servants flow back and forth. They are largely unseen, but remain vitally important. It is startling, then, to discover that a single recruitment entity keeps those arteries full. David Bearfield is the Director of the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO), the centre created in 2003 to collate the recruitment functions of each EU institution in preparation for the union’s expansion from 15 to 25 countries in 2004. The scale of the operation today is vast, with many parts of the selection process available in 24 languages and EPSO’s bank of assessment tests now numbering more than 80,000. “We recruit between 1,500 and 2,000 people each year from 28 countries,” says Bearfield, “and the nature of what we do makes things incredibly complex.” EPSO recruits for ten of the EU’s 13 institutions â€" from the European Commission to the European Court of Auditors â€" as well as many of its 40 agency bodies, which work on the policies and laws that affect the people of Europe. The EU spends only six per cent of its annual budget on staff, administration and maintenance of its buildings. Yet 38,000 people work in the European Commission alone, which has a permanent staff of around 1,750 linguists and 600 support staff, making up one of the largest translation services in the world. Bearfield has been Director of the office since 2007, leading it through “a dramatic and far-reaching programme of change”. His strategy was threefold: enter the war for talent; select on competency rather than knowledge; and embrace technology. Before 2010, civil services had waited for people to come to them, says Bearfield. “Many people still do,” he adds, “but how people see work has changed dramatically. Twenty or 30 years ago, labour markets were national and the range of jobs wasn’t like it is today, with a global market for top talent.” While EPSO cannot control anything later than the recruitment stage, as the first point of contact with applicants, it has needed to develop the EU’s employer branding, and that too has grown phenomenally. Its EU Careers Facebook page is one of the most popular global recruitment sites, with more than 150,000 fans, and EPSO has employed a team of 100 on-campus EU ambassadors, spanning every member state, who tour leading universities around Europe. This has helped in EPSO’s ongoing drive to bring the average age of the EU Civil Service down â€" something it has managed to reduce by five years through its new selection methods. The small team at EPSO â€" only 150 core staff â€" has leveraged technology to improve its recruitment without enormously growing its own team. In particular, online assessment has allowed it to overcome the huge logistical challenges of assessing thousands of applicants. Tests are, in general, verbal, abstract and numerical reasoning, alongside a situational judgement test, and are provided in each of the 24 official languages of the EU. Shifting the focus of assessments from knowledge to competency followed EPSO’s “modernising the selection process”, says Bearfield. “The institutions are not recruiting people for a single job,” he says. “We want people who can come for 20 or even 30 years. People who are very able, smart and with a very high level of social and emotional intelligence. They will have to adapt within a constantly evolving role within constantly evolving institutions.” While roles may change for the recruits, EPSO needs to get hires right at the first attempt. With dismissals much harder to carry out in the EU than in a country such as the US, for example, there is no room for error when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money. “When you hire people in the public sector, they could stay for decades. The wrong selection decision could be very costly,” Bearfield says. View the full article from issue 7 of our bi-annual publication the Hays Journal, providing global insights into the world of work. You can view the article in the Hays Journal online, via the Hays Journal iPad app or request a printed copy from haysjournal@hays.com Engage with fellow HR professionals across the globe and stay up to date with the latest HR news, by joining our LinkedIn group. Join the conversation