Imagine you want to find some qualified employees to work for your institutions. This is how you do NOT do it.
1. You ask the people to apply, say, in February.
2. You invite the people to come to the first round of tests, which have nothing to do with the job they´re trying to get. The tests take place in April, they´re computer-based and it takes you over a month to process them. (You also publish a press release saying that the whole procedure is going to be made shorter and more efficient… in about two years´ time.)
3. You ask those with the best results to send a full application, so that they can be invited to the second round of tests, finally focused on the skills they´re actually going to need in their job. You say that the invitations will be sent as soon as possible. There´s still no sign of them after more than two months.
4. If the exasperated applicants do some digging on your website, they can find out that no, there hasn´t been a mistake, you really are that slow. They also learn that the probable date of the tests is on a Friday about a month from now, and the test centre is located in Brussels only. (This is, by the way, at least 1000 km from where they live. There is usually no direct train service, bus timetables aren´t likely to include a bus arriving in Brussels on Friday morning, and if there are any flight tickets still available by the time the test date has been confirmed, the applicants may well have to spend their whole month´s pay on them. Not to mention the two days off they´ll need to take.)
5. From their previous experience, the applicants can now imagine that it´ll take another couple of months at least to assess the results of these tests – probably more considering that it can´t be done on a computer. But some time next year they can expected to be invited to go to Brussels again, for the third round of tests, facing the same kind of problems again.
6. Even after that, if they are successful, they do not get the job they wanted – they just have the right to apply. Do I need to say that this would mean another couple of visits to Brussels and/or other European cities, only at a much shorter notice than before? And if the recruitment process looks like this, what kind of idea would you get of your potential employer?
7. This might make you wonder what kind of qualities you´re likely to get in your employees. But I guess it won´t, so just forget about it. Who cares, anyway?
