The European Personnel Selection Office published on 4 February the results of the first new open competition to select generalist graduate 'Administrators' launched on 2010 as part of a programme of modernisation of the EU Institution selection procedure. This new procedure has allowed to speed up the selection process and reduce it from an average 2 years procedures to approximately 10 months.

Thanks to the programme of modernisation of the EU Institution selection procedure, and despite more than 51,000 applications were presented to the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO), it has been possible to deliver the results after the two stage process only 9 months after the application deadline was closed back in April 2010.

More specifically, of the 51,639 candidates who applied for the graduates "Administrators" selection procedure, 37,329 sat the first stage computer-based reasoning tests in centres around Europe and across the world, and 992 were invited to take the second phase in an assessment center in Brussels. Finally, the list of candidates includes 308 people in five different fields: European public administration, law, economics, audit and ICT.

This modernisation programme for the selection of EU officials driven by EPSO, which was presented in March 2010, includes the introduction of an annual cycle of competitions, to allow potential candidates to know when they can apply year to year, and a streamlined two stage process, which has cut the time of large selection procedures from 2 years to 10 months. In the case of smaller specialist selections the selection periods are even shorter as they passed from 16 months to just 6 months.

One more feature of this new selection procedure for EU officials is that it allows EPSO's trained Selection Boards to make an assessment on competencies instead of knowledge-based, enabling them to select candidates with the range of skills that they will need to make the most of the wide opportunities offered by an EU Career. EPSO also acknowledge that selection of the staff to work on behalf of 500 million EU citizens should not just focus on the speed of the process but also the quality of the people selected.