Flawed recruitment by Syed Saadat

[khurram aziz]

LAST month, the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) announced the results for the written CSS exam 2013. Out of 11,406 candidates only 238 were declared successful in the exam meant to ascertain who is worthy of being a part of the civil service of Pakistan and who is not.

First, heartiest congratulations to the more than 11,000 failed candidates for having saved themselves from thankless low-paid drudgery. Civil service is only a shadow of the glorious impression it has left on the minds of aspirants.

Authority has been diluted to the level that any Tom, Dick or Harry with a camera and microphone in hand can question your integrity by misrepresenting you. The judiciary might nail you for doing your job inefficiently and political bosses can do the same for doing it efficiently.

Surprisingly, there are still many who aspire to join the civil service of Pakistan, but then many of them are shunted out by the inept evaluation system.

The pass percentage this year was a dismal 2pc and this was the result of only the written portion of the exam. The psychological test and interview stage has not even started. Is this reflective of the dwindling standard of education or the falling intellectual level of our youth? Actually, it is the failure of the evaluation system.

There are around 250 vacancies this year in the federal service. A globally accepted principle for all recruiting agencies is to interview or shortlist three candidates for a single vacancy so that there is enough room to choose the most appropriate candidate and ensure that the exercise is not rendered ineffective by lack of choice.

The result that the FPSC has announced after having overcome challenges like answer sheets stolen from a centre in Faisalabad and the subsequent cancellation of papers is faulty if one is to go by the standard principles of the recruitment procedure. But one cannot blame the FPSC; it is like a home for retired civil servants, generals and judges.

A glance at the current members and chairman is enough to lend credence to this statement. When the world is moving to specialised recruitment agencies run by human resource management professionals, we are happy to go through the bizarre drills that were set in motion decades ago.

There is no objectivity in the exam, the syllabus or format has not changed much in decades, the use of computers in marking or taking exams is non-existent. Around the world assessment tests like GRE, GMAT and TOEFL provide an evaluation mechanism that is impartial and uniform. But it takes initiative to bring such changes and with due respect bureaucrats, that too retired and re-employed, can’t be expected to show that.

Then the checking of answer sheets of all subjects is arbitrary, depending on the checker’s humour. Customs, Income Tax, Audit and Accounts, Railways, Pakistan Post and Pakistan Administrative Service are service groups for whom subjects like accounting and financial risk management are relevant but there are no signs of these.

Ironically, the scientific reason behind why ships float and needles sink is part of the compulsory portion of the syllabus. The fact that state institutions are neither needles nor ships explains why our bureaucracy is often clueless when they sink into deeper trouble.

Earlier this year, the provincial quota in the federal service was extended further. The urbanites forming the majority in the civil service know little about remote regions so the quota system does have its relevance.

However, the recruitment procedure fails at this level as well as mostly these quotas are not filled for lack of enough successful candidates from these regions. Generally every year, a sizable number of seats are carried forward to the next year from the quotas of Sindh rural, Sindh urban and Balochistan.

This is bound to happen this year as well. The problem with this backlog is that 10 years down the line there will be a gap in serving senior officers from the remote regions.

When these seats are not filled in the year they are announced, it leads to a lopsided seniority list with candidates from remote areas being overwhelmed by officers from better developed provinces. This renders the quota system useless — ironic, since it is in place for proportional representation of all provinces at all levels in the federal bureaucracy.

We would not want the decision-makers in the years ahead to have no representatives from rural Sindh or Balochistan because no candidates were selected in 2013 to fill those seats.

Lastly, reforming the recruitment system needs initiative and our leadership doesn’t seem to know the importance of quality human resource. No matter how many PhD scholars a country produces and how many entrepreneurs spring up in the wake of easy loan schemes, an inefficient bureaucracy multiplies everything with zero.
The writer is a civil servant.