Interventions to speed up the staff recruitment process in Public were implemented after the passage of the relevant bill of the Ministry of the Interior and the publication of the law in the Official Gazette.

With the new regulations, the competent ministry seeks to address the major issue of delays in filling positions from the successful candidates of the ASEP competitions, which has the consequence that on the one hand the services remain understaffed, and on the other hand the successful candidates remain unappointed for a long period of time.

The problem is attempted to be mitigated by shortening the deadlines at certain stages of the process, from the approval of recruitment planning to the appointment and taking up of duties of the employee.

The aim of the interventions is to reduce the time between the approval of the annual recruitment plan and the new recruits taking up work from the current two or even three years to 8 to 12 months.

The minister Theodoris Livanios and the deputy minister Vivi Charalambogianni they aspire to reduce this time further with the full development of ASEP’s interoperability with all possible public and private bodies needed so that the extraction of candidates’ supporting documents (degrees, foreign languages, etc. scoring criteria) is done automatically without the (time-consuming) audit by the employees of the independent authority is required.

In the plans of his political leadership Ministry of the Interior it also includes the prospect that the procedures for filling positions that are going to be vacant due to retirements will start from the previous year so that they are covered immediately and not “widowed” for a long time as is the case today.

Increased scoring for remote areas

Special care is given to the staffing of the mountainous, island and continental municipalities of the country with permanent residents of these areas, through the strengthening of the scoring of the criterion of locality.

Specifically, the score in the written competition of candidates of the P.E. categories. and T.E. it is increased by 40 points for residents of mountainous and island municipalities regardless of population, and by 20 points for residents of border regions or municipalities with a population of up to 25,000 inhabitants. The beneficiaries, however, will have the obligation to serve for at least 10 years, in the position to which they are appointed, and for 5 additional years in the services of the same Regional Unit in which the Municipality is located, of which they used the criterion of locality.

With another article, the decision to allocate PWD positions is issued at the latest within one month of the notification of the cabinet act approving the annual recruitment planning. The determination of the deadline was deemed necessary in order not to delay the further process of filling positions in the public sector since the distribution decision is a prerequisite for this.

In addition, in an effort to speed up the filling of thousands of vacancies in key public sector bodies, it is envisaged that the positions of the annual recruitment planning for the years 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be filled by the winners of the first pan-Hellenic ASEP written competition according to their score in the written examination and increments based on formal qualifications and locality.

It is also introduced the possibility in procedures with an estimated very high participation, such as that of teachers, that the order of ranking of equal candidates is determined based on a random number that the candidates will receive electronically through an open lottery software application based on the principle of randomness in order to the candidate with the lowest number is preferred. In this way, there will be no recourse to the public lottery, a process that requires time to prepare and conduct.

In addition, there is a disincentive for candidates who participate indiscriminately in recruitment processes without aiming for a specific position and when they succeed in an appointment they do not accept it or after a while they resign, resulting in the position remaining vacant even for six months until a replacement is found . Now, those who are appointed but do not accept the appointment or resign within 12 months will not be eligible for a new recruitment process for three years.

It also increases from 5 to 10 years the required period that must have passed since the appointment or hiring of a civil servant, in order to have the right to participate in a new procedure to fill positions of the same or lower category than the one in which he already serves.

The deadlines for submitting the supporting documents for appointment are reduced (from 20 to 15 days), the deadline for appointment or hiring from the deadline for submitting the supporting documents (from 30 to 20 days), while a time limit of three years is introduced for the replacement process in an announcement from runners-up , which notably creates an additional administrative burden and delay in the completion of staff recruitment procedures.

With another arrangement, the extraction of supporting documents from the ASEP candidate register is the responsibility of the candidate, as he decides from the supporting documents he has registered in the register which he wishes to submit depending on the announcement. In order to speed up the process and reduce the administrative burden of ASEP, it is stipulated that supporting documents registered in the candidate register are not checked again for their accuracy and authenticity. However, in the case of submitting false supporting documents, the candidate, in addition to being excluded from the current procedure, is also excluded from any subsequent procedure for filling positions for a period of five years.

Also, for the sake of speeding up the procedures, the entire process of filling fixed-term staff positions (IDOC), and not just the submission of supporting documents, will be conducted through the electronic platform of the Ministry of the Interior. The platform in question will be accessible to all those involved, namely the candidates, the ASEP and the competent bodies in the exercise of their powers.

Finally, in the individual interview for the recruitment of Special Scientific Staff and tenured staff, mandatory recording and transcription is introduced, in order to reduce the time taken to write the minutes of the interview.