bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, p. 21
As more than 4,000 Canadians sat down across the country and in Canadian consulates and embassies in various parts of the world on October 25, to write the foreign service exam, Bill Bottomley could heave a well-deserved sigh of relief.
Bottomley, head of recruitment, employment and appraisal programs for External Affairs, has devoted a large part of the past two years to thoroughly revising the department’s selection process.
“It was a good selection process overall,” he says, “but I wanted to see if it could be improved upon to better meet the department’s needs.
Bottomley canvassed a wide range of opinion in government and in the private sector for new ideas and journeyed to Washington for a closer look at the State Department’s hiring practices. The raw material gathered in this way was worked over and fleshed out by a committee drawn from all four streams, and its recommendations approved by management committee.
The result is a beefed-up recruitment process with several innovations. Gone is the old staple, a three-hour exam composed of 100 multiple choice knowledge questions, 35 judgment questions and a precis. In its place is a two-hour 150 question multiple choice exam made up of general knowledge questions and stream-specific knowledge questions arranged in random order.
Gone too is the screening mechanism by which selection teams would examine the résumés of the 1,000 highest-scoring applicants in order to decide who should be invited to interviews. This year interviews will be offered only to the 240 candidates with the best exam scores, and each candidate will have only one interview instead of two, as was commonly the case in previous years. Rather than returning for a second interview, aspiring foreign service officers will spend an entire day with their selection team. Following a morning interview that may last as long as two hours, they will be asked to write a short essay on a topic of departmental interest. Role-playing has been separated from the interview, and will instead take the form of an afternoon simulation in which up to six candidates state positions and negotiate with one another face to face.
Following the interviews, the department will check references, especially work references when they are available, and rate them. As a final step, scores will be calculated for education, experience and extracurricular activities based on the information contained in the applicant’s résumé. Appropriately weighted scores for all the components will then be added together to prepare short lists of eligible candidates in each stream.
Bottomley acknowledges that new processes such as this one sometimes contain bugs that need to be ironed out, but he says the department will make corrections as needed in an ongoing process of fine tuning.
“It is not a panacea, “he says, “but it may help to eliminate anyone who is really not cut out for the foreign service before problems develop in the probationary year”
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1986) — Winter 1986 // Hiver 1986, p. 21. Read the rest of this issue →
