Eurocrats have been left red-faced after a blunder in the EU’s recruitment process forced nearly 10,000 would-be civil servants to retake their entry exams — thanks to a basic technical error. The fiasco centres on the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO), the agency responsible for running assessments for high-level EU jobs.
Candidates who sat an online exam last month, hoping to become translators for EU institutions, were informed on Thursday that their results had been voided due to a fault in the testing system. One candidate wrote on Facebook: “This is insane. So those of us who are able to follow instructions (one would think a sought-after quality for an EU official) need to go through the whole thing again, get days off at work etc? How to be unfair to absolutely everyone at once lol.”
In total, 9,663 applicants were affected. According to an email sent by EPSO, a “set-up defect” in the multiple-choice test — designed by an external contractor — allowed candidates to select more than one answer despite instructions clearly stating there was only one correct option.
One candidate wrote: “How can EPSO be such a failure every single time?”
Another said: “I was actually talking to a friend of mine who got this notification and is about to give birth so probably won’t be in the best shape in May.”
EPSO has apologised “on behalf of its external contractor” but insisted the exams must be rerun next month. The announcement has sparked anger among applicants who say they spent weeks preparing for the test.
One candidate wrote: “I don’t have kids, I’m not studying, I just have a tiring job, which made it difficult to get back to revise maths in the evening. But for people who have kids and families and very demanding jobs, it’s absolutely horrible to go back home and study.”
Another candidate was more blunt: “All I can say is EPSO are utterly incompetent and not fit for purpose. They couldn’t organise a p***-up in a brewery.”
The botched test was intended to assess language skills, verbal reasoning, and numeracy across eight official EU languages. After repeated controversies in recent years, the fallout has again raised questions about EPSO’s reliability.
In 2023, the office was accused of breaching EU law by offering tests solely in English. More recently, staff unions have demanded the annulment of internal promotion exams, citing sloppy formatting and incoherent questions.
As Politico reported, the U4U union sent a message to Commission HR chief Stephen Quest, saying, “Yet another fiasco cannot go unanswered.”
EPSO said the current mess was partly due to the rollout of a new IT tool, and confirmed that “some controlled use of AI” had been used to compile the pool of questions used in the test.
One candidate summed it up: “This organisation is allergic to competence. Every year, something goes wrong.”
The European Commission, led by President Ursula von der Leyen, has yet to confirm whether the external contractor will face financial penalties.