Ms Fiona Tierney:

The point the Deputy raises around telling candidates that a panel is closed is an interesting one. Just to let the Deputy know, we do not recruit for commercial semi-State bodies like RTE so that would not have fallen within our remit at all. To be honest, with a panel that lasts for four years, if no appointment has been made from it and there is no really good reason to keep it open, there could be a wider field of candidates within four years or newly qualified people in the organisation who would by then be eligible to apply. It would be only fair to run another competition.

If I understood the Deputy correctly, he asked whether creating panels was best practice. In a situation in which it is difficult for client organisations to anticipate how many vacancies they will have over the course of 12 or 18 months, it is probably the most effective and efficient way of running competitions. There is a cost involved in filling every role and if it is known that there is likely to be a requirement to fill ten positions over 18 months, creating a panel of about 15 people is very effective. As I said, there is no guarantee that everybody will be appointed.

The Deputy is correct in his assessment. In the Public Appointments Service we handle so many contacts with such a large number of candidates that we are clearly dealing with the very many disappointed candidates who do not come through the process for one reason or another.

I will address the question of why we lose so many people through the process. Quite large numbers of candidates are applying for roles and given that we are just coming out of the moratorium, there is a pent-up demand. Very significant numbers of people applied for the Garda trainee competition and 28,000 people applied for the clerical officer competition in the Civil Service. Those competitions have attracted very large numbers of applicants. When it comes to graduate recruitment, we received perhaps 3,000 applications from people who want to join the Civil Service at administrative officer level. Those candidates are taken through a process of testing which includes testing in a supervised testing environment. Based on the number of jobs we will be required to fill in the next 12 to 18 months, we use very good predictive models to establish the number of people we would be required to interview to make a panel of 100 people. We ask how many would have to be interviewed and in order to interview that many people, how many people do we need to bring through to testing. That is how we work it. The main costs of our business are interviewing costs from putting together interview boards and organising testing. They are the main drivers of cost to our organisation.

The interview process involves merit and competency based interviews. We use a marking scheme which is agreed by the interview board in advance. Candidates can be marked out of ten or 20 for each competency which totals up to a certain number. There is generally a pass level set by the interview board with guidance from the Public Appointments Service for each particular competition. For the more senior level competitions, at principal officer level or equivalent across the Civil Service and public service, there are two rounds of interviews, rather than only one. For the general grades when we are dealing with larger volumes, we would have one competency based interview after which people would be placed on a panel in order of merit.

The Deputy asked about the Irish language. There are demands from clients to fill positions with people fluent in Irish. We refer to those people as functional linguists in Irish and English. In the last series of competitions for the Civil Service we administered the new process whereby instead of giving a standard percentage of marks to people who declared a competency in Irish we actually tested it. That has worked effectively to ensure we have a panel of bilingual people available for assignment. While a large number of people indicate on their application forms that they are bilingual and capable of transacting business in Irish, there is a significant fall-off once we try to process those people. There was a significant reduction in numbers for the Garda Síochána trainee, clerical officer and executive officer competitions. We have successfully put in place panels of Irish speakers for the Garda trainee competition and in the more recent clerical officer and executive officer competitions. We are currently working on that for assistant principal officer roles and we also have functional linguists at principal officer grade.