DESA's STAFF SPEAK-UP: - PROMOTION AND RECRUITMENT OF PERSONNEL

A. Promotion and recruitment of personnel (Summary of the issue raised by DESA Staff)

• Several staff members stressed that current rules and practices discourage promotion based on merit and favors a more bureaucratic approach based on seniority and the fulfillment of mobility requirements. Such rules and practices also encourage short-term solutions (e.g. hiring of consultants) and are prone to abuse by managers (e.g. hiring persons they favor).

• It was pointed out that in order to strengthen DESA role and capacities it was necessary to encourage staff performance through a proper system of incentives/rewards. The main criteria for staff promotion should remain the quality of contribution and other qualifications such as leadership and management skills. Recruitment of external candidates should be weighed against the need to promote and consolidate performance of internal staff as the backbone of the Organization's workforce.

• In general a strong feeling of lack of trust and frustration concerning how decisions are made on recruitment/promotion emerged from staff comments.

• There is a common perception that individuals selected for posts are not always the best qualified. Staff members believe that qualifications, ability to perform assigned duties, contributions made, education, experience and suitability for the job, should be the most important indicators. However, respondents felt that merit may not always be used as the main selection criteria and promotions. Likewise managerial posts are not based on qualifications such as leadership and management skills. Staff perceive that individuals may instead be recruited/promoted based on their connections and their nationalities.

• The current Central Review Board (CRB) system does not provide sufficient checks and balances, as its role is restrictive and limited. As a result, on the one hand, managerial prerogatives appear to have been granted without formal, systematic oversight. This situation allows managers to abuse their prerogatives and to select and promote staff based on their own perceived and often short-term interest, versus the long-run broader interest of the Organization.

• On the other hand, these prerogatives also create conflict over appointment/promotion choices between different managerial levels. In some Divisions, it was reported that the decentralized recruitment has not been fully implemented and decisions on recruitment are widely imposed by the head of the Department.

• Moreover, a serious limitation of the Galaxy system is its inability to
separate recruitments (based on finding the best qualified person for the job) from promotions (assessing if individuals merit a promotion and new responsibilities). Hence, a great number of the posts advertised are not really open but are destined to promotions. This results in a significant waste of resources and time from administrative offices, substantive offices and applying candidates. It also creates delays in the efficient management of staff and posts and undermines the importance of performance. Thus the promotion process becomes inadequate as panels do not assess the candidates' past performance (whether they have done enough to deserve the promotion) but only compare them against other candidates.

• In addition to the above dysfunctions, the selection process is considered to take too long - often exceeding the 6-month period allowed for filling vacant positions.

• Against this backdrop, the Executive Office (EO) is perceived to favour the approval of consultancies over the creation of extra staff positions and to have a tendency to approve consultancies without requesting an assessment of alternative work redistribution options among existing staff.