The Ministry of the Interior aims to greatly speed up the time of issuing the results for the announcements through ASEP, as the time that elapses from the issuance of each announcement to the appointment of the successful candidates exceeds in some cases even two years, causing major problems of dysfunction in public institutions .
Controls
Despite the fact that the applications for participation in the ASEP announcements are submitted electronically, the major delay lies in the process of checking the supporting documents, especially in the cases of announcements with a large number of candidates. The need now for a faster development of the procedures has become imperative, as there are thousands of pending recruitments scheduled for the previous and current year, while in a few days the approval of the annual recruitment planning for 2025 is expected.
The case of Health
The most typical case is that of Health, for which more than 6,500 permanent positions have been approved for this year in institutions such as hospitals, EKAB, Health Centers, while at the same time another 4,000 positions are pending from 2023 and 2022. And while the issue of understaffing of hospitals and health institutions is major for the orderly operation of health structures, no appointment has been made to date neither from the 2024 announcements nor from the older ones either.
According to the president of ASEP, the extra scoring of candidates in the said competitions is the problem that greatly delays the process of processing the files of the candidates, especially in the DE and HR categories where there are too many candidates. According to information, the Ministry of Interior is working on a scenario according to which the new recruitments pending for the Ministry of Health will be filled from the pool of the written competition in order to speed up the filling of vacancies in nursing institutions.
In more detail, there are three main interventions included in the bill in order to greatly speed up the recruitment and appointment of candidates.
Interfacing registers and digital controls
1 A digital mailbox will be created for each candidate and the supporting documents will be automatically drawn from all the digital registers of the State (gov.gr, e-efka, ptyxia.gov.gr). The need for digital interconnection of the registers is made more evident by the fact that an ASEP employee can process only 10 applications per day, while an average ASEP competition can reach 70,000 applications.
With the new electronic application of the box, each candidate will now log in with Taxinet codes to submit his application for the announcement, through which he will authorize the system to search from gov.gr for all the relevant information and/or the scoring criteria, such as certificates for three children, multiple children and the disabled.
The electronic collection of certificates will fatally involve all the subsequent stages of the competitions, as the verification of the qualifications will be done digitally, i.e. automatically, reducing the time for objections to the results.
In this way, ASEP checks will be uncongested, as many data on the candidates’ qualifications will be collected digitally, faster results will be issued with fewer objections, while the process of filling in the form by the candidates will be simplified and the validity of the qualifications at the application stage and not at the appointment stage.
Digital contest
2 For those cases where a public service needs staff immediately, a pool of successful candidates will be created which will always be available, from which the ASEP will be able at any time to draw and appoint someone from the registered tables, depending on the needs . This was also the reasoning behind the written pan-Hellenic competition held in March 2023.
According to information, the aim of the ministry is to strengthen the model of the competition, not with the procedures that applied in the first competition, but with changes that will include examination of the candidate through a digital platform, installed in special examination centers.
Candidates will be examined in groups, so that there is no overcrowding, and the grading of the examination will be done automatically, so that at the end the candidate will immediately know the result of his performance and the process of correcting the papers by ASEP will be completely bypassed. In fact, the ministry’s thoughts are to include in this process more specialties than those that exist today in order to increase the pool of candidates and cover more needs of public bodies.
Fast position acceptance
3 Changes will also occur in the recruitment process, which now takes up to six months for successful applicants. The fact, in fact, that many candidates had been appointed but might accept the position following one semester blocked the whole system, because many of the newly appointed simultaneously chose another position from the results of previous announcements, with ASEP always looking for runners-up .
In fact, the ministry is considering the possibility of there being a kind of “penalty” in case of non-acceptance of the appointment, which would provide for the exclusion of each candidate from future ASEP competitions.
Locality enhancement
+1 Finally, the new bill will include the strengthening of locality in positions that open up in mountainous and island municipalities, in implementation of the constitutional obligation to protect these areas, with a fifteen-year residence obligation and with the aim of supporting the permanent residence of residents of medium-sized municipalities and other areas of the territory, beyond border and critical areas.
According to the Minister of the Interior Th. Livanio, the bill will be submitted in the coming weeks. “ASEP closes 30 years of operation. What we want is to give him the tools to do the procedures faster”, notes the minister.
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