About European Commission / EPSO

The European Commission is the EU's politically independent executive arm. It is alone responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and it implements the decisions of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. EPSO is EU’s central recruitment department. Its core mission is to meet the EU institutions’ recruitment needs by selecting talented candidates through generalist and specialist competitions. In carrying out this goal, EPSO acts as a trusted matchmaker between the EU institutions and high performing professionals and graduates. It thus contributes to the building of the current and future European civil service.

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The challenge

“Help us investigate if the complex EU process for recruitment and selection of candidates can be supported by a market standard Applicant Tracking System”

EPSO aimed to pilot the Talent Acquisition platform of Cornerstone OnDemand for selection and recruiting of EU staff in 2019. Not an easy one. Selection procedures for EU bodies are extremely particular. After thorough testing and training candidates are added to a talent pool of preselected applicants. Hiring managers tap into these pools at the moment a vacancy occurs. On top of that very tight policies and procures for equality and candidate privacy apply. To map and operate this recruitment process on the recruiting solution of Cornerstone OnDemand, that’s where worldofwork™ came in.

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The solution

Recruitment specialists and solution consultants of worldofwork™ scoped down a subset of recruiting procedures and specific countries that EPSO is recruiting for. For this beta population the end-to-end recruitment process was automated, including single-sign-on for candidates, GDPR guidelines and technical integration with assessment engines. Goal was to collect solid findings from the project for the organization to decide on structural HR software architecture after the project. The Cornerstone cloud platform proved to offer great flexibility to support the most complex selection procedure in Europe. These pilot findings helps the executive counsel and IT department of EU to progress further with the move towards cloud computing.