Since 1924, anybody who needs to develop into an American diplomat has needed to cross a rigorous written examination, the Foreign Service Officer Test. Now the State Department says it needs to “modernize its hiring process to create a more inclusive workforce that hires the best talent and represents America’s rich diversity.” While candidates will nonetheless take the examination, beginning in June there’ll now not be a cross/fail rating, so candidates who rating poorly should be employed.
The examination has lengthy been considered troublesome. In a 1995 interview, veteran diplomat
John Edgar Williams
recalled that in 1953 the take a look at took 3½ days and lined all the things from astronomy to zoology. When I began taking it within the Nineties, it took three hours and consisted of a job information part together with the sort of normal questions contestants reply on “Jeopardy!,” an English grammar and utilization part, and an essay, which wasn’t graded except you met the cut-off rating. In a typical 12 months, 10,000 to twenty,000 individuals take the examination and a couple of% to three% of these are employed. The take a look at expires after 18 months; I handed a number of instances earlier than I used to be provided a job in 2001.
The State Department made modifications to the take a look at in 1989, in response to a long time of litigation by feminine candidates, and in 2006 after
George Staples,
then director normal of the Foreign Service, known as for it to be scrapped for its unfavorable impact on minority hiring. Female illustration has elevated to 42%, however the diplomatic corps remains to be 6% black and seven% Hispanic.
A spokesman says the State Department is shifting towards a “more holistic” hiring method that may “result in a more qualified pool of applicants.” But provided that purposes already vastly outnumber out there jobs, why the crucial to contemplate candidates who flunk the examination? The spokesman mentioned the division believes schooling and work expertise are higher predictors of job efficiency than the examination. Perhaps, however the examination and the cutoff rating inject a component of benefit and transparency right into a byzantine hiring course of that includes more-subjective components, together with an oral evaluation and private essays. And the diplomatic corps is already full of people that handed the take a look at and have spectacular résumés.
The American Foreign Service Association, the union representing profession diplomats and consular officers, issued an announcement condemning the transfer as “against both the letter and the spirit of many commitments made by this administration to its public servants” and expressing concern “that these unilateral changes risk being seen as excessively subjective and subject to partisan influence.”
The examination was created by the Rogers Act, which abolished the spoils system and remodeled the Foreign Service into an expert group with hiring and promotions based mostly on benefit. Nearly a century later, the State Department believes it wants the flexibleness to rent candidates who can’t cross the examination to “modernize American diplomacy and win the competition for talent.” Let’s hope that doesn’t translate into a brand new sort of patronage.
Mr. Seminara is a former diplomat and writer of “Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed & the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth.”
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Appeared within the May 3, 2022, print version as ‘In Defense of the Foreign Service Test.’
Source: www.wsj.com”