SCS speaks on civil service recruitment (with photos/video)

     Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for the Civil Service, Mrs Ingrid Yeung, at a media session on civil service recruitment at the Central Government Offices this morning (June 1):
 
Reporter: Secretary, two questions. So you mentioned apart from meeting all the conditions, such as obtaining the degree within a certain period of time, students with advanced conditional offers can then join the Government immediately upon graduation. Can you explain further on what other conditions or qualifications the candidates need to obtain and need to be fulfilled? The second question is how likely do you think the new scheme can entice candidates from the private market given that the recruitment process is similar to the existing one?
 
Secretary for the Civil Service: For the conditions to be imposed on our conditional offer, it really differs from job to job. Different jobs have different requirements. So I can't really give you an exhaustive list here. But for example, this is just an example, for some disciplined service jobs, they would have a fitness requirement. Of course, in the recruitment process, the candidates would have to satisfy the physical fitness requirement, but since there is a considerable period of time between the recruitment and the actual reporting for duty, the disciplined services may require the candidate to be able to satisfy the physical fitness requirement again when they are ready for duty, so this may be one of the conditions. And also for all civil service jobs, we require civil servants to have a high degree of integrity and to have good conduct. So students who have been given a conditional offer have to satisfy the condition that their integrity and conduct remain good for the time between their acceptance of offer and the actual reporting of duty. And of course, as a civil servant, when they have become a civil servant, they have to maintain a high standard of integrity as well.
 
     For your second question, this initiative is not really to snatch people from the private sector, but to give greater certainty to those university undergraduates who before their final year have already made up their minds that they want a career in the civil service. It's to give greater certainty for them. It's to enable them to prepare themselves better for civil service jobs. And this is also a measure that has been in practice in the private sector for long. So we are simply catching up. We are simply doing what the private sector is doing as well. It's not really to target a particular source, but we are trying to give more certainty to young people who want to join the civil service.
 
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)