A rare chance for thousands of aspiring officials to secure jobs at the heart of the EU is turning into a race among member countries, with capitals scrambling to place their citizens in influential roles.

The launch of a new hiring competition to find the next generation of top EU officials marks the first time in seven years that general applicants — rather than, say, lawyers, HR personnel or finance experts — can apply for well-paid roles in the EU institutions. As a result, embassies and national governments are hatching plans to boost applicant numbers back home and going as far as paying for exam prep to increase their candidates’ chances.

Diplomats from six EU countries, granted anonymity to speak frankly, told POLITICO that they are seeing the contest, which pits more than 50,000 applicants against one another for as few as 1,900 jobs, as an opportunity to address underrepresentation and cement their grasp on the levers of power for decades to come.

“We have been preparing for almost seven years,” said Asia Riazantceva, coordinator for EU recruitment at the Swedish Council for Higher Education, a government agency. “Now we have waiting lists for our training sessions and we are booking extra ones … It’s cost-free for Swedish candidates — the Swedish government is paying.”

Applications for the hiring competition closed on Tuesday, with virtual exams overseen by the European Personnel Selection Office to follow on a date to be confirmed.

Successful candidates will be in line to apply for AD-5 grade jobs, paying around €6,000 to €7,000 a month. During the assessment stage that follows, nationality is taken into account as part of the hiring targets to ensure fair representation.

Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden are among the countries with disproportionately fewer EU staffers, according to Commission figures.

Italy, where pay has historically been low by EU standards, and Belgium, which hosts the bloc’s institutions, are traditionally among the best represented in the bloc’s administration.

“It’s not only that Swedes are underrepresented, but there are upcoming retirements that are decreasing the number of Swedes at the institutions,” said Riazantceva.

The Netherlands, for example, despite making up 3.9 percent of the EU’s population, only accounted for about 2 percent of candidates during the last hiring competition of this kind in 2019, according to the Commission. In response, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working to encourage applicants to join its “talent network” and providing training sessions and practice materials free of charge.

One diplomat from an underrepresented member country said that “geographical balance in the EU institutions is about legitimacy. Europe’s policies are stronger when shaped by talent from every corner of the Union,” adding that “citizens will only believe in Europe if they recognize themselves in its institutions.”

Poland has run social media campaigns to raise awareness of the competition at home and provided a six-hour training session earlier this month, covering how to ace the verbal, abstract and numerical reasoning tests. Ireland similarly has a strategy to boost its representation.

András Baneth, the founder of EU Training — a company that works with national governments to help their candidates — said the diplomatic scramble highlights a “contradiction” in the way the bloc works. “Formally speaking, civil servants, once they are hired, no longer represent … their home country — they need to be neutral and look at the European interest. But then … why the hell would so many national governments be so keen on helping their countrymen and women to get into these institutions?” 

Traditionally, embassies have kept a close eye on which of their citizens are in the most senior tier of officials, working to parachute allies of their national governments into jobs as heads of cabinet and directorate-generals. But the growing focus on the AD-5 competition marks an increasingly fierce fight for younger people in mid-level roles, who could have decades of service ahead of them in the institutions.

“Those informal channels, the perspective, ideas, culture and politics they might bring into the policymaking — [EU countries] consider that an important endeavor,” Baneth said.