Gov’t to headhunt for best college achievers — minister

AMMAN – The Ministry of Public Sector Development is preparing plans to attract top best achieving university students in certain fields to work for government agencies. 

Minister of Public Sector Development Khleef Al Khawaldeh said Sunday that the ministry will be launching an initiative to gather the highest performing graduates of public universities in a forum to benefit from their "innovative" ideas and to encourage them to work at government agencies.

The minister told The Jordan Times that a gathering for top-rated students who graduated over the past years will be held in the near future, adding that the forum will include discussions and brainstorming sessions on how to develop the quality of services offered by the government sector.

This kind of students who would like to serve at government agencies will be offered the opportunity to be recruited, he said.  

The ministry will contact universities in the coming days to provide the ministry with data of highest performing students in the last five years, adding the fields targeted in the first phase of the project will be engineering, business administration and information technology.  

“The more we inject government institutions with excelling students the more we strengthen the performance of the public sector,” Khawaldeh said. 

The main goal of the programme is to boost innovation and to adopt the strategy of headhunting for efficient people to work at public agencies, he said. 

For example, he said, if a ministry or a government department is seeking to recruit people, a database of excelling students would enable it to pick appropriate candidates. 

Khawaldeh indicated that the ministry is also working on amending regulations for hiring at the government that may allow exceptions for top-rated students at public universities to be recruited directly by the government once they graduate. 

Commenting on the plan, Ali Mistarihi, a professor of public administration at Yarmouk University, described the initiative as a “good effort”, adding that talented students who may have the opportunity to work for the government should be equipped with a creative environment and incentives to continue excelling at work. 

They should also be given the opportunity to advance further up the career ladder and be provided that all what it takes to perform challenging duties, he noted. 

The current bureaucratic system at the public sector does not encourage innovation at the workplace, Mistarihi said.