Israel’s Civil Service Commission plans to transfer management of senior recruitment tenders to government ministries, a change affecting about 2,300 senior public-sector jobs, Calcalist reported. Today, a ministry that wants to fill a senior post must go through the commission’s recruitment division, which runs the tender process end to end, from publishing the job notice and handling resumes to conducting interviews.
Under the new arrangement, ministries themselves will be able to operate the tenders, while the commission will shift to oversight and control. The report says this would let, for example, the Agriculture Ministry recruit its own new deputy director general without relying on the commission to run the process.
The move is the first structural reform by the new Civil Service Commissioner, Doron Cohen, and signals his intention to continue the long-standing transfer of authority from the commission to ministries. Cohen was a member of the 2013 committee on reforming human-capital management in the civil service, and although the current proposal was not spelled out in that report, the question of decentralizing powers has been debated for decades, at least since the 1989 Kobersky Report. Ministries have long complained that the commission is to blame when senior positions are not put out to tender.
The change is limited, not revolutionary. The commission will still approve job descriptions, and any changes to a post’s definition will still require its consent. A commission representative will also remain on the final selection panel, and the commission will retain authority to intervene if procedural fairness is in doubt.
The new step also follows a pilot launched by the Finance Ministry and the commission before the departure of former commissioner Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz. That pilot covered entry-level hiring in five ministries. Officials told Calcalist that a pilot for this reform was considered too, but because the changes are reversible and the commission’s oversight remains strong, they decided to implement it across all ministries at once. Success will be measured by faster hiring and ministry satisfaction, while also ensuring the system is not abused for favoritism or political appointments. The commission says it can roll back the reform if problems emerge.
