Landing a job is never easy, but landing a foreign aid job with the European Union is really tough.
First of all, candidates must pass a public competition whose aim is not to fill a vacant post, but to create a reserve list of candidates from which EU institutions can recruit, when and if they need to.
Being successful in a competition doesn’t mean getting a job, though. According to a survey of the European Personnel Selection Office, only 11,000 of 300,000 applicants have passed one of more than 300 competitions to date and among them, 8,400 were hired.