Incentives and selection in public employment

The effectiveness of the Public administration depends on its ability to attract and select skilled individuals and encourage them to exert effort. Recruitment and career policies affect the composition of the pool of applicants who take part in the selection procedures. The process by which these are managed determines who, among the self-selected candidates, accesses public employment and, consequently, the distribution of individual characteristics across the public workforce. Such distribution, in turn, sets the environment in which incentive schemes are designed. This work provides an overview of the interactions among these dimensions and studies some critical aspects of the Italian context: the decreased selectivity and increased instability in recruitment, pay and career policies that insufficiently compensate education and skills, rigid selection procedures slanted towards generalist knowledge, the uniform application of incentive schemes to the entire Public administration without structural rearrangements. Furthermore, this work provides a critical comparison between these considerations and the direction taken by the recent reforms of public employment.