Hong Kong youth who graduate in mainland to be enticed into civil service, says Civil Service chief
Authorities seek to attract Hong Kong students who graduated from the mainland to join the government as the number of civil servants leaving is on the rise, the Civil Service Bureau said on Wednesday.
According to government data, around 10,500 civil servants left the service in 2021/22, a new high in recent years.
Secretary for the Civil Service Ingrid Yeung Ho Poi-yan stated that the government's recruitment promotion aims not only for local university graduates but also for mainland and overseas graduates and the working population to serve the city and the community.
She said many departments have recently strengthened promotion and recruitment efforts for local students studying in the mainland. That included the recruitment activities conducted by the Police Force in Guangdong and Fujian in November and the one in Beijing and Wuhan this April. Other departments also plan to run recruitment works in the mainland.
According to the Basic Law, public servants must be permanent residents of the HKSAR. Yeung stressed that the non-local qualifications of the job applicants have to be assessed as comparable in standard to the academic entry requirements of the posts for local graduates.
She said over 200 qualification assessments had been conducted in the past three years before departments made the appointment offer to applicants holding a mainland institution's bachelor's degree.
Currently, the Civil Service Bureau conducts recruitment exams in seven cities outside Hong Kong (including Beijing, London, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney). It plans to include Shanghai as an additional examination venue to facilitate more candidates.
And the Bureau would consider whether it is necessary to arrange recruitment examinations in more mainland cities in the future based on actual circumstances, Yeung said.
When responding to the call for facilitating the more extensive use of the Chinese language in the civil service, Yeung said the Civil Service College had provided various Chinese and Putonghua training programs as well as e-learning resources for the civil servants.
Over the years, the use of Chinese within the government has been increasingly common, with more and more official documents directly drafted in Chinese, she added.
"We will continue our efforts in promoting the wider use of Chinese in the civil service through support services and training."