Review of the MFA’s support to international recruitment

The overall purpose of this review was to gain a clear picture of international recruitments supported by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA). This allows the MFA to further develop this tool as a strategic element for advancing Finland’s development, trade, foreign and security policies.

More specifically, the objectives of this review were:

• To synthesise the goals and the rationale for international recruitments;
• To describe how international recruitments and secondments are managed at the MFA;
• To evaluate the degree to which the JPO, UNV and SARC programmes have contributed to their stated objectives; and
• To formulate evidence-based conclusions and recommendations – including alternative options – for more strategic and effective management of senior-level international recruitments, secondments and the JPO, UNV and SARC programmes in the future.

In terms of scope, the MFA’s support to different international career paths (EU, UN, development banks, JPOs, UNVs, SARCs) as well as secondments administered and/or supported by MFA were included in this review. The temporal scope of the evaluation covered international recruitment activities from 2018 to 2022 but also made use of earlier evaluations on the subject.