Lobbying experiences

It is interesting that the 2014 report 'Evaluation of the European Commission's Traineeship Programme' laments lobbying:

Improving the Blue Book could reduce the current level of lobbying that many applicants and officials consider unfair, and that the evaluation showed to be wasteful.

whilst acknowledging that recruiters actively use it:

...advisers were still left unaware [from the Blue Book details] of candidates’ specific skills and competences .This led many interviewees [the EC recruiters] to respond to lobbying from would-be trainees in order to save time, even as they acknowledge the practice was unfair and sub-ideal.

The report acknowledges that on issue of the Blue Book there is:

a frantic scramble to select the most suitable candidates...

The above strongly suggests that any applicant who does not lobby is at a very serious disadvantage even though the Commission would prefer it doesn't happen.

I would be really interested to hear of lobbying experiences and I suspect this could be useful to many others. Of particular interest, but not exclusively so, would be:

• Personal views on the lobbying process
  
• Positive reactions as a result of lobbying
  
• Negative reactions as a result of lobbying
  
• Interviews clearly resulting directly from lobbying
  
• Offers clearly resulting directly from lobbying
  
• Offers without lobbying
  

Nice of you to point out the Evaluation report, I wasn't aware of it, seems like an interesting read. The forms have probably changed somewhat from 2014 to 2017 (for example now it was again possible to select DG's, not just policy areas), so that's something to take into account.

From the way you structured your post it seems that you are doing a research project or writing an academic paper on the matter? Explicitly stating or disclosing this might get you more (informative) answers and is also a transparent way of conducting research.

You can probably get some interesting info from the threads in previous years as well. Best of luck!

ansich

Many thanks for your reply.

I'm writing an article on the Commission internship application process but may expand it into something more. You're right, it would have been sensible to have mentioned this. It may be a bit presumptuous to hope that applicants will spend their time posting their experiences for my benefit, but I am hoping they may share their experiences for the benefit of future applicants. One thing that seems only too apparent is the overall lack of information; the difficulty in tracking down the evaluation report is a case in point; easily finding the number of applicants, by country, for each intake, is another. The information is there, or seems to be there, but who knows what analysis one has missed!

I'm glad that the Evaluation report is of interest.

If you're applying yourself, I wish you every success.

You do not get to see the evaluation report of your application (see March 2017 session). You are either accepted or rejected and told how many points below threshold you were.

Application statistics, broken down by countries, are available for each semester and the applicants can see them by logging in (at the Stages homepage you can see an Application statistics link at the bottom of the screen).

You can probably see those statistics if you make/have a regular EU-Login account as well? Otherwise it would be best to contact the Traineeship office directly and request the relevant information. I am sure that they can provide you this data (especially if you are a researcher) and perhaps more in-depth information as well, as those statistics are completely unproblematic with respect to privacy concerns.