Ms De Leeuw, successor in the post to Peruvian lothario Fernand Servan, is a "skilled enchantress who surrounded herself with a few incompetent staff at P5 level" while one senior staffer incompatibly combines the posts of Staff Relations Officer with Head of Recruitment, according to a whistleblower.  

 

  Two years after the appointment of the new HR supremo the whistleblower charges that she "has not yet managed to develop and implement the new recruitment guidelines, not yet managed to develop the guidelines on development of staff, not done anything on teleworking ... she is truly leading by example by spending long periods in Belgium at her home while she asks all the staff to work in presence ..."

 

 Under the current reign the HR department has hired in addition "many unskilled people from other agencies to please friends and former UN colleagues. The human resources budget with the hiring of all these consultants is now collapsing."

 

 "The DG now refuses to have direct contact with her and has marginalized her by asking DDR Thomas to monitor her performance on a daily basis ... " 

 

  Among hirings that have raised eyebrows at FAO headqurters is the employment of "change management" expert and travel blogger Bronte Jackson, at a reputed daily fee of dlrs 500 a day, according to the source. 

 

 A veteran FAO watcher commented that "It's outrageous that she makes that kind of money from FAO - especially since they are so stingy money-wise with their consultants.  (Editors, for example, are only paid  USD 300 a day to rewrite poorly written documents by non-native speakers - sometimes from scratch)."

 

 "I attended a 'Change Management' retreat run by Bronte.  She asked us questions like 'what did you want to be when you grew up?'  It was basically a two day paid holiday from the office with free breakfast and lunch and her asking a bunch of inane questions couched as 'team-building exercises.'"

   

 The seasoned observer added that "I have worked for five different UN organizations and none of them has an HR department as bureaucratic or as antiquated as FAO.  It can take almost a month of filling out forms and test-taking (the UN's BSAFE - which discusses what to do when one happens upon a land mine) for an at-home 'editor's contract.'  UNHCR, on the other hand, has future staff take exams regarding corruption and ethics."

 

 "The UN should standardise all of their hiring processes - send candidates to a clearinghouse where all potential employees fill out the same form, pass the same tests and are processed the same way - it would save the organisations a tonne of money."

"But this idea will never happen because HR departments (like FAO's) have their little empires - with only a favoured few."  

  jf