CAPABLE MEN SCARCE.

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 13826, 22 July 1915, Page 3

CAPABLE MEN SCARCE.

(From ovv. own Correspondent.)

Wellington, July 21. Public servants with ability and ambition will take heart on reading the following emphatic declaration of the Public Service Commissioners in their annual report. :■—"They feel that it is due to tho. officers themselves to state in plain language that . difficulties are being experienced in finding capable officers to fill positions of responsibility, particularly officers with initiative and possessing a knowledge of higher accounts work, together with capacity to supervise a"d control." The efficiency cf the' Public Service should be of the highest standard, they say elsewhere, and while this is the goal looked for by the commissioners a certain disappointment must be expressed at the comparatively slow rate of improvement in some departments. It is, however, difficult, when the existing inefficiency is the result <rf thirty or forty years' entanglement in ,the meshes of unbusinesslike methods, to produce greater efficiency without vexatioiis delays, but it is satisfactory to record that while some departments passively or actively resist improvements to increased .efficiency, ethers show a sustained endeavour to bring their departments into, the best condition. Even at the risk of reiteration, the« Commissioners again stress the necessity for business methods, which are nothing more than methods which give a maximum result at a minimum of cost.