Many of us use corporate computers for tasks unrelated to work, such as consulting our personal e-mail accounts, booking airplane tickets, making personal appointments, browsing the internet, etc. In a similar vein, many candidates could expect to be able to use their corporate computers to sit the EPSO’s online selection tests [1].

These tests require a third party – an external contractor – to take control of your computer while you take the test. Among other things, this prevents candidates from browsing the internet or running applications outside the remit of the tests.

In the digital environment of EPSO’s institutional clients, there are multiple layers of IT security applied to corporate computers, including laptops. These include, mainly: network firewalls & other types of access restrictions.

In order to enable online selection tests to run on a corporate computer – including those made available to staff of EPSO’s institutional clients (e.g. the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the EU and others) – multiple security controls would have to be disabled, relaxed or changed by an authorised administrator.

This could include changing firewall rules or local permissions on your corporate computer and on your Windows registry settings.

All these changes could present known and unknown risks for corporate stakeholders, some of them potentially serious.