11 July 2016
Some EPO people phone me, to talk about recruitment into the IP professions. I tell them about IP Inclusive, which has spawned another brand name Careers in Ideas to raise awareness of jobs in IP. I tell them we would like to include information about becoming an EPO examiner, since this is also a Career in Ideas even if you do spend most of your time denouncing those ideas for lack of inventive step. I do not tell them about the poster that is being redesigned by patent attorneys, not yet anyway. The EPO people say: This is great! We are keen to recruit more examiners. We are particularly keen to recruit English examiners. We will even teach the English examiners a third language for free, and help them learn their second language properly, also for free, if it encourages them to join us. Although they would never admit it, I suspect the EPO have ever such a slight bias towards the English language, due to most of their international customers – not to mention most of what you can find on Google® – using it. They tell me how lovely it is being an EPO examiner, and what a good employer the EPO is, with an equal opportunities policy and a keen interest in diversity and inclusivity. Everyone politely skirts around the fact that EPO employees have been striking for months, that they spend their generous lunch breaks sabotaging their own President’s bicyclette, and that all of them nurture a probably not unconscious bias against Frenchmen with Italian-sounding surnames.
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