Bureaucrats hopefuls get mystical in job search

The lengths to which civil servant hopefuls will go to pass the recruitment test know no bounds, including spiritual.

In Surabaya, several civil servant applicants said they had sought hocus-pocus blessings from witch doctors for help passing the test.

"A couple of days ago I visited a witch doctor in Sidoarjo. After a consultation, he asked me to give him the pencil I was going to use during the test," one applicant said.

He said the witch doctor engraved a mantra on the pencil to help him guess the right answers

Another applicant said he was confident about beating out thousands of other applicants with the help of a witch doctor.

After a recent consultation, he was given a bottle of sugar water and told to drink it several hours before taking the test. Apparently this will help him correctly answer the questions.

These two and many other applicants resorted to the mystical arts for an edge in the fierce competition to be accepted into the civil service.

In Surabaya alone, almost 17,000 people applied on Wednesday for just 150 positions in the East Java provincial and Surabaya city administrations.

"We are just hoping for a little luck (with the witch doctors). Look at the competition. A person like me without connections or money for bribes has little hope of being accepted," one applicant said. -- Antara