Avoid, avoid, avoid! For EU institution consultancy jobs, look at other companies/service providers
Pros
What I really liked of this company of money making lawyers is: they do NOT make any effort to hide who they are and what their way of conducting business is, which is low technical competence, make money, and use legal means to make money if they do not make money. I was naive thinking that they were offering interview contracts and employment contracts to cover themselves from the similar legal clauses that their EU institutional costumer require from them. Indeed, EU agencies do not pose all the legal conditions they require and very very seldomly they ever enforce them (please read the cons too). What a wonderful idea to intimidated a candidate to accept the job because of a 1000 Euro penalty, when the candidate does not feel it is the right opportunity. I believe they impose this to 'show' they understand the customer needs, also the temporal one, and they are not wasting the customer's time. What a genius idea! So, don't do like me thinking it is okay to accept all these conditions if their customers enforces the same conditions on them. First, it is not true that they need to satisfy all those legal conditions, second as pre-screening company, they should take responsibilities in the consultant/job matching at least, and in this way they just pass all the risk on you.
Cons
- They offer contracts with clauses considered illegal from the Luxembourg labour law (they offer Luxembourger contracts regardless of the job location). One illegal clause is the non-competition condition, which forbids you to work for any of their customer within 12 months of the end of your contract. This is illegal, they have been warned, but they still keep intimidating people with these conditions. - Bullying culture starting from the HR - their IT managers are sneaky, but not bullying at least - High staff turnover (at least in the HR). In other areas, people get stuck and it becomes more difficult to change as, once you work for European Dynamics: you have much lower leverage! Talking with Trasys, IRIS, and all the others, the first thing they will tell the ED story and the trail of people who are trying to leave this company) - Among European Dynamics consultants for EU institutions, I have noticed an above average level of stress and job dissatisfaction - They don't have a clue of what their customer needs (this is a company of money making lawyers, not a real IT consulting company), and they (in my experience) do not have good relationship with their customers. This can have a number of consequences, and in particular you can be seriously risk to be squeeze by a bullying company that holds you for the trough with financially enforceable contract and an angry customer. These are not words, but real facts. Search in internet (e.g. web site Lexology or Google) about European Dynamics case vs European Institutions, you will find almost an endless list of cases that in 95% of the times ended in favour of the European Institutions. What are the consequences of this? For EU institution, this company is causing many trouble: unless and unneeded work load to deal with the legal cases, delays in projects and public procurement, high turnover of the consultants, etc. For the records, they won the 5% of the previous cases not for the main European Dynamics claims, but because indeed the institution did not follow the public procedure literally. - Please be aware that you might indeed (as I had to) require legal services to support you in the resolution of any issue with European Dynamics - they have a well trained team of lawyers.
