Indian Civil Service exams were introduced by British East India company. I was under the impression that it was original idea of British East India company but the fact is British East India company copied the idea from Chinese imperial examinations. The British government adopted a similar testing system for screening civil servants in 1855. Other European nations, such as France and Germany, followed suit.
Chinese imperial examinations were a civil service examination system in Imperial China to select candidates for the state bureaucracy. Although there were imperial exams as early as the Han dynasty, the system became widely utilized as the major path to office only in the mid-Tang dynasty, and remained so until its abolition in 1905.