Episode One – Recruitment

Welcome to our employment law bite-size series where we'll be telling you everything you need to know about the points in the employment life cycle that really matter. And we're going to start today by looking at recruitment. Assuming you've got a role that you need to fill, where do you go from there?

Job description. So you need a good job description that sets out the duties, the responsibilities, reporting line details like part-time, fixed-term, full-time, hybrid, homeworking, whatever. Anything that a candidate is going to want to know. Bear in mind, you need to be very careful to identify only the necessary requirements. So things like experience. Think about what are the skills, what are the expertise and experience behind that?

Then you need to advertise the role. You'll probably do it internally and externally, and remember, if you're going to use a recruitment agent, you need to have terms and conditions in place with the agency that you're comfortable are fitting for the process that you want to follow. You also want a standard application form or process, so you're getting the same information from all of the many applicants hopefully you will get. Once you've got your applicants, what do you do then?

Over to shortlisting. So you've got your list of applicants. How do you whittle that down? Well, what we're finding is that increasingly companies are using AI-driven tools to do this. So resume scanners and other such tools. Great, they're very cost-efficient, they're very quick, but just bear in mind that there are some risks, as with any AI. So a risk of bias, not knowing precisely what the decision was based on. So use, but use with care.

And then it's interviewing the candidates that you've shortlisted. All interviewers should be prepared and have some training so that they know what to ask, but more importantly, what not to ask. Questions around protected characteristics or someone's personal circumstances are certainly off limits. We don't want any questions around someone's plans for marriage, for example, or child care. It makes sense to have more than one person as the interviewer, perhaps a panel or more than one interview. And it also makes sense to ask all candidates the same standard set of questions, so there is fairness across the board. What's next after that, Ann?

Just two things. Two bits of paperwork actually. First is privacy notice. So you'll be collecting personal data of the candidates that you're interviewing. You need to give them, as you would with any individual whose personal data you collect, a privacy notice, setting out what you're collecting, for what purpose, how long you'll keep it, who you're going to give it to, etc. Alongside that, if you're hiring somebody technical, for example, you might be disclosing confidential information during the course of the interview process, in which case we'd strongly recommend entering into a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, with them just to protect your confidential information.

One final point in this whistle-stop tour of recruitment is that if a candidate who is disabled makes requests for reasonable adjustments, or reasonable accommodations as they're known in the US, then you need to consider those and respond to them as appropriate. And with that, hopefully you'll have the perfect candidate on board for your role. So join us next time where we'll be looking at that onboarding process. See you soon.