Episode Two – Onboarding

Welcome to the second in our series of UK employment law bite-sized. Today we're going to be looking at onboarding employees. You've got your candidate, what do you need to do next, Kafeel?

So you need to make a offer of employment, and that can be either verbal or written. Many employers choose to provide a written offer letter, which sets out the key terms of employment, such as notice, holiday pay, working hours and salary. So a UK offer letter is noncontractually binding and would generally be superseded by an employment contract, but the offer letter provides an employee with some comfort prior to employment.

Yes. And just picking up on one aspect of an offer letter, which I think is quite useful for employers, is to make it conditional. So if you have any pre-employment checks that you want to carry out, background checks, for example, you should make the offer conditional on completion of those checks. Anything else on the check front?

So one of the key background checks to conduct is something called a right- to-work check. And you can do this in one of two ways. You can either do this manually by checking an employee's passport, or you can use the government's online service, and that's particularly important for employees who have settled status. It's important that you conduct those right-to-work checks prior to an employee starting work with you, because there are fines that could rack up quite significantly, up to 20,000 pounds per illegal employee. And also, you'd want to make sure that you keep a paper trail to minimize your legal and reputational risk.

So definitely not one to miss out on. Unfortunately, sometimes things change and you no longer need to hire somebody, in which case you are going to be looking at withdrawing the offer that you've made. Now, if the offer hasn't been accepted, then that's a simple exercise in notification, i.e., letting the person know that you no longer have a job for them. If, however, they have accepted the offer, and a binding contract (and we'll look at employment contracts in a minute) has formed, then you need to terminate that contract in accordance with its terms. And there will generally be a notice provision in there that will tell you how much notice you need to give to withdraw the offer by terminating the contract. I've mentioned employment contracts, Kafeel, tell us a bit more about those.

The employment contract, it's really your bible. It's designed to capture all terms and conditions of employment. From an employee's perspective, it captures key terms, such as notice, salary, holiday pay, pension, benefits. And from an employer's perspective, it captures key terms of employment, such as confidentiality, IP and post-termination restrictions. And those are particularly important in ensuring that you have the best business protection.

And one other thing about employment contracts we'd recommend is a probation period. So a period when both you and the employee can assess whether the job is right. The benefit of having a probation period is that you can have a shorter notice period, say one or two weeks, and in the probation period, as opposed to once probation period has been finished, where you're looking at perhaps one or three months for more senior employees. So you've onboarded your employee. Well done. Join us next time for performance management. See you soon.