Recruitment & The New Employment Rights Bill

Under the Government’s new proposals, a company or organisation may only have the probation period (up to a maximum of  9 months proposed) to decide whether the employee is the right fit for their role.

After this point, managing an employee out of your organisation will become much harder.

The more preparation you do for any new changes to Employment Law, the easier it will be once any changes are introduced.

It will also make your Company stronger and more competitive in the short term.

Recruitment – Things to Remember

You should be ensuring that the employee is a good fit from both a skills knowledge point of view and a personality fit.

There is not much point in recruiting an individual that has all of the skills but cannot get on with the rest of the team and vice versa.

The recruitment process is also costly.

Smaller organisations don’t normally pay much attention to this cost because it is a sunk cost i.e. fixed overhead dealing with the recruitment process.

However, if you add up the time it takes plus the induction and training processes, the cost will be significant per vacancy.

We have highlighted some areas below to help you think about how you could amend or improve your current recruitment processes to get ready for any future law changes.

Be Ruthless About Recruitment

As a recruiter, you need to ensure that you are getting the very best candidate for a role in your company or organisation.

You cannot afford to have too many second-best applicants join as employees.

It is therefore important to look for the following in CVs and applications:

• Any gaps in education or employment, or things that don’t seem to add up.
• Does the experience stack up with the responsibilities? i.e. check a candidate’s CV carefully to ensure they know what they say they know.
• Ask searching and open questions that require more than a yes or no answer. You want to encourage the candidate to speak for two-thirds of the interview.
• If the candidate has not done their homework on the Company or Organisation, this may show a lack of initiative and inquisitiveness. It could also highlight laziness on the candidate’s part.
• Are they interested, engaged and alert? If not, this could point to future issues such as demotivation and lack of drive to be at work.
• Ask yourself after each interview, if you were one of your competitors, what would you think if you knew this person had been offered a job? Relieved that you didn’t employ them or upset for missing the opportunity to employ them?

Don’t Take Their Word For It – Test It

Quite often, a recruiter will complete the interview and think the last candidate they saw was incredible in terms of their answers.

This could be true, or it could be a bluff. How would you know?

The honest answer is you don’t often know for certain.

By testing candidates, you can see what they know and how they deal with certain business-related situations.

Here are some testing tips:

• Consider the role and create tests that prove the candidates’ abilities. You could introduce scenario-based testing, English or Maths tests or practical tests.
• Time the tests so that the candidates are put under some form of pressure. This will give you an idea about how they may react to pressure in the role.
• Put together a scoring matrix to benchmark each candidate’s scores accurately and objectively.
• Use the scoring to make an informed decision about who should be offered the role. The test scores should be used together with all of the information you have collated during the recruitment process.

Managing the Probation Period

This is a much-overlooked area for ensuring you have the right person in the role. #

The probation period is your chance as a manager to ensure that the employee has the motivation, skillset and behaviours you need in the organisation.

Some tips for managing probation periods are given below:

• A new employee should be giving maximum effort in their probation to try and impress the manager to pass. If this is not happening, ask yourself why.
• If an employee is clearly not going to work out in the role, make the decision to terminate the employment early. Unless they can change or you can help them to change, nothing is likely to change.
• Observe how the employee deals with colleagues, success and adversity during the probation period and make notes. Remembering a current positive is too easy than a list of past negatives.
• If you are unsure at the end of the probation period, then extend it. You can extend a probation to ensure you are making the right decision to either pass or fail the probation period.
• Provide any training that you think is necessary to help the employee pass their probation. It is cheaper to invest in training than start the recruitment process again.
• Communicate as much as possible to ensure the employee is supported. The employee on probation will have a lot to learn in their first few months and no matter how skilled they are, a new job will still be daunting.

Summary

Anything a company or organisation can do to tighten up their recruitment processes will be important in relation to the Employment Rights Bill.

Day-one rights will likely be given in some form for unfair and constructive dismissal.

This is an opportunity to fine-tune your recruitment process and see how successful you can make it before any changes are introduced.

Please let us know if you have any queries or questions on recruitment processes by emailing jon@hrsmartuk.com or calling us on 01903 754107.