Offering employment, on-boarding, induction and review

Offer

So, you’ve now got a candidate who the assessors agree is appointable and is the best person for the role. 

Any offer made at this stage, should be conditional upon satisfactory pre-employment checks.

These include but not limited to:

• satisfactory references,
• satisfactory safeguarding and DBS checks
• pre-employment Medical Questionnaire
• car Insurance Certificate and License
• certificate of all Qualifications stated as essential on the person specification
• original documentary evidence that entitles you to work in the UK
• bank details

Failure to make an offer ‘conditional’ can mean you are stuck with an applicant if they don’t have satisfactory references etc.

We’d recommend that you make a conditional verbal offer to the successful candidate and ask if they are going to accept the offer, before rejecting any other appointable candidates. 

Follow up on the pre-employment and safeguarding checks as quickly as possible so that the offer can be confirmed.

On-boarding

The period between offer and start is called the on-boarding period.  Sadly, this is sometimes a period of little contact between the employer and employee, but should be a period in which the working relationship starts to grow.

To help your employee settle into his/her new role more quickly and feel a part of your team, why not:

• send copies of newsletters
• invite him/her to team meetings/events
• send links to your school policies
• discuss what you think the induction will look like and ask the employee for their thoughts.
• let the employee know what he/she needs to bring on the first day
• keep the employee updated on how their pre-employment checks are going.

Induction

An induction should be tailored to the post that the new starter is doing and also the job holder themselves.  There will be some statutory items to cover such as Health and Safety and some policies and procedures to cover such as Safeguarding, IT, Security etc.

We’d encourage you to talk to the new employee about the induction so that it can be jointly agreed and planned.  It will help the employee to know what will be covered and to ask for any support he/she may require.

We’d encourage you to have an induction checklist for each employee, which is signed and dated to show what topics have been covered/documents handed over and when.  This checklist can be helpful if there are issues during the probationary period.

Recruitment review

Once your new starter has been in place for a few weeks, it is good practice to review your recruitment and selection process and produce a short document to help you with future recruitment & selection.

Your review should consider:

• how many individuals requested an application pack?
• how many applicants applied?
• where did applicants see your advert – which media had the best impact?
• what was the quality of applications like?  How many were you able to shortlist?
• how many of the applicants shortlisted came for interview?
• what was the calibre of those who came for interview? – Consider if there is anything you may want to add in/change on your advert/application form to improve the shortlisting process
• what was the location of the applicants who applied?
• which selection tools provided you with the best evidence?
• what interview questions gave you the best evidence?  Which questions did you have to regularly re-phrase?
• what worked well during the selection process – ie pupil involvement?
• what didn’t work well during the selection process?
• what feedback/ideas can the successful candidate share to help further improve the process?
• how much time did the process take? 
• what were the costs associated with the process?