In the first few months of a new year, many people begin looking for a new role and a new challenge. With that in mind, it’s a good time to remind ourselves of the importance of having a fair and professional recruitment process in place.

One area of recruitment that can cause tension is feedback to unsuccessful candidates. Although not the most obvious area of concern, it’s important to take the time to provide professional feedback to candidates who were unsuccessful but took the time to attend an interview.

We need to resist the urge to dash off a quick, cursory email that hasn’t been thought through and can easily be copied and distributed far and wide. This approach has the potential to backfire, as the following cases show…

A few minutes after a waitress was interviewed for a job in a restaurant, her application was rejected by text with the sarcastic explanation that her interview responses were ‘just not engaging’ and ‘like, basic’. Even worse, the message also included the ‘cry laughing’ emoji.  The candidate then tweeted a screen-grab of the message which went viral and was picked up very quickly by the news outlets.

Although this is an extreme example, it shows that now more than ever it’s important to ensure practice managers, partners and any colleagues involved in recruiting staff receive training in proper recruitment practices.

In another recent case, a jobseeker received an email in response to a job application clearly forwarded to her by mistake, describing her as a ‘home-educated oddball’. The email said she would be ‘worth an interview, if only for a laugh’. The email also said that she might be very good but equally could be ‘a biscuit short of a packet’ or a ‘left-wing loon tree-hugger’.

Again the story was picked up by news outlets and resulted in much embarrassment for the company.  Whilst both those stories were not obvious breaches of employment law, the very fact that they received so much attention could be very damaging to those employers, making it easier for employers to see the benefits of investing in recruitment training for staff.

FPM members can prepare for the recruitment process by downloading documents like the recruitment checkless procedure - just head to the FPM Core.

To learn more about the recruitment process, why not take a look at FPM’s recruitment service? Plus, award-winning primary care training providers Thornfields provide practical and informative courses on this topic, including Recruiting the Right Person.