How to recruit

This is not a guide to the methods of recruitment (find about recruitment methods here). This is a guide to ensuring that your recruitment methods comply with your legal obligations

Discrimination

The main thing is to avoid discrimination in your recruitment for:

• Sex
• Age
• Race (includes colour, nationality, citizenship, religion and ethnic or national origin)
• Disability

What is discriminatory?

As regards advertising for posts, in all of these cases the question you should ask yourself is whether an ‘ordinary, reasonable person with no special knowledge’ will think the advertisement is discriminatory.

Discrimination can be indirect or direct. Indirect discrimination might be “must have a beard” whereas direct discrimination might be “over 40″.

A good starting place to understand all of the issues surround job advertising discrimination can be found at the CWJobs site.

Are there exceptions?

Yes there are limited exceptions and a good starting point to understand the law behind these is the list of UK anti-discrimination acts and descriptions at Wikipedia. In most cases, the exceptions have to be reasonable; for instance when being from a particular racial group is a ‘genuine occupational qualification’ for a post. If in doubt, ask a qualified legal advisor.