“We assess the policies adopted by our target companies in evaluating their preparedness for growth and benchmark them against PQ.”
Make policy that aligns with your values
A manual developed to reflect stakeholder feedback across industries, delegations of authority, and region in your recruitment policy
The Recruitment Policy Primer is an interactive, customised toolkit
This toolkit is maintained using intelligence contributed from sources within the parameters you specify. In this demonstration, you're seeing extracts from the global policy. You're welcome to adopt that setting as your base, in which case you'll see the full spectrum of insights, from stakeholder perspectives, regional influences and industry trends as well as suggested policy segments using both prescriptive and descriptive styles.
For a more focused experience, apply your settings to filter insights to your stage of business growth, industry, approach to policy and other priorities. Develop your policy, and supplementary materials to support it, so affected users can be confident that they are making the right decisions.
Check in against the primer to evaluate your policy against the insights and conduct formal reviews with stakeholders who will be working with your policy.
- Business case for the position
- Preparing job descriptions
- Posting job ads
- Screening candidates
- Interviewing candidates
- Bias in recruitment
- Approvals
- Offering employment
- References
- Background checks
- Onboarding
- Feedback to unsuccessful candidates
- Using contractors
- Referral rewards
- Recruitment agencies
- Internal applicants
Related policies:
- Remuneration and benefits
- Diversity and inclusion
- Privacy
- Decentralised workplaces
- Reduction in force
- Performance management
As you work through the policy decisions in this tool, you will be presented with templated suggestions that you can adopt and customise to make your own, as well as a checklist of common issues that are addressed with policy, case studies, and insights from hiring managers, job-seekers and recruitment teams to help inform your policy decisions.
This is a preview of the policy toolkit. The system has not customised the insights generated for you. Policy Quarter is not providing advice to you. You should seek your own legal advice before relying on any of the content generated by the toolkit. By interacting with the toolkit, Policy Quarter may review your interactions and use this information to improve the toolkit and the services we provide to you. Except for the preview, this toolkit is optimised for interaction with you. Let us know if suggestions are helpful or not. Share your feedback in the discord.
Overview
What to expect
This toolkit is designed to help you develop a Recruitment Policy, from scratch. Where you see underlined text, there are variables that you can change in your settings profile, to better customise this tool with more focused insights and parameters.
By the end of this process, you will have developed a Recruitment Policy, which you can circulate to your leadership team for comment and approval, and any subject matter experts from whom you may wish to seek advice, such as lawyers or hiring managers.
Members who use this toolkit for the first time, spend approximately 2 hours interacting with the tools before generating the first version of a complete policy. The segments have been divided so that you can tackle them individually. You can choose to include or remove them from your policy, or mark them as lower priority considerations that you can address in a subsequent version of your policy.
About youEXAMPLE
You are the Chief Operating Officer of a health analytics company, incorporated in New South Wales, Australia. Your team has 200 people and is expected to be 300 people within 12 months. You plan to open an office in New Zealand this year. Your organisation conducted 200-300 interviews, made 75-100 offers, and recruited 25-50 people in the last 12 months. You compete for talent with Cochlear and TelstraHealth. You have a dedicated recruitment manager to support recruitment activities. Your goals are to improve your acceptance rate, improve diversity statistics and to reduce the time it takes to hire. You are uncertain about the approach to remote working.
Let us get to know you a little betterEXAMPLE
We will be able to generate more focused, actionable insights for you, if you tell us how you feel in relation to the following views (we won't hold you to these views, but they will help us to generate more relevant insights for you). There are 5 questions in this series - you can skip them if you wish.
AGREE
DISAGREE
Scoping
Your Notebook
Your notebook has been generated with reference materials to guide your scoping process. Develop them as you work through this phase so that you can customise requests for feedback, such as surveys to send to relevant stakeholders to solicit feedback, and to evaluate your findings against relevant benchmarks and standards. It's interactive. As well as your direct authorship, you can tell us if you would like to see more or less of a particular type of content by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons.
Trends
- Employees want to work remotely ~ 3 days per week.June 2022Read more
- On average, it takes 4-6 weeks to recruit. In the health sector, candidates with engineering and data science skills are in high demand. The best ones expect to complete the process within 2 weeks.November 2022
Register to see more trends.
Key stakeholders
Division managers who will be responsible for the hiring decisions in their teamsRequest feedback
Recruitment managers who manage the hiring processRequest feedback
Investors who have consent control over executive team hiresRequest feedback
Rising stars who should be encouraged to foster candidates through the processRequest feedback
Recruitment agents who may be engaged to help in sourcing candidatesRequest feedback
Recent hires to give feedback on the process up to nowRequest feedback
Board approval is required for this policy to take effectDraft board paper
Research
The Forum is a place to share research that may inform recruitment policy development. You may be interested to review:
The Deloitte Millennial Survey which found that three quarters of millenials have a preference to work from home.2022
This Stanford study reveals the prevalence of diversity washing amongst US companies.2023
This case study which reflects a candidate's experience in dealing with two Australian companies who had outsourced their screening checks.2023
Register to access The Forum to view and share research and insights related to recruitment policy.
Specific requirements
Get legal advice on whether superannuation contributions need to be made for independent contractors
Review the terms of engagement of the screening service provider engaged to perform background checks
Identify security measures used to protect the data collected on candidates during the recruitment process
Competitor analysis
Cochlear has 2 current positions advertised in your region. It does not promote a remote working benefit, which may be a source of competitive advantage to you.
Policy
Policy Designer
Your design feed is populated with template policy positions that have been generated using the profile settings and feedback you have provided. You can broaden the filter on each issue to see variations on the prescriptive and descriptive policy statements, which you can adopt or customise. You can also use them in preparing your own policy statement.
The example below shows the policy statement generator for the Background Checks section of the Recruitment Policy.
| Section | Policy Issue | Context | Prescriptive Approach | Descriptive Approach | Insights | Resources | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
17 | Background Checks Verification of legal right to work, police and credit checks, verification of qualifications, employment history and credit checks. | LEGALAll staff must have a valid right to work in Australia. VALUESWorking with people of integrity. | Offers of employment are conditional on pre-employment checks being completed satisfactorily. This includes verification of a valid right to work in Austalia, employment history, qualifications, police and credit checks. The specific checks required will be indicated in the invitation to the first interview, and be finalised to reflect the particulars of the candidate being screened. Candidates must be given full disclosure of the screening scope and information required, and consent to screening must be obtained, before the checks are undertaken. Candidates must consent to the checks and provide the necessary information to enable them to be completed. Checked has been appointed to perform this verification. The Privacy Policy sets out how the information is collected, used and stored. The Head of Human Resources has delegated authority to exercise discretion in considering any misstatements relating to professional qualifications or experience or candidates with criminal or bankruptcy records for candidates below managerial level. Board approval is required for executive team hires whose background checks reveal any such issues. | For each role, the requirements of the function should be considered and any special features (such as a role which will work with children) should be identified so that appropriate background screening parameters can be specified for internal approval. Candidates should be notified early in the process as to what this will require. If this is done internally, consult the legal team for advice on any regulatory requirements that must be satisfied. As a minimum, we verify the identity, right to work and criminal history of all staff. Checked has been retained to provide this service and canddiates should be asked to provide personal information to that service provider and to consent to a report being provided to us. Candidate privacy must be considered in this process. Workplace trust and safety, as well as reputational risk should be considered in hiring candidates whose search results indicate integrity, creditworthiness or criminal history. | LEGALCandidates expect that personal information provided for this purpose will be kept secure and not used for any other purpose. LEGALThere a fines for hiring people that do not have a valid right to work. | Candidate perspective on data privacy and security. Checklist for assessing screening service providers. A fair chance for candidates with arrest or conviction records. | |
DYK?: A criminal record may disqualify a person from eligibility for a role. | Aside from reputational issues, the legal requirements are mandatory. | This is the template that is most commonly used. | This template may be useful where there are unusual workforce features, such as offshore teams. By taking this approach, organisations leave decision making, in terms of how to apply the policy, in the hands of colleagues responsible for working within it. | A conversation about this topic is active in The Forum. Join in. | View our policy assessment of screening service providers. 2023 | ||
Previous Section: Checking References | Next Section: Onboarding | ||||||
Atlassian's Career Privacy Policy We appreciate Atlassian's policy because it has clear statements that set out what information is collected, how it is used and where you can look for further information. For a big company, with global operations, we think Atlassian has done a good job of explaning how it protects data and satisfies obligations that are owed in different parts of the world. Whilst section 5 of the policy covers how Atlassian shares information outside of its organisation, it does not have a section that identifies its requirements for candidates to provide sensitive talent data to the service providers it has engaged to perform background checks. We'd like to see that section included in Atlassian's policy so that applicants can see to whom, and on what terms, they will be required to disclose personal information so that background checks can be performed. This review was conducted by Alex from Policy Quarter by reference to the policy as published on 24 January 2023. | |||||||
Communication
Communicate with relevant stakeholders
Commuicate the policy requirements, and the role each relevant stakeholder has in upholding them, with consistency. Maintain a resource library of the communication materials you have created so they can be easily accessed and updated.
Reflect your brand values across the suite of communications materials you develop so that you can enable your colleagues to represent the team effectively.
The example below shows the communications register for the Recruitment Policy. When you join, you can customise these templates or create your own.
| Element | Reference | Lead | Last reviewed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Policy | COO | October 2020 | ||
Training | Head of HR | December 2020 | ||
Factsheet for Candidates | HR Manager | March 2021 | ||
Website copy | HR Manager | July 2021 | ||
Screening | COO | September 2022 | ||
Bias | HR Manager | April 2022 | ||
Business Case | COO | July 2022 | ||
Job Ad | HR Manager | July 2021 | ||
Interview Invitation | Head of HR | December 2021 | ||
Offer | Head of HR | January 2022 | ||
Day 1 welcome | Head of HR | January 2022 | ||
Onboarding Checklist | HR Manager & Division Leads | June 2020 | ||
Recruitment Agency Terms | Head of HR | January 2022 | ||
Interview Tips | Head of HR | January 2022 | ||
Privacy Training | Privacy Officer | March 2022 | ||
Screening Service Contract | Head of HR | March 2022 | ||
Referral Bonus | HR Manager | May 2022 |
Compliance
Manage Policy Compliance
Customise compliance templates to stay on top of your organisation's policy commitments and collect information you need to generate to produce your reports.
From training schedules to attendance registers, infringement or audit requests you can collect and analyse data from your dashboard.
Feedback
Get the feedback you need to hear to make your policy
Manage formal feedback sessions with relevant stakeholder groups. Collect feedback in your dashboard and use it to demonstrate to your affected staff, suppliers and shareholders that you have considered their views.
Badge your policies with statements to show your stakeholders how you are engaging them in policy development and in addressing their concerns.
Clients who partner with our service exclusively receive complimentary strategic workforce planning from our team.
Cameron WalshBusiness Development Manager at HealthTech Recruitment Agency, 2021 supplier surveryResponse: We have solicited proposals from the major recruiters in our field to better understand the potential beneifts of specialist advice.A data scientist we tried to recruit expressed hesitation in applying because our amenities are not wheelchair accessible.
Antonia QuentinChief Data Scientist, 2022 Department Heads Feedback SessionResponse: The budget for the next financial year includes a provision for renovations to the office to make it wheelchair accessible. The decentralised workplace policy now supports fully remote participation for team members that may have difficulty working from the office.How can we justify paying $5,000 referral bonuses to staff who introduce their network to the team?
Simon FraserBoard Observer representing the investors, 2021 shareholder presentationResponse: Finance team prepared an analysis showing the comparative cost of the program against the costs of running a recruitment campaign. The analysis supports the continuation of the program.Clients who partner with our service exclusively receive complimentary strategic workforce planning from our team.
Cameron WalshBusiness Development Manager at HealthTech Recruitment Agency, 2021 supplier surveryResponse: We have solicited proposals from the major recruiters in our field to better understand the potential beneifts of specialist advice.
A data scientist we tried to recruit expressed hesitation in applying because our amenities are not wheelchair accessible.
Antonia QuentinChief Data Scientist, 2022 Department Heads Feedback SessionResponse: The budget for the next financial year includes a provision for renovations to the office to make it wheelchair accessible. The decentralised workplace policy now supports fully remote participation for team members that may have difficulty working from the office.
How can we justify paying $5,000 referral bonuses to staff who introduce their network to the team?
Simon FraserBoard Observer representing the investors, 2021 shareholder presentationResponse: Finance team prepared an analysis showing the comparative cost of the program against the costs of running a recruitment campaign. The analysis supports the continuation of the program.
Join the Careers Policy Forum
Register to join your governance peers in addressing recruitment policy issues