Trusting the People We Support to Help Recruit

The Real Life Options Group has a long history of involving the people we support in the recruitment of our staff and they regularly contribute to the selection of new appointments by participating in interviews.

However, with the current COVID-19 restrictions on travel and meeting in groups, we have had to get creative with how we can best involve the people we support in the recruitment process in a meaningful way. So, we were delighted to recently launch our new Digital Recruitment Panel to interview five candidates who hoped to join the Group as new Trustees (Non-Executive Directors) for our Board. Recruiting the right sort of person for this role is crucial as they are oversee all the organisation’s activity by holding our Leadership Team to account and help to shape future actions to ensure we continue to deliver exceptional support.

The Digital Recruitment Panel consisted of two groups of four people we support accompanied by their Support Workers or Service Managers, in addition to a facilitator. Taking place via a Microsoft Teams video meeting, the panel interviewed the different candidates by asking a range of conversation-style questions to help put them at ease and get an interesting insight into their personalities. This was followed by a One Page Profile exercise in which candidates were talked through the process of sharing the details of what would go on their own profile.

Afterwards, each candidate was assessed and scored based on their ability to engage well with the people we support (for example by maintaining good eye contact), how well they took part in the activities and how effectively they explained things in an interesting, clear and easy to understand way.

The Digital Recruitment Panel fed back their valuable insights to the Formal Interview panel, which consisted of our Chief Executive David Sargent, our Chair David Wilkin and two of our Board Members; Hannah Mounsey and Rob Hendry.

Everyone was exceptionally pleased with the new interview process, with David Sargent declaring it “very successful indeed.” All the people we support thoroughly enjoyed the process, with Stephen from Fraserburgh summing it up well by saying, “It was a very good experience. I enjoyed it and would definitely do it again.”

Huge thanks to all the people we support who were involved (and their staff teams). Well done to Anjum, Angela, Gordon and Alistair (Group 1) and Hannah, John, Jack and Stephen (Group 2) for all your useful input and advice.