Including Service Users in Staff Recruitment

Main Learning Point: Ensuring that the process is meaningful and non tokenistic, and using this as a starting point for further involvement.

What we did...

Recruitment process. Service users from the whole project were sent out a questionnaire regarding recruitment and what areas they would want candidates questioned on.

Service users were asked what was important to them; this influenced the questions that candidates were asked on the day.

One of the questions was ‘what support candidates would offer to service users in the organization?’

What was good about the activity?

• This was a good activity because it was not tokenistic. Although service users were not involved in the whole interview process, the questions generated were representative of a large percentage of service users using the service.
• This process also helped to ensure that the candidates hired were better matched to suit the needs of the people using the project.

What were the challenges?

Questionnaire.

What could have been improved?

This was the initial stage of aiming to involve service users in the whole recruitment process. We are hoping that in the future service users will be involved in every stage, including putting together the recruitment advert, representation on the recruitment panel, with equal decision making with staff, and also involved in induction.

We will also be making sure that we evaluate service users experience and ensure that there is adequate training in place. We also recognize that this process was not accessible to those who have literacy issues.

Resources to consider.

There was not a great deal of expense required for this piece of work. In the main, it was staff time to compile the questionnaire, and service user time to fill in the questionnaire. We also had to update our recruitment policy. We expect that this will become more resource intensive the more we involve service users in the whole process. However, many of the skills gained are transferable and once service users have gained experience, there will be less training required.

We would like to find out about your thoughts on this activity, so please feel free to add anything from your experiences, or ask a question in the comments section below.