Helping to recruit the right people to work in Adult Social Care

We know the best way to do this is to involve people with experience of support from Adult Social Care, because you know exactly who the right people are.

This information tells you what you should expect if we work together on recruitment.

When we know we need to recruit someone new to work in Adult Social Care, we will ask people with lived experience if they would like to help to recruit the right person.

If we ask you, we will give you some information about the post we need to fill.

If you are interested, we will work with you, and two or three other people who say yes too.

We will ask how we can support you to be involved. We will also use information you have given us on your Working with me profile.

We will make sure you are recognised and rewarded for your time and paid for any expenses like travel costs.

There is more information about payments in our Getting paid for your time co-production guide.

We will agree timescales and key dates together.

For some jobs, we might work with you to agree the wording of the job advert and the job role summary.

For some jobs this wording will already have been co-produced.

We will decide who to interview together. This is called shortlisting.

We will not tell you the names of the people who have applied for the jobs, or any personal details about them.

Our decisions about who to interview will be based on the information people give us on their application form about their experience, skills and knowledge.

When people have been shortlisted, we will decide together how the interviews will work.

We might decide to have one interview panel with a mix of Council workers and people with lived experience on it.

Or we might agree to have two panels – a Council panel and a lived experience panel.

If there is a separate lived experience panel, we will agree together who will be the chair of the panel.

We will also agree on a Council worker to support the panel.

The worker will be there to check everything goes smoothly on the day. They will not take part in conversations and decisions about who should get the job.

We will agree interview questions together, and how to score people’s answers.

We might agree to send interview questions to people ahead of their interviews to help them to prepare.

We will arrange for you to arrive with plenty of time to get comfortable before the interviews start.

We will make sure you have copies of the interview questions and scoring sheets.

We will make sure plenty of drinks are available through the day.

If the interviews last all day, or over lunch time, we will provide lunch.

You should agree how you will introduce yourself to each candidate with the rest of the panel before the interviews start.

You will need to ask each candidate the same questions to make the interviews fair..

You should decide your score for each candidate’s answers by yourself.

At the end of each interview, you should discuss your scores with the rest of the panel.

At the end of all the interviews, we will decide together who should get the job.

If you have been part of a lived experience panel and there is a separate Council panel, you should meet to make the decision together.

We will make sure you know if the candidate we chose together accepts the job.

We will arrange to meet up with you and the rest of the panel after the interviews to share feedback.

We will arrange a time for you and the rest of the panel to meet with the successful candidate when they have been doing the job for three months, so you can discuss how the job is going.

If you have arranged to be paid for your time, you should receive your payment within two weeks.