Defining the role and the job specification
Every good hire starts with clarity about what you are actually hiring for. Before writing an advertisement, set out the core responsibilities, the outcomes the role must deliver, and the skills and experience genuinely required to achieve them. Separating essential criteria from desirable ones keeps your later shortlisting objective and defensible.
A job specification and a person specification serve different purposes. The job spec describes the work; the person spec describes the attributes a candidate needs. Keep the person spec focused on capabilities relevant to the job, and avoid criteria that could indirectly exclude protected groups without good justification.
Be careful with the language of your advert. In both Ireland and the UK, discrimination law prohibits wording that could deter candidates on grounds such as age, gender, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, civil status or family status. Phrases like 'young and dynamic' or 'recent graduate' can carry age-discrimination risk even when unintended.
Sourcing candidates
There are many routes to candidates: your own careers page, job boards, professional networks such as LinkedIn, recruitment agencies, and referrals from existing staff. Each has different costs and yields, and most employers use a mix depending on the seniority and scarcity of the role.
Employee referral schemes can be highly effective for smaller firms, but guard against them narrowing the diversity of your applicant pool. If everyone is hired through the personal networks of a homogeneous team, you may unintentionally entrench a lack of diversity, which is both an ethical and a legal concern.
Whatever sourcing channels you use, keep a consistent record of where applications come from and how they are handled. This helps you measure which channels work and provides an audit trail should a candidate ever question how they were treated.
Interviewing and selection
Structured interviews — where every candidate is asked the same core questions and scored against defined criteria — are fairer and more predictive than unstructured chats. Agree the questions and scoring in advance, and use more than one interviewer where practical to reduce individual bias.
Keep questions job-related. Asking about someone's plans to have children, their age, their health or their religion is not only poor practice but can amount to unlawful discrimination in Ireland and the UK. If a genuine occupational requirement exists, take advice before relying on it.
Document your decisions. Brief, factual notes explaining why each candidate was or was not progressed protect you if a decision is later challenged, and they impose a healthy discipline that keeps selection focused on merit.
Right-to-work and pre-employment checks
Before someone starts, you must confirm they are legally entitled to work for you. This is the local equivalent of what US employers do with the Form I-9, but the process is different: in the UK, employers carry out prescribed right-to-work checks (increasingly via the Home Office online service or an identity service provider) and retain evidence to establish a statutory excuse against illegal-working penalties.
In Ireland, non-EEA nationals generally require an employment permit or other permission to work, and employers must satisfy themselves that the correct permission is in place. EEA and Swiss nationals do not require a permit to work in Ireland. Always check the current rules with the relevant government department, as immigration requirements change frequently.
Other pre-employment checks — references, qualification verification and, for certain roles, vetting through Garda vetting in Ireland or the DBS in the UK — should be proportionate to the role. Only carry out checks that are genuinely necessary, because each one involves processing personal data.
GDPR in recruitment
Recruitment generates a large volume of personal data — CVs, application forms, interview notes, references and sometimes special-category data such as health information for reasonable-accommodation purposes. Under GDPR and UK GDPR you must have a lawful basis for processing it, tell candidates how their data will be used, and keep it only as long as you genuinely need it.
Provide applicants with a clear recruitment privacy notice explaining what you collect, why, how long you will keep it and their rights over it. Do not quietly retain the details of unsuccessful candidates indefinitely 'in case something comes up' without telling them and obtaining an appropriate basis to do so.
Set a defined retention period for recruitment records and delete data once it expires. A common approach is to keep unsuccessful applicants' data for a limited period after the decision, sufficient to defend a potential discrimination claim, and then securely erase it.
