Has anyone challenged unfair recruitment/ nepotism in the local authority.

[Gytyg]

I get that nepotism is rife in local authorities but in this instance I'm not talking about getting someone's foot in the door.

This is a case of withholding training from other staff and exclusively providing mentoring and training for a senior role that none of the team knew was in the pipeline to a temp agency worker.

I'm not sure - maybe someone will say that this is absolutely above aboard and I'm overreacting but some advice would be appreciated as this must have happened in someone else's team.

I’m going to assume you don’t want logical responses, you just want to vent (understandably) it sucks when this happens & you’re right to feel pissed.

However proving nepotism happened is harder than you think, it’s easy to say to colleagues “oh Sally got that job because she mates with the managers wife” or “Ahmed got to go on the training first as he’s cousins with the department head” it’s another thing to prove it to HR.

Unlike clear misconduct, nepotism is almost never written down or openly admitted, decisions to hire the nepo-candidates can easily be framed as the right choice/best fit by those doing the hiring.

Managers are also allowed to use their discretion where they see fit, which ties into the above, as much as we can argue it was nepotism why they were given an opportunity the manager could give you a list of reason why they made that decision.

The absolute kicker though, nepotism isn’t in itself automatically “illegal” in the majority of work places, unless of course it overlaps with discrimination under laws like the Equality Act 2010.

Im sorry you’re having to work in team like that, but truly I wouldn’t make it the hill you die on….

@WarmHare it's deliberate withholding of training from other staff, fobbing them off and then miraculously the new JD aligns with the persons tasks and tasks that the members of the team were asking for training. It obviously is nepotism but it's influencing the outcome of the recruitment of a post.

I've not been working for an LA that long so I am very surprised that this has been allowed. I used to work at a uni and if anyone tried doing this, ppl would have raised concerns even management.

Interesting, I don’t know anyone who is related to anyone else in our large LA.

Maybe it has worked the other way, and we warn our families off…🤔

There was a thread here earlier in the week about the worst thing you’d ever done. There was a woman on the thread who admitted she’d got her newly graduated daughter a temp job through an agency in the local authority team she managed. She then created a promotion job opportunity and wrote the JD tailored to the work her daughter was doing, gave her access to systems only senior managers could access, coached her in her job and also blocked her other direct reports from accessing any training that might have helped them progress or seeing the JD. This all sounds very familiar!

@ParksidePen oh really? Need to check that thread out. We're in a very similar situation!

Maybe this type of thing happens a lot?!