Any NHS HR staff on here?

[FluffyPinkFlamingo]

Can anyone advise please - for jobs that are advertised externally, is there a minimum number (or percentage maybe?) of external candidates that have to be invited for interview?

Thank you.

Hello,

There is no specific minimum number or percentage of external candidates required for interview in the NHS. However, there are several key principles and guidelines that should be followed:

Fairness and transparency: The recruitment process should be fair and transparent, and all suitable candidates, regardless healthinsurancemarket of their internal or external status, should have an equal opportunity to be considered.

Meritocracy: The selection should be based on merit and the candidate's suitability for the role, not on their internal or external status.

Compliance with NHS policies: Each NHS trust or organization will have its own recruitment and selection policies that need to be adhered to. These policies may outline specific requirements for advertising and interviewing candidates.

No not at all, no hard and fast rule or %. You tend to do two things, first is set a 'shortlistable' mark i.e. a number of points based on the scoring of their application/how well they've met the essential and desirable criteria, then set a number of slots based on panel availability (at least 3-4 is normal but can be many more if you have more than one role to fill), then fill up those slots going downwards in score order. But there's no rule about how many slots you have to offer, you decide that as the recruiting manager. For some roles particularly lower level admin we get hundreds of applications, many of them meeting the minimum benchmark for interview and we realistically can't see them all so you have to make a cut off somewhere.

I guess it would be a bit odd to only interview one person unless that person was genuinely the only one who met the pass mark/was shortlistable based on their application, but not against the rules per se. It's usually considered wise these days to shortlist a few additional people compared to how many you actually want to interview as so many people drop out during the process and/or simply don't bother turning up on the day!

Thank you - that’s very helpful.

Thank you for your help - I have an interview for a Band 3 clerical role later this week as an external candidate and was just curious as to whether I was being interviewed as part of a “box ticking” exercise (if that makes sense)!

No it won't be box ticking, being invited for interview will mean you're one of the top scoring applicants based on your application so well done. Do be aware though that at interview internal candidates do have a bit of an unavoidable advantage just being familiar with the work area and lingo etc, however fair you try to make it as the recruiter sometimes externals are left disappointed (it can be really hard where you have 3 or 4 really excellent candidates, all of whom would doubtless do a good job and you can only offer 1 job so have to let people down, obviously it's a nicer problem to have than no good candidates at all but still hard). But obviously they think you have potential or they wouldn't have bothered inviting you so fingers crossed for you!

@maxelly thank you.