Preventing Discrimination In Recruitment

08 Aug 2023

It’s very easy to slip into informal conversation mode during job interviews when things are going well, and when that happens, it’s just as easy to start asking questions that you wouldn’t have planned to on a formal basis. This is something to be very wary of as talking about the wrong subject matter, even inadvertently, can taint the whole interview process and leave the organisation open to potential litigation.

Protected Characteristics

There are some things you just can’t ask your candidates during a job interview and they are mainly in relation to what are referred to as ‘protected characteristics’. These are traits that have been set out in the Equality Act (2010) which you are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of or ask about in job interviews, in case you are seen to be asking in order to facilitate discrimination.

As a gentle reminder, here are the protected characteristics you shouldn’t ask about:

● Age

● being or becoming a transsexual person

● being married or in a civil partnership

● being pregnant or having a child

● disability

● race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin

● religion, belief or lack of religion/belief

● sex

● sexual orientation

We’ve seen some poor examples of where recruiters have asked about some of these, even though they were trying not to be too direct. But, they still ended up with complaints:

What year are you planning to retire? This is a clear issue with ageism. The recruiter basically asked how many years they would potentially have from the candidate before they retired. It could be construed as them trying to decide whether it was worth employing the person in question, given the relatively few years they may end up working with the organisation.
Five children must be a handful – I hope you’re not planning on having more! Expressing any kind of opinion on how many children someone has is not something that anyone should be doing in a job interview. In this case, it was a clear expression of the opinion that this person had their hands too full at the moment for the job and would be even busier if they had more children.
I see you have a problem with your left eye – how does this impact your ability to use a computer? Something that should never happen is interviewers commenting on someone’s seeming disability and questioning whether it would prevent them from carrying out everyday workplace duties. If it was an issue that would interfere with their work, the candidate would have brought it up themselves. It may be that they need reasonable adjustments for the job but this is something that could have easily been addressed if successful.

All of these left recruiters with a problem to deal with from those candidates who didn't get the job. Having said that, anyone who did get the job would still have a right to take issue with having been asked the question in the first place.

So, be careful – and make sure your interviewers are trained!