Preventing Discrimination in Recruitment

12 Jun 2023

The Equality Act in the UK is designed to protect job applicants from facing discrimination based on what are termed “protected characteristics”. This is a list of attributes that are protected by the law and which it is illegal to discriminate based on.

Recruiters should be aware of these characteristics and ensure that everyone involved in every aspect of their recruitment process is up to speed on them. It can be very costly, both reputationally and financially, to be caught on the wrong side of a discrimination case.

There are some things you just can’t ask your candidates during a job interview, mainly concerning ‘protected characteristics’.

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

All of the above characteristics are protected by law, and there is no good reason that interviewers should be asking about them. There may still be underlying reservations, biases and discrimination amongst recruiters who think that women in a certain age bracket may decide to go on maternity leave or that people of a certain age may struggle to pick up new computer skills.

The law is intended to protect them from discrimination on that basis, but in reality, it means that recruiters just can’t ask them questions about the areas concerned.

We’ve seen some extremely poor examples of recruiters asking about some of these, even though they were trying not to be too direct. They still ended up with complaints, which isn’t surprising, reading some examples below.

“What year are you planning to retire?” - this is obviously a problem as it implies that the candidate may not be willing to stay with them for as long as they would like and may not get the job on that basis.

“Five children must be a handful – I hope you’re not planning on having more!” - Expressing an opinion on how many children a woman may have clearly implies that her answer to this will impact her chances of getting the job.

“I see you have a problem with your left eye – how does this impact your ability to use a computer?” - This expresses doubts about the candidate’s ability to do the job because of a perceived disability and is obviously highly inappropriate.

Not only are all of the questions above very poor interview questions, but they are also downright rude and disrespectful to the candidates. All of these questions 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.

The critical point to take away from this is that recruiters should always adhere to the law as it relates to discrimination and ensure their interviewers are trained and up to the task!

It may be worth running some mock interviews with them to ensure they can steer clear of trouble concerning the provisions of the Equality Act and the “protected characteristics” in particular.