Recruitment for SMEs: Getting it right from the Start

From 1st January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal will drop from two years to six months. This alters the economics of recruitment for every organisation we work with.

Until now, if you recruited badly, you had two years in which to correct the mistake in a fairly straightforward manner. From January 2027, that window becomes less than six months. So, the best way to avoid a claim of unfair dismissal is to recruit the right person in the first place, rather than having to move a bad hire on, which if it is after six months, will mean using the full disciplinary procedure.

That makes the front end of the process – deciding what you actually need, describing it accurately, and putting it in front of the right people – considerably more valuable than it used to be. This article covers that stage. Verification, references and pre-employment checks are dealt with separately.

Do you have a vacancy at all?

The natural reaction when somebody leaves is to replace them. Before you do, take a step back and ask how the role has actually been working.

Do you have too many people in this department and not enough in another? Has the work changed since the role was last filled? Is this an opportunity to reshape the team to cover where the business is going rather than where it has been? A departure is one of the very few moments when you can restructure quietly, sensibly and without using any of the mechanics that a formal reorganisation requires. It is worth using.

So before you recruit, satisfy yourself that the role genuinely needs filling.

Job descriptions and person specifications are worth it

Some organisations do, thankfully, have job descriptions and person specifications. But is the specification proportionate to the role?

The lower down the organisation the role sits, the fewer criteria you are likely to need. Filling a Saturday afternoon shift in a pub is a genuinely different exercise from recruiting a receptionist for a busy doctor’s surgery, and the paperwork should reflect that. Applying the same template to both helps nobody.

We have spent our careers receiving these documents from clients, the ones that cause a sigh are the very long, very complicated job descriptions – the ones you have to scroll through. Length is not thoroughness. A job description that tries to capture every conceivable task tells a candidate less about the role than one that sets out clearly what the job is for, what the person will actually spend their time doing, and what success looks like.

The graduate default

The other one that causes a sigh is the person specification for a Saturday afternoon job that lists “graduate level preferred”.

That is an exaggeration to make a point, but only just. There are an enormous number of roles advertised with a preference for a graduate for no reason other than that it has always been there. If you cannot articulate why the role requires that level of education or training, take it out.

There are two reasons to be disciplined about this. The first is practical: every criterion you add narrows your pool, and unnecessary criteria narrow it without improving the shortlist. You may not have recruited for this role in twenty years, and a great deal has moved on in that time. The better question is usually what core skills and abilities the job actually needs.

The second reason is legal. Educational requirements that cannot be justified are capable of amounting to indirect discrimination; most obviously on grounds of age, since degree-level attainment is not evenly distributed across age groups. If challenged, you would need to show the requirement was a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. “It was on the last version of the person spec form” is not that.

Do not recruit too high

A related and more expensive mistake is recruiting above the level of the role.

If the job is essentially a first job out of school – straightforward administration, say – then recruiting a recent graduate into it very often ends the same way. They do the job perfectly well for six months, treat it as a stepping stone and leave. You have then paid for a recruitment process, an induction and six months of training, and you are back where you started.

Match the person to the role honestly. An overqualified candidate is not always a bargain.

Say what the job pays

The single biggest mistake in advertising is not stating the salary.  Candidates increasingly filter out advertisements with no salary altogether, so an unpriced advertisement is not neutral – it actively costs you applications.

The second is stating one that is not realistic. 

The third is publishing a range and then not honouring it. If your advertisement says the role “pays up to £45,000”, the strong candidate who needs £45,000 will apply on that basis. Offering them £35,000 because the range started at £30,000 wastes their time and yours, and it does so at the final stage when you have both invested most in the process.

If you are going to publish a range, be prepared to pay the top of it for the right person, or publish a narrower one. 

The wider direction of travel is towards greater pay transparency in recruitment, and employers with Irish or wider EU operations should note that pay transparency obligations are already tightening in those jurisdictions. There has been talk about it in the UK too.

Where to advertise

There is no single right answer, and the correct channel depends almost entirely on the role.

• • LinkedIn is where many employers now start, particularly for middle management and above. It has a very large pool, and it is relatively simple to approach them directly. A recruiter licence widens the range of people you can reach considerably. It is expensive, but may be worth it if you recruit regularly at that level.
• • The big job boards like Indeed and TotalJobs are attractive, but a basic ad will get very little airtime before it disappears off the top of anyone’s list. Make sure that keywords are in there to attract someone looking for the same type of role. And the advice about salary really applies here.
• • Trade press remains effective in sectors where it is genuinely read. This is entirely industry-dependent, and you will know whether it applies to yours.
• • Local advertising is undervalued. For the pub job, you want somebody who lives one, two or three miles away. A sign in the window still works, and so does a card in a newsagent’s window or a notice in a student union bar. These channels are cheap, quick, and better targeted than anything online for a genuinely local role.
• • Leaflet drops. We have run these with clients – a couple of thousand leaflets printed and put through every door in the area, saying that we are looking for somebody really local, this is the job, come and see us. For the right kind of vacancy, the response rate can be excellent, and you reach people who are not looking on job boards at all.

The common thread is that you should choose the channel to suit the candidate you want, not the channel you used last time.

The point of all this

None of the above is complicated, and none of it takes long. What it requires is that you treat each vacancy as a decision rather than a repeat of the last one.

With the qualifying period for unfair dismissal falling to six months in January 2027, the cost of getting this stage wrong rises sharply. Six months is not long to identify a poor appointment; address it properly and conclude the process. Time spent defining the role accurately and advertising it honestly is time that pays for itself several times over.

Once you have found your candidate, the next stage is making the offer conditional and verifying that what you have been told is accurate. That is covered in the companion article on references, qualifications and pre-employment checks.

This article is drawn from an episode of the BackupHR Bulletin, in which Guy was joined by Cathy Norton and Rosalie Collins. Further episodes in this series cover pre-employment checks, onboarding and right to work checks. 

Want to discuss any of the above, or would like a job description and person specification reviewed before you advertise. If you are a BackupHR client, please get in touch with our team. Even if you are not a client, we would love to help and are happy to offer some initial guidance.