Application Forms

It is good practice to use well designed application forms which do not discriminate against any potential employees.

In order not to discriminate, you need to ensure that sensitive data including age, ethnicity and marital status is not part of the application form that recruiting managers use to decide who to interview.  It is useful to monitor this data to back up your Equal Opportunities Policy.  The easiest method is to invite applicants to complete an Equal Opportunities Monitoring form that is detached from the main application form as soon as it is received and before passing to the recruiting manager.

In order to monitor ethnicity, a useful list is provided by the Office of National Statistics.

An application form should only ask for information that is relevant.  Therefore a single application form may not be the best approach where you are recruiting for a wide variety of posts. For smaller organisations or where jobs are very similar, one form may be sufficient.

It is good to ask about competencies in an application form, rather than just experience or qualifications.  Competencies are skills and behaviours and how people apply their qualifications and experience in the job.  So asking for examples of when and how people have used their competencies in the past is a useful guide to how they are likely to perform in the future.

While some employers rely on applicants submitting CVs, application forms have the advantage of the same format for all applicants. The appearance and varied format of CVs does not always help to create a fair selection process.