Appropriate recruitment to your opportunity is vital. If you don't spend time thinking about the skills and experiences participants will need, you could end up asking a group of people who know little about the subject to make decisions that will affect your work for years to come. This can lead to people feeling inadequate and out of their depth. For some people, it can harm their mental health.
We want to make people's experience taking part in our work as meaningful and enjoyable as possible. Ensuring they have the right skills and experience is part of how we do this.
Spend time thinking about what specific skills or experiences you need people to have before recruiting. You can then include these in your opportunity description, a role description and an application form. If your opportunity is short term or a 'one off', choose 4 – 5 skills or experiences people must have had to participate.
Examples of this include:
These then form your selection criteria, ask people to tell you a little about each point in an application form, via e-mail or over the phone. The information they give you and primary demographic data will help you select a diverse group of people with the relevant skills and experience.
Provide people with a role description/hyperlink to the role description template/ and application form for longer-term opportunities. Here, you can list essential and desirable skills and experiences in more depth and give people space to explain how they meet each criterion.
When recruiting for longer-term opportunities, it is helpful to follow a shortlisting and interviewing process to ensure you have considered each applicant fairly against the criteria.
This tool helps those interested to tell you about themselves. It will help you make informed decisions about who should take part.
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