Avoid the risk of discrimination in pre-employment checks

It’s a sad fact that workplace discrimination is still an issue that the HR departments of organisations across the UK have to deal with on a daily basis. Although perhaps often unintentional, people still fail to leave biases at the door when they enter their working environment, and base business decisions on personal perceptions.

It’s an emotive topic and one that the HR industry would like to see the back of, but given the intrinsically human nature of the profession - and an inability to control every move of every employee - it’ll likely be something we all have to deal with at some point in our career. We can only hope it becomes less prevalent.

What we absoultely can control, is the discrimination that comes into play before an employee even has the opportunity to demonstrate their worth.

The recent Xref Recruitment RIsk Index told us that a quarter of respondents who had acted as referees during a reference checking process, had been asked a candidate’s age, while a staggering 14 per cent had been asked their marital status. Both of these are protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 but, legalities aside, it’s alarming that anyone in today’s working environment would even think these questions were acceptable.