National Staff Step 4: Establish Hiring Group

Principle:

More than one person must be involved in making hiring decisions. This assures we get multiple points of view and helps prevent corruption.

How to Do This:

Assemble a group of three people (one of whom could be you, yourself). This group will do CV review, test review, interviews and the decision-making for the position.  These three people must include:

      1. The vacant position’s supervisor (the “hiring supervisor”), and
      2. An HR staff person (or the person who is filling that role in the early days of the emergency)
      3. Someone who has knowledge of the position and a perspective that complements that of the other members.

The people on the committee must be independent of any relationship to candidates for the job (that is, no one can be a friend or family member of any of the candidates).  It may be difficult to determine this when you set up the committee because you won’t yet have any candidates.  But should anyone on the committee later find he or she is related to or friends with a candidate for the position, that member should notify HR of this fact in writing and remove him or herself from the committee.

Any committee member who knows of a conflict of interest like this and fails to notify HR and remove him or herself could be terminated.

Short Cut:

You can do this step as you are completing the earlier steps in the process. Once you have the job description it should be relatively easy to know who should be involved in the decision-making.

Next Step:

Step 5:  The committee will quickly agree on the most important qualities in a candidate.