The Filling Vacancies Intranet Site provides a range of options for filling posts to help ensure that the Service has:
- the right staff
- with the right skills and competence
- in the right place
- at the right time
It has been designed to allow posts to be filled quickly and efficiently with the minimum of bureaucracy whilst upholding the Service's commitment to equality of opportunity.
Options, covering both temporary and permanent arrangements, can be accessed using the tool bar on the left. The external recruitment option will take you directly to the External Recruitment Intranet Site, which contains information on all external recruitment including casual and fixed term appointments.
Key Principles
Posts should be filled substantively where possible and the majority of posts should be advertised in order to help staff progress their own career development. However, in order to meet operational needs, the facility to fill posts on a temporary basis and/or without advertising is also available.
To enable the management of staff reductions and the redeployment of surplus staff during the restructuring of Headquarters functions across the Home Office (including the Prison Service) the Home Office Departmental Reform procedures must be applied. Wherever it is practicable to do so Governors should also apply the principles of the procedures when considering staffing issues for administrative posts.
As a further measure to address staff surpluses across the Civil Service the Cabinet Office have also introduced a mandatory protocol for notifying vacancies to Jobcentre Plus before they are externally advertised.
A flowchart to help identify the most appropriate options to consider for filling a vacancy can be accessed by clicking here.
Decisions taken on the filling of posts must be fair and defensible and comply with the minimum standards in this summary:
- United Kingdom and European Union Law. Selection must be conducted within UK and EU law as it applies, including:
- employment law
- anti-discrimination legislation
- data protection legislation
For more information please click here.
- Equality of opportunity. The Prison Service is an equal opportunities employer and there must be no unlawful discrimination, either direct or indirect, during selection.
- Levels of devolved authority. In almost all circumstances responsibility for filling vacancies has been devolved to establishments and Headquarters Groups. Where specific authority applies, this is stated in the appropriate section.
- Openness, fairness and merit. This is about getting the best person for the job.
- There is a presumption that posts will be advertised except where there are defensible operational or management needs for not doing so;
- Assessment centre accreditation must be acquired prior to appointment to grades where it is mandatory;
Where posts are advertised:
- prospective applicants must be given equal and reasonable access to adequate information about the job and its requirements;
- applicants must be considered equally on merit at each stage of the selection process;
- sick absence information may be considered as a factor in assessing suitability;
- selection must be based on relevant criteria applied consistently to all candidates; all selection decisions must be conducted by at least two people to guard against individual bias;
- selection techniques (selection strategy) must be objective, reliable and guard against bias.
- Security clearance and checks. All postings must comply with any security clearance or checks that are required.
- Appointment procedures. Staff must be informed in writing when there is a change to their terms and conditions of employment, even if this is on a temporary basis.
- Auditing and monitoring requirements. Auditing and monitoring arrangements must be set up to ensure compliance with the Self-Audit Standard.
- Workforce Planning. Area Managers/Governing Governors/ Heads of Group are responsible for forecasting projected staffing needs in order to respond proactively to likely vacancies.
- Training. Training is no longer mandatory (PSI 9/2003). However, Governing Governors, Area Managers/Heads of Group must ensure that staff taking part in a selection process are competent to carry out the task.
It is a requirement, and good employee relations policy, that trade unions must be consulted when changes are being planned that will affect either staff numbers or the grading of posts. Further information is available by clicking here. In addition when proposing to create a new non-operational Senior Manager C-A post, authority must first be sought from the Director of Personnel.
Pay and Grading Phase 1 introduced new Prison Service grades which combined a number of previous grades. These new grades consist of a number of paybands representing different job weighting within the grade. As promotion can only occur when moving from one grade to another, the term progression was introduced to describe movement up the paybands within the same grade.
There are also special arrangements for soft promotion in certain limited circumstances. Further information on these terms and how they fit with the selection process is available by clicking here.
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