Before you start any recruitment, check if anyone on your board has a conflict of interest. You need to continue to monitor this, as a conflict may arise as recruitment progresses.
Anyone with a conflict of interest needs to declare the conflict and your board needs to decide how to manage it.
As a board, write a recruitment brief that covers:
Use our list of questions to help:
Your board may set up a recruitment sub-committee to make key decisions throughout the recruitment process. Or you may have an existing remuneration committee that could take this role.
Either way, it’s a good idea for your chair to be a member of the committee.
If you establish a committee, your board sets its terms of reference, which must include:
If you're on a board for a small organisation, you may not need a recruitment committee. If you don't set up a committee, your board needs to ensure the selection panel understands its role and responsibilities.
The requirements written in this guide are for the recruitment committee. But you can tailor these requirements to reflect the agreed roles and responsibilities of your board, recruitment committee and panel.
Your recruitment sub-committee reviews:
These may have specific requirements for your hiring process.
Confirm the classification of the role and clarify the remuneration range your board considers appropriate. For guidance, read the Victorian Public Entity Executive Classification Framework.
Consult your portfolio department and minister’s office to check on their interest in and requirements for the recruitment process.
Your recruitment sub-committee develops a project plan that has:
When you're planning your recruitment process, speak with your entity's or portfolio department's people and culture team.
They can guide you on how to make your process fair and consistent and comply with your organisation’s policies and the law.
Think about how you’ll shortlist candidates:
Also think about how you’ll assess your candidates:
You may need a contingency plan if you can’t find a suitable candidate or your preferred candidate cannot start immediately.
Your contingency plan provides options for who will do the CEO’s job until you recruit a new one.
For example, you could:
During the time the contingency plan is in place, you may choose to delay strategic decisions until you appoint the new CEO. For example, it may be appropriate for your board to put new initiatives on hold.
Get more advice on How to plan for succession.
Your recruitment sub-committee sets clear terms and conditions for your CEO’s appointment, in line with the Victorian public entity executive handbook .
This will include what you can and can’t offer your CEO as part of their employment package.
The public entity executive remuneration policy mandates key terms for executive employment.
Your recruitment sub-committee can choose to hire a consultant to help find suitable CEO candidates.
They may help you:
They will also conduct a rigorous and impartial evaluation of candidates.
Get more advice on using an executive search consultant.
Your recruitment sub-committee sets up the selection panel. This can include members of the sub-commitee.
The panel should have a diverse mix of people who can assess a CEO.
It’s a good idea to have your board chair on the panel. You may also want to consider asking a key stakeholder to join the panel.
Your recruitment sub-committee can also assign someone to set up interviews and block time in diaries for the panel to do their duties.
When your recruitment sub-committee has finished its preparations, it briefs your board on the plan.
Your board must approve the plan before recruitment can start.
Your recruitment process must comply with public sector employment principles including fair and reasonable treatment for all candidates and employment based on merit.
Your recruitment sub-committee creates a position description.
To write your position description, use the information from your board’s recruitment brief and the employment terms and conditions your committee has set.
The position description should cover these topics:
Talk with your people and culture team on where they recommend you advertise your role.
Some places you can consider are:
To reach diverse candidates, advertise the position widely and through various channels.
The experience someone has when they apply for your role has a huge impact on what they think of you, your organisation and the public sector.
When your job is being advertised:
Reasonable adjustments (also known as workplace adjustments) are changes to the work environment or conditions that allow people with disability to work safely and productively.
A candidate has a choice if they want to disclose their disability. If they do and request a reasonable adjustment to your process, under the Equal Opportunity Act 2010 you must make it.
Based on the applications received, your recruitment sub-committee makes a shortlist of people to interview.
One way you can do this is to use a rating scale to assess candidates fairly and consistently.
Before interviewing candidates, your sub-committee may want to discuss areas of particular interest to inform the panel. The panel then prepares interview questions. Check if the questions should be approved by the sub-committee, the whole board or both.
It can be helpful to use behavioural based questions drawn from the key selection criteria.
Behavioural-based questions focus on past behaviours, rather than knowledge or opinions about hypothetical situations.
Avoid multi-part questions and keep them open ended to encourage storytelling.
You may also want to ask candidates to make a presentation.
For CEO roles, you would normally interview strong candidates at least twice.
The purpose of the first-round interview is to check the extent to which a candidate meets the key selection criteria.
Interviews aren’t your only source of information to assess the candidates to see if they fit the role.
With the selection panel, the recruitment sub-committee should collect and check the accuracy of evidence about each candidate’s abilities.
This may include:
You can also consider doing some tests, such as:
Don’t accept or dismiss information about candidates at face value.
Instead, look at all relevant evidence before you exclude them as a candidate.
Here are some themes and questions you can use:
In the minds of stakeholders, would their failure:
In the minds of stakeholders, would their comments:
To what extent would their crime impact:
To what extent would the penalty impact:
To what extent would the behaviour impact:
First your selection panel makes a list of candidates that:
Then your whole board needs to review and approve of the short-list and rationale used to prepare the short-list.
Your panel should:
Your selection panel sets up and runs second-round interviews with short-listed candidates.
Use this interview to:
In addition to your second-round interviews, the selection panel should check the references of your top 1 or 2 candidates.
To prepare for the reference check:
Your selection panel ranks your short-list of candidates based on all the evidence you’ve collected so far.
This includes who they think will best fit your organisation’s current and future needs.
The whole board then reviews the ranking of the short-listed candidates and the rationale behind this.
If the board is satisfied, they can ask the selection panel to make a conditional offer to the preferred candidate.
A conditional offer means the preferred candidate will likely be hired if they pass a few last checks.
The board chair makes the conditional offer to the preferred candidate and tells them why they were chosen.
With the feedback, let them know their:
The chair also provides feedback to the unsuccessful short-listed candidates.
With this feedback, tell them:
Before you can move from a conditional to formal offer to the preferred candidate:
The board chair:
If the preferred candidate doesn’t accept the offer, the chair needs the board’s approval to make an offer to the second preferred candidate.
This continues until a candidate accepts an offer.
If none of the preferred candidates accept the offer, follow the contingency plan your board approved at the start of this process.
The board should review why you weren’t able to appoint someone and address any issues, before you try to recruit again.
Your recruitment sub-committee or board secretary must collect and securely store all the documents created as part of recruitment, such as:
Get more prescribed public entity remuneration advice on: