Hilary Goldsmith on how to spot the photocopier wizards from the slackers and not end up with a Team X Factor when you want a Team Strictly.

I find that it’s always helpful to have a handy guide for the huge variety of tasks that a school business professional might be asked to carry out. This month I’m focusing on HR, so I thought it might be useful to jot down my very tongue-in-cheek hints and tips on an area of the role that you can never really learn until you try it out for yourself - recruitment.

Getting the right person for a job is always a challenge, and a huge financial commitment, so it can pay to be quite fierce when it comes to this aspect of the role. It’s tough out there, but it’s tougher still inside, so in difficult times there’s only one approach worth having - hardline. No excuses, no rule-bending; in short, show no mercy.

The hardline approach

Firstly, stick to your application deadlines - anyone who can’t get their application in on time is not likely to be a great timekeeper. Or, if they send you a CV when you requested an application form, bin them. If they’re not capable of carrying out a simple instruction, they’re no good to you. There is a theory that you should take all your applications and randomly put half straight in the bin - the logic being that no one wants to employ unlucky people, but I’m yet to be completely convinced on that one.

So, on interview day, unless there’s been a world event of epic proportions, if your candidate arrives late for interview, send them straight home again, and certainly don’t offer to pay travel expenses. Slackers are no use to you. If there’s no parking on your site, don’t tell them - it can be an initiative test to see if they’ve done their research on your site, or left enough time in their schedule to park three miles down the road and hike back uphill in their best black high heels. Why make life easy? It isn’t.

Leave deliberate holes in your interview schedule to see how your candidates fill their free time. Bribe your receptionist with Hobnobs to watch out for the ones who sneak out for a crafty fag break, or the ones who are socially awkward and hide behind their phones rather than interact with other candidates (I’m blushing a little at this point). Similarly, ask your friendliest catering person to pop in and refresh the tea supplies and start up a conversation to check out over-familiarity, but primarily to find out if they’re team X Factor or team Strictly. You’ll know yourselves whether you’re an X Factor or a Strictly school. If they say they like both, they’re fence-sitters. If they say they don’t watch either, well, frankly, who needs that kind of negativity in their school?

Ask one of your admin team to copy and verify their ID documents. Admin staff are usually extremely good judges of character. Alternatively, if you’re appointing to middle management or above, ask them to copy their own ID documents and get your admin team to score them on the extreme Photocopier Challenge. Award extra points for double-sided, and a 20-point bonus for colour. If your candidate manages to achieve the heady heights of the stapling function, offer them an immediate position on your senior leadership team - you’ve found someone very special indeed.

A false sense of security

In the interview itself, plan your questions carefully. Lure them into a false sense of security with the “tell us about yourself” question, then hit them straight between the eyes with the “you think your boss might be stealing” question. Always a classic. Avoid any “what are your best qualities?” namby-pambyism and instead invoke the “tell us about your most embarrassing professional moment” jewel. If nothing else, it will give you some material for your next blog.

Always ask a question about the “personal interests” section on their application form - this is the domain of the big fat fib. We’ve all done it. If they quote “reading, going to the cinema and cooking”, ask them for details. Reading Facebook, seeing the Minions movie and watching Bake Off might not score quite so highly on your list as some other more lofty pursuits. Personally, I’d rank the Minions movie pretty highly, but I appreciate I’m niche.

And then comes the awkward part at the end of an interview when you ask the candidate if they have any questions they’d like to ask. It can go one of two ways:

If they have well thought through questions, excellent, but always be cautious about explaining the real reason the last person left. If they ask what a typical working day might look like, they may not be right for your team. We all know that the only “typical” in school life is the lack of any type of typical.

If they have no questions prepared and hastily try to think of something that isn’t about holiday pay or if there’s any free cake, then they have shot themselves in the foot by:

a) Not caring enough about the job to have any questions in the first place.

b) Showing they have no planning skills by not having prepared any thoughtful questions for this part of the interview.

c) Not showing an interest in cake, and therefore not having understood the current educational context in any way whatsoever.

So there you have it, my top tips for hardcore recruitment. Get it right first time and you’ll save yourself a whole heap of trouble later.

And finally, if anyone has a model disclaimer to cover me in the unlikely event that anyone uses this advice, please do forward it to me directly.

Hilary Goldsmith is director of finance and operations at Varndean School. She tweets at @sbm365