Any recourse?

burnleymik

Partner has been working as an Admin assistant at a local School now for roughly 10 years. There has been a team of three of them for many years and all was going well.


In September last year it was decided to increase the number of Admin assistants from three, upto six. Three new employees were taken on, including the HR Managers partner, who had no prior experience in administration. My partner was then tasked with training these new starters up on the job.




Anyways, at the start of the year a new business team was appointed to the school and they decided to make some cost savings, which meant reducing the number of admin assistants back down to the original level of 3 people.


All six of the employees were given a print out explaining the criteria for the jobs (which they have given a slightly different title), which my partner would have done very well, if it was based upon that, given experience, attendance, punctuality etc.


Last week she received an email explaining that there was a change of criteria and instead of the original criteria list they were given, all the affected parties would instead have to do an interview for the positions. This started alarm bells ringing.


Anyways, yesterday my partner attended her interview and said it went very well, only to find out 1 hour later she had not been successful, but, maybe it's a coincidence, but the HR Manager's partner managed to secure one.


As it stands we are at a loss as to what exactly we can do, if anything? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

redpete

One point to make is that experience is not the same as competence, the ex-pizza maker person might be just as able to do this new job as someone who has been doing it for 10 years.

I think it is quite reasonable to expect to be told the criteria that are being applied (as they were originally). The desire to interview might not change this, the interviews could be used as one means of assessing the candidates against the criteria. I would ask what are the new criteria used (if they are different) and ask for feedback from the interview of their assessment of your partner's performance; unfortunately it is reasonably easy to create subjective criteria and then justify any decision against these.

jobbingmusician

Yes, it does sound as if this stinks. However, just to reassure - using length of experience is nowadays a real no-no as it is indirect age discrimination. I suspect this, rather than any more devious explanation, is why the criteria were changed.

stuartJo1989

Just curious but did anything happen on the lead up to this change? School extension built? Higher intake than usual (I doubt that one)? Policy change?

Just seems slightly strange how they suddenly DOUBLED their admin assistant support! I probably would have started seeking a new job at that point. Hindsight, of course, but may help out with future jobs?

FBaby

She can ask for written feedback and see how she was scored. If she feels that she was marked unfairly, she could raise a grievance, but ultimately, it is hard to defend score because how can you prove against what was said. You can always have a bad day and unfortunately, all they have to do is tick boxes, and making sure that all candidates were interviewed is a sound one.

Your OH needs to think about the wider context. They might have taken on the HR partner unfairly, but they were still two other positions that was given to other staff, so if indeed the process wasn't fair, it would indicate that they didn't want your OH to be part of the team any longer, and there might be reason for that. In this case, would she really want to continue working there with these people?