Spotlight: Recruitment & Safer Hiring

Hiring is where safeguarding starts — and it's where most trusts are stitching together the most tools. A generic applicant tracker that's never heard of KCSIE. A spreadsheet for the shortlist. An inbox for references. A separate e-signature service for the contract. Then, once someone accepts, the whole thing gets re-typed into the Single Central Record and the HR system by hand.

This week's spotlight is the module we built to end that: Recruitment & Safer Hiring. It runs the entire hire — advert to e-signed contract — inside the same platform as your SCR and your People register. Every step happens in one place; nobody is the integration layer between six tools.

Advert to offer, in one pipeline

Publish a vacancy to a branded, public careers page and take applications with a CV and the KCSIE self-disclosure built into the form. The page wears your trust's brand, not ours.

From there, every applicant for a role sits on one pipeline board — received through to appointed — so nobody slips between an inbox and a spreadsheet.

A structured, anonymised sift

Score each applicant against the person specification, with anonymised sifting so the shortlist is defensible. An AI suggestion is available — but it's advisory only, assessed against your criteria and never against protected characteristics. The decision stays yours.

Interviews, panels and scoring — all in the module

Interviews don't happen in a separate calendar tool and a Word scorecard. You build the interview from your own question set, then invite a panel — each panellist gets a calendar invitation, RSVPs, and scores in their own portal against a weighted scorecard. Candidates self-schedule their slot from the times you offer, so nobody plays email tennis to find an hour. Scores roll up automatically — and the appointment decision is always a person's; the AI only ever drafts questions and summarises, it never decides.

Offers candidates sign in the browser

When you're ready, generate the offer and the contract from your templates, then send them for signature. The candidate gets their own portal: they can track where their application is, confirm their appointment, and e-sign the offer in the browser — no third-party signing tool, no printing, no posting. The signature carries a tamper-evident audit trail of who signed, when, and from where.

On acceptance, the candidate becomes a future-dated record in People with the checks already attached, onboarding ready to run, and the safer-recruitment evidence pack one click away. Identity Lifecycle can take it from there and provision the new starter's accounts before day one.

Safer recruitment, captured as you go

Pre-employment checks — DBS, right-to-work, references via a structured referee portal, and the KCSIE online search — are tracked to completion. Watchlist and barring matches hard-block an appointment until the DSL signs off. At the end, one safer-recruitment evidence pack assembles the application, sift, interview scores, references and safeguarding summary into a single inspection-ready PDF.

What we're honest about

Two things we won't oversell — because the fastest way to lose an operations buyer is to be caught doing it in the demo:

• AI is advisory only. Sift summaries and question drafting help your panel move faster, but they never see EDI data, self-disclosures or watchlist flags — and they never make the appointment decision. A person does.
• DBS is recorded, not queried. As in the SCR, a DSL runs the Update Service check and records the outcome with full evidence. We don't claim a live gov.uk lookup we can't make.

See it for yourself

Recruitment & Safer Hiring is live in the demo today — click around the pipeline, open a candidate, generate an offer. It's the real product, with synthetic data. See the full module →