Professional Services Recruitment Toolkit


The School’s recruitment process plays a critical role in contributing to a positive employee experience at the LSE, and bringing in leaders and managers to build strong and effective teams that deliver educational and research excellence.

It has been colour coded and designed to be picked up whenever you need support at any stage of recruitment

The School aspires to attract, retain and develop the very best people in a high trust, academically-led environment. One of the ways in which we seek to deliver this is through two of our six core HR pillars of operational activity: 

1. Building an excellent workforce

2. Providing grounded HR policy, advice and support 

The Professional Services Recruitment Toolkit has been put together to help you, as a hiring manager or panel member, recruit effectively within the School and in a way which complies with School policy and procedures, employment law and equal opportunities legislation. 

It has been developed in response to feedback received from our candidates and managers, and is intended to walk you through the recruitment process, providing advice and guidance on what to remember at each stage. 

It has been colour coded and designed to be picked up whenever you need support at any stage of recruitment, rather than to be read from start to finish in one go.

The full Recruitment Journey can be viewed here.

Why follow a structured Recruitment Process

 Achieving successful outcomes:

  • A structured recruitment process provides opportunity for greater consistency which should provide you with steadily better outcomes.
  • It also eliminates any possibility of unlawful discrimination, inequality or bias. 

Getting the recruitment decision right:

  • Recruitment failures are commonplace across all sectors and, with the average cost of recruiting the wrong person being between £8,200 and £12,000 (according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development), it can be a costly process to get wrong. 
  • Poor selection and appointment of an individual not suited to carry out the duties of a post can result in short and long term performance issues, and a poor use of management and HR resource.  
  • Poor selection can lead to litigation and fines against the School. 

A positive candidate experience:

  • A structured approach to recruitment will help you and the School present itself in a welcoming and professional manner and ensure that, regardless of outcome, all of our candidates have a positive experience with us. 

We actively encourage you to think through your recruitment issues and strategies and encourage you to have discussions with your HR Partner or HR Adviser at an early stage in the process.

Colleagues in HR will be able to provide a range of advice and support to help you. 

Keeping up to date

The Professional Services Recruitment Toolkit is monitored as part of the HR Document Repository and is reviewed regularly to comply with changes to employment law, and to improve the guidance and best practice examples given. 

We appreciate any feedback on this guide, the recruitment process generally, and the information and advice provided. 

Please contact the Human Resources Team at humanresources@lse.ac.uk if you wish to do so.