Social Security Experience Panels: agency recruitment

Looking for jobs

Social Security Scotland want to make sure that people who have lived experience of the social security system feel able to apply for jobs within Social Security Scotland, allowing the agency to benefit from their experience and skills. As part of this, we wanted to understand how they can make the recruitment process more accessible to people with disabilities, caring responsibilities and long term health conditions.

As a first step in understanding how the recruitment process could be improved, we spoke to Experience Panel members about their past experiences of looking for jobs and whether they had encountered any barriers whilst doing so.

Previous experience of looking for jobs

Over nine in ten survey respondents had experience of applying for a job at some point (92 per cent), with just under a third having applied for a job within the last five years (31 per cent).

Table 9: Survey respondent experience of looking for jobs (n=167)

Respondents who had experience of looking for a job were asked where they had looked in the past. The most common methods tended to involve looking online – for example, looking at recruitment websites (68 per cent) and looking directly on the websites of specific organisations (57 per cent).

Offline methods were still popular, with over two thirds of respondents (67 per cent) having visited a JobCentre Plus to look for work. Other offline methods used by survey respondents included asking friends or family for recommendations (48 per cent), looking in newspapers (43 per cent) and volunteering (36 per cent). The other methods of looking for a job, such as going to a jobs fair or approaching a recruitment agency or careers advisor were used by less than one in five respondents.

Table 10: Where survey respondents looked for jobs (n=66-69)

We asked survey respondents who told us they had looked online what websites they had visited. In total, respondents mentioned 36 unique websites a total of 111 times. Websites were grouped into the categories below by the researcher.

Table 11: Types of website used

Awareness of existing agency recruitment

In order to find out who had been reached by previous Social Security Scotland recruitment drives, we asked survey respondents whether they were aware if the agency had been recruiting staff over the past few months.

A quarter of survey respondents (25 per cent) said they had heard about Social Security Scotland's recruitment, with three quarters (75 per cent) saying they had not.

Respondents who had heard about the agency's recuitment primarily found out about this online, such as through the Scottish Government's website (50 per cent), news websites (27 per cent) or through Social Security Scotland's website (17 per cent). A small number of respondents found out about agency recruitment through friends and family (17 per cent), newspaper advertisements (16 per cent) or search engines (14 per cent).

Table 12: Where respondents heard about previous agency recruitment (n=130-132)

When asked where they would expect future Social Security Scotland jobs to be advertised, survey respondents gave a wide range of suggestions, grouped into the categories below by the researcher.

Table 13: Where should agency jobs be advertised in future