We’re committed to including resident voices in all areas of our work, including the recruitment of new Town & Country Housing (TCH) colleagues.  

The ambition to include residents more frequently in our recruitment process was initially raised in a Resident Scrutiny Panel review and was set out in our Resident Engagement Strategy 2023-2025. 

To start turning that ambition into action we asked two residents from our Resident Scrutiny Panel to join the recruitment panel for our new Resident Engagement Officer role.  

The successful candidate would liaise closely with our residents, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to work with residents and understand how to include them in the process.  

You said…

Feedback from this process told us that residents value the opportunity to be part of the recruitment panel for roles that were heavily resident focused. They also felt that all interviewees for all roles across TCH should be asked a question that reflects residents’ views.  

Based on this feedback we asked our Resident Survey Group what questions they would want us to ask all interview candidates, and what they would expect the candidate’s answer to be. Thirty-two residents from the group responded with their ideas. 

These suggestions were reviewed by our Human Resources team who drew up four suggestions for interview questions based on the survey group feedback. We ran these by our Resident Scrutiny Panel to see what they thought.  

Their feedback was that all four questions captured the resident voice, but that not all questions may be relevant for each role. The Panel agreed they would like it to be the decision of the recruiting manager to decide which one question (as a minimum) would be asked.  

We’re doing…  

Where appropriate to the role, we will have a resident on our interviewing panels. And at all interviews we’ll also be asking at least one of the four questions that we’ve developed with residents.  

We’ll be tracking how this works over the coming year, and will continue to update the approach based on resident feedback.  

Thank you to all residents who helped us to implement this change to our recruitment process!