Most of the work we do here at Chatter concerns helping our clients provide a great candidate experience for everyone who applies for a job with them. Whether successful or unsuccessful, helping to build a positive, useful employer brand which will become an asset. We often then spend even more time ensuring that the promises that are made during the recruitment process are realistic and achievable, so that the lucky candidate offered the job hopefully finds that by the time they've completed the onboarding process they're emotionally engaged with the new employer, fired up and ready to hit the ground running on their first day, power through their first week and be completely settled in over the first few months.

All which underlines quite how surprised I was this saturday morning while listening to the dulcet tones of Paul Lewis on Radio 4's Moneybox (waiting for The News Quiz to start and eating a late breakfast). They were highlighting a practice several listeners have alerted them to, particularly in the aviation industry. It appears that Virgin Atlantic (and some of their competitors) make it standard practice that candidates offered a role are then approached by a 3rd party agency to do a criminal and employment background check, which doesn't proceed until the candidate pays £25! They've no doubt spent time attracting and recruiting these people, only to then make the candidate pay from their own pocket for the part of the process which has a tacit subtext of "we don't trust you", what a great way to make them feel engaged with their new employer! 

To their credit, some of the competitors did say that they refund the fee on the candidates first day, which is better than nothing I suppose. At this point you're probably that the aviation industry is a special case, after all we're all made to jump through hoops every time we get on a plane, so surely employee security checks are vital? Except that Virgin are levying this fee on staff who are destined never to leave the ground...they work in the call centre. Really not the kind of experience you'd expect from Mr Branson is it, a security check is just one of the costs of doing business. Offloading onto the candidate really doesn't reflect well on anybody.