Your recruitment decisions have far-reaching and long-standing consequences for your career and impact – the right decisions can help you to delegate well, expand your research, and develop your ideas. The wrong ones can result in hours or days of performance management, stress, and anxiety for all parties involved.

The Recruitment Toolkit created by the Future Leaders Fellows Development Network, is a practical, structured resource for research leaders who are recruiting for the first time or want to improve how they hire team members. This is especially helpful for those new to UK recruitment practices, or those wishing to avoid recruitment fails that they have experienced before.

The toolkit:

• Supports good practice in building diverse, effective teams from the start
• Reduces guesswork around UK hiring norms if you’re new to recruiting
• Provides turnkey templates and checklists to save time and improve consistency
• Encourages structured thinking about roles before launch and onboarding after offer

It guides you through every stage of academic/research hiring:

• Planning your recruitment strategy
• Clarifying and designing the role
• Writing inclusive and effective job adverts
• Running selection and interviews that identify the best candidates
• Onboarding and inducting new hires effectively

The toolkit includes:

• End-to-end recruitment guidance: Step-by-step support across the full recruitment process, with the flexibility to dip into specific stages such as advertising, shortlisting, interviewing, or induction.
• Peer insight from experienced researchers: Short videos featuring Fellows and PIs sharing practical lessons, challenges, and reflections from recruiting research staff.
• Practical templates and checklists: Ready-to-use Word and Excel resources, including planning prompts, shortlisting matrices, interview tools, offer and rejection emails, and reasonable adjustments checklists.
• Equality, diversity and inclusion embedded throughout: Dedicated guidance and resources to support inclusive recruitment practices at each stage of the process.
• Curated links to further support: A focused collection of high-quality external resources on inclusive recruitment, reducing bias, and effective induction.