ICO Jobs Board Policy

ICO jobs listings are received by over 5,000 job seekers via our email alerts and seen by over 100,000 people online each year. We are the independent film sector’s best resource for recruitment and our jobs service is free to access for recruiters and job seekers. As well as criteria for posting jobs on the ICO website, you can find our guidance below on what makes a good job advert. This is a living document that we will revisit regularly and we welcome your feedback on what works for both job seekers and recruiters. This guidance was published on 12 August 2021 and was last updated on 27 March 2023.

Our essential criteria for advertising with ICO

To help create a fairer industry and to help employers find the best talent, our essential criteria for any job advertised via ICO are that it includes:

• The job title
• Job description
• The salary (if listing a part-time role, both the part-time salary and the equivalent full-time salary is required). See ICO guidance for voluntary roles
• A location (and clarity on whether flexible/remote working is an option)
• Hours of employment (e.g. full time, part-time)
• Contract type (Permanent or if a fixed term or casual contract, please state time frame e.g. six-month contract)
• Closing date for applications
• It must not be listed with a stipulation that entries may close early due to a high level of applications. Once posted, listings must remain live until the advertised closing date.

Our guidance as employers

In addition to the above criteria, we have reviewed recruitment in our own organisation to try to ensure we reach the widest pool of applicants and to make our recruitment processes as fair, inclusive and equitable as possible. We want to address areas where our organisation and the broader sector are not accessible to ethnically diverse and disabled people. Much of our thinking here reflects an attempt to see where recruitment practices inherently favour some groups over others. If you have suggestions on how we can do more, either in our own recruitment or in the wider industry, let us know.

Here are the things we’re doing to help reach more diverse candidates. You can read more about our thinking in this blog. We’re grateful to Fair Museum Jobs for guiding us in this work. We also recommend this resource from Applied on reducing bias in recruitment and this one from Flatpack Festival on inclusive recruitment.

Designing a fair job

• Writing a good job ad is an art in itself. You can use tools like the Gender Decoder to see whether you’re using any gendered terminology in your ad (reducing your usage may encourage more women to apply). Take a look at this Dyslexia Writing Guide to see if you’ve reduced challenges for dyslexics. And the Hemingway App helps you check how readable your ad is.
• Give some thought to the length of your ad. If you want a relatively concise response from the candidate, give a concise job description, as applicants will be responding to these criteria.
• We’re a Living Wage Employer. Living Wage employers pay at least £12.60/hour (£13.85 in London). We believe that people do their best work when they can meet their needs outside work. Fair pay also reduces staff turnover, which has a high level of direct and hidden costs. If you are offering a salaried role, spend some time calculating the actual working hours against the salary to find out whether your role meets Living Wage standards.
• Mention any access adjustments that can be made for candidates or anything that would prevent someone with access needs applying. Not every point of access is within your power to mitigate but being up front about the barriers reduces the burdens put on applicants with access needs. Conversely, if your role can be adjusted, you’re reaching a whole new group of talented people by making this clear.
• We recommend removing a requirement for degree level education unless it is genuinely essential for the role. If knowledge of a specific area to degree level equivalent is needed, the area of expertise should be outlined and other equivalent levels of experience should be accepted. Try to think about the skills required rather than easy proxies for those skills (e.g. a degree is a very clearly packaged way of arriving at skills and knowledge).
• Is there a clear fixed skillset for the job you’re advertising (e.g. a necessary professional qualification) or are there alternative skillsets to those you’ve previously considered? How about including a line like: ‘If you feel you have transferable skills that we could benefit from that don’t exactly match what we’ve imagined, we’re really happy for you to tell us why your experience could make a difference to our organisation.’
• Overall, make it clear that you’re open to different kinds of experience. Be clear that you accept work done in institutions or outside of them, paid and voluntary work, work in the film sector or outside of it if these are appropriate to the job you’re advertising. Let candidates know their experience counts!
• Ensure the person specification is clear so the candidate knows how they will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process. If you can, provide the candidate with recruitment guidance to guide them through the process. This can be a brief explanation of what you’re looking for to help the candidate to complete the form.
• Think about your company’s tone of voice. If you expect candidates to be clear in how they respond to the advert, then be clear in your ad. Being friendly and speaking in more conversational language will help reduce candidates’ hesitation about applying.

Recruiting and applications

• Think about offering the opportunity for people to apply via video or voice note.
• We recommend leaving at least four weeks for recruitment. Imagine someone who is balancing a full-time job, caring responsibilities, and their own chance to rest. Writing a good application can take the equivalent of a full day’s work time or longer, and it’s entirely possible a good candidate wouldn’t have access to that much sustained time in less than four weeks. Don’t miss out on these great candidates!
• Along the same lines, take some time to lay out the benefits of working with your organisation: offering flexibility in working is many people’s priority today. Can you offer flexible hours for someone who needs to do the school run, or for someone immunocompromised who doesn’t want to commute in peak hours? Lay out any other perks you offer to help create an overall picture of what kind of employer you are. Adding detail about how you support staff to do their work makes a big difference too. Be clear about pastoral care (e.g. mental first aiders). What reasonable adjustments is your work able to offer (e.g. adjustments for disabled employees)? Without being exhaustive, show candidates how flexible and supportive you are to the staff you already have.
• We recommend laying out the recruitment timeline in your job advert. This will ensure candidates are not left in the dark, make everyone on your team clear on key deadlines and cut down on the back and forth between candidates and recruiter. Make sure to build in time for your preferred candidate to consider their decision and to offer feedback to unsuccessful candidates. And crucially, if you have to delay the process at all, make sure you update candidates so they are not left assuming they haven’t been shortlisted.
• Be clear about what shape the recruitment process will take in your job ad. For example: “We’ll be selecting based on a first round of testing, followed by an interview of one hour with named staff where you’ll be asked to demonstrate a piece of work you are proud of that is relevant to the role.”
• Try to think of recruitment as a pyramid: at the beginning of the process, a wide group of people give a relatively small commitment of time to applying, which is then fleshed out and expanded as the field narrows. Having an exhaustive process at the beginning means you may alienate candidates who take the time to apply but don’t advance, and put off candidates who are suitable but are unsure if the time investment is worthwhile. Many candidates cite long application forms as their number one reason not to apply for a role. You are the experts on what your role requires and having a broad field at the beginning will help you find the right people for the job. The Watershed in Bristol have adopted a model where they lay out five essential criteria for a role and give a short interview to anyone who meets the criteria. This has radically changed who they shortlist for their roles.
• What about a video with someone on the hiring group explaining the job ad? This makes you more approachable and takes the fear factor out of the first interview.
• Are there chances for advancement? Talk about them! Arts organisations are often small with low turnover, but if you have the framework for professional development, that can be as enticing as a hefty salary bump.
• Is there a named individual who candidates can contact to discuss their application and suitability for the role? Ideally this person would be outside the recruitment panel to aid honest discussion.
• Ask at every stage of the process, ‘why do I need to know this from candidates?’ and remove anything you think can fall by the wayside. It’s probably not that important when hiring your next CEO to have their school history…
• Could you include work samples into your recruitment process? Work samples – small tasks that indicate how people would do the job in question – have been proven to be an excellent predictor of how people will perform in roles. While it’s not reasonable to set up lengthy or convoluted tasks for candidates, it’s worth looking at how a short task could clarify who is most appropriate. See more information.
• Try to respond to all applicants after you’ve made an appointment. Even if you can’t offer them detailed feedback, it’s only fair to return a very small proportion of the effort the candidates have taken to apply in how you let them know of the outcome. CharityJob have a good blog post on why it makes sense, but a useful stat to bear in mind: 79% of candidates are less likely to apply to an organisation again if they hadn’t had a response to a previous job application. So don’t reduce your future pool.
• A good rule of thumb is that the further a candidate moves in the process, the more feedback you should be willing to offer. Although it’s hard to put time aside for this, even a short response means a lot to candidates and will help you re-engage with them in the future.

Interviews 

• Think about whether it’s possible to cover expenses of candidates attending interviews, such as travel expenses (and whether applicants may reasonably prefer to interview via Zoom/video call).
• Consider circulating questions before the interview itself. This helps some people (including neurodivergent people) prepare to a better level and deliver their best.
• It is basic decency to let unsuccessful candidates know that they’ve been unsuccessful in a timely manner. It should be established at interview what the timeframe is for outcomes of the interview process and candidates should be updated if this changes.
• We recommend offering feedback to all candidates with HR support where staff time allows.

Work experience and internships 

The ICO does not post unpaid internships. In addition, we ask that internships and work experience placements:

• Must not come with a list of job responsibilities and must not replace paid work
• Must be of a fixed length
• Must have clear benefits for the intern for their personal development (e.g. ‘You will learn about how to deliver 70mm projection’)
• Must be clear about whether expenses are included.

What about volunteer roles?

Voluntary work is a contentious area. Done right, it can aid an organisation to do ambitious things, enrich the lives of volunteers and give those who want it an insight into the industry. Done wrong, it enriches an organisation and exploits volunteers. With some film organisations having a charitable aspect to their work and with many people wanting to help organisations that work for causes they care about, we feel there is a place for voluntary work. Many of the best candidates have engaged in voluntary work before moving into full-time employment. We recognise that not everyone can participate in unpaid work. But well-designed volunteering opportunities have a valuable place in the industry and many organisations (such as smaller film festivals) could not function without the support of generous volunteers.

Voluntary roles should:

• Be for a limited period of time or have a limited number of hours per week
• Offer to cover reasonable expenses for in-person attendance, including travel and food
• Not require high levels of expertise, skills or qualifications (e.g. in photography, translation etc.). Volunteer roles should not be replacing skilled paid roles
• Not require volunteers to provide their own equipment (e.g. photography equipment).

The ICO will not post voluntary roles we believe are potentially exploitative or ask too much of potential applicants.

What motivated us to create these guidelines?

ICO’s jobs board has significant influence in our sector. What we share through our board shapes what is seen as a ‘good job’ in film exhibition. We think it’s a good use of our free service to try and push for better jobs, better recruitment and better employment across the industry. The last year has given us renewed focus on what kind of industry we are making and who has a chance to contribute. Better recruitment practice is only one part of achieving these goals, but good recruitment practice is a pivotal moment in allowing equitable access to the industry.

If an employer advertises a role that doesn’t conform to the stipulations and guidelines we’ve laid out here, we’re not suggesting job seekers don’t apply. But in the future, we’re not going to be posting jobs that don’t fit the criteria we’ve laid out above in the top section. If you’re thinking of sharing a vacancy, please do. We are not experts in recruitment, and we can’t give detailed advice, but we’ll let you know if the vacancy doesn’t fit with these new stipulations.

We’re also very open to improvements or discussion around these new guidelines. Please email duncan.carson@independentcinemaoffice.org.uk if there’s anything you think we could add or improvements to be made or if you feel that a job we’ve listed doesn’t fit our standards.

We are grateful to Fair Museum Jobs for their guidance in this area. If you would like to learn more about some of the thinking behind our new policies, their manifesto is a great place to start and below you can watch a discussion we held with them as part of our Young Audiences Screening Days event in June 2021.