This blog post is written by Caroline Fiennes, Giving Evidence

One of the Foundation Practice Rating’s criteria is: Does the foundation publish its recruitment policy for board members? (It’s our question no. 57).

This short post is to explain what we mean by this.

We mean an actual policy, which explains features like:

• The fact that all Trustee positions are advertised openly.
• Whether the process is managed in-house or externally or could be either.
• The type of selection criteria, e.g., experience in a particular sector or discipline; whether a degree is required.
• That the process and advert will be clear about pay, term limits, benefits, what expenses are reimbursed.
• How applications are long-listed, shortlisted.
• How interviews (if any) are conducted and by whom.
• The offer process, e.g., whether and how references are taken up. 

An excellent example John Ellerman Foundation’s recruitment policy. (Disclosure: John Ellerman Foundation is in the Funders Group which enables the Foundation Practice Rating to happen.)

What does not count – but we see a lot – is a brief statement in the Annual Report. These are often literally only one or two sentences. An example is this: “Trustees are appointed on the basis of specific skills and knowledge to enable them to make a contribution to the management of the charity” – followed by another single sentence about induction, e.g., stating that new Trustees (i.e., once appointed, so after the recruitment process, which is what the question is about) are given the appropriate Charity Commission publications.

We tightened up on this criterion this year (Year Five). We think that some of the latter type of brief statements were allowed in previous years but this year were deemed inadequate: we may have been unwarrantedly generous before. We do not think that this change affected the grade of any foundation.