How Asking The Wrong Interview Question Can Cost Your Business Thousands – Joanne Moss of Moss HR

Darren: On this week’s Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking to Joanne Moss of Moss HR. Joanne helps people with the HR in their businesses, as you would expect. So I’m going to be talking to Jo about what is a fascinating, truly fascinating and terrifying subject, and all of the things that can go horrifically wrong if you get your HR wrong when you are hiring, firing, setting contracts and running your business.

If you do not have an HR consultant in your business, you will absolutely need to listen to this, because this could cost you tens of thousands of pounds just by asking the wrong question at an interview.

Tell me, as an HR consultant and an outsourced HR company, what got you first interested in HR? Because it’s not the kind of thing people dream of doing when they’re in school.

Joanne: No, it’s not, and I didn’t dream of doing that when I was in school either. I fell into HR really. Even worse, I wanted to be an accountant when I was at school.

Darren: Oh, that is even worse.

Joanne: Yeah. So I started off in a firm of accountants. I was a bookkeeper and I did payroll as well, very old-fashioned payroll with the printed tax tables, manually calculating payroll and manual bookkeeping. I did that for about four or five years.

Then one role that I went for, the manager at the time said, “Yes, it’s finance, it’s payroll and this thing called personnel.” This was about 1998, 1999. I thought, “I don’t really know what that is, but I’ll give it a go.”

I started the following week and found out that the previous person had already left, so I was pretty much on my own. Then I discovered that finance was centralised in Manchester and I was in Suffolk, so there wasn’t actually any finance. There was payroll, which was fine, and the rest was this personnel thing.

There were about 250 employees, we had five out-bases, and it was warehousing and logistics. I spent about the first three weeks going home crying because I had no idea what I was doing. I was completely in over my head. No one in the business really knew what the job entailed at all. But I’m not one to give up easily, so I stuck at it and ended up loving it, kind of self-taught. When I left there, I went into my first full-time HR role.

Darren:

What changed though, from you going home crying to then you loving it?

What made it different?

Joanne: Well, one, I don’t give up easily. I was in this role where there was something that I didn’t know what to do with, so I started doing some research about what this personnel thing was. I obviously did payroll, so I had a little bit of an understanding from that perspective, but it’s quite different.

I did research and spoke to people and learned on my feet about what the job entailed. I think what lit the flame for me was that I could really influence how people felt at work. For example, if someone has an accident and they’ve been off work for a period of time, the longer somebody is off, the more difficult it can be to come back to work. They might have changed physically. They might not have the same skills if they’ve been injured physically. Or emotionally, it can sometimes be quite difficult to come back to work.

I realised that I could really influence that and make it better for people and get them back to work sooner, which is obviously best for the employer and for the employee. I think I just found some job satisfaction in that area that lit that fire for me.

Darren: I think there’s a lot of lack of understanding about how it affects people when they are away from work, not just accidents or injuries or sickness. It can be as simple as a holiday or maternity or any kind of leave they have. Any absence from it.

Coming back always seems to be quite daunting. I know you’re in BNI, and we’re going to talk about that in a moment, but we had a member of our BNI a few years ago who was very anxious about doing his weekly talk, about doing the 60 seconds, and he was really anxious about doing the 10 minutes.

He got better and better and got okay at doing it. He was still hyperventilating when he spoke, but he was able to do it. Then he went and got married and he was away for three weeks. And he never came back. Not because he didn’t like BNI or it wasn’t working for him. Just those three weeks away made him more and more anxious about coming back and doing a talk again and potentially a featured presentation. We never saw him again.

It can really impact you. It’s not just injuries. I don’t think people realise that

Joanne: No, I don’t think they do. There are simple things you can do to help alleviate some of that stress and worry about coming back to work, or to you, or to a group or a BNI meeting. Most of that is really just being in touch with that person and reassuring them.

For example, when someone first comes to a BNI meeting, I always say to them, “If you’re nervous about coming in, let me know and I’ll meet you in the car park,” because even just walking into a room sometimes is really stressful for people.

You mentioned maternity leave. I’ve got two children, and I didn’t have maternity leave in the traditional sense because I resigned from my corporate role when I had my daughter and started working for myself immediately. So I didn’t have that. But being away from work sometimes for months or even a year, you come back and it can be a completely different organisation. The people have changed, the desks have changed around, the clients have changed, some of the processes have changed.

I always say to clients, treat that person like a new employee. Make sure you’re in touch with them before they’re due back. Give them an update of what things have changed. Perhaps they can use some of their keeping-in-touch days to come into the business to essentially keep in touch, so it’s not quite as stressful when they come back. It can have a huge impact on people.

Darren: Friendship dynamics have changed as well. I always remember, I’ve just had this flash of memory of school because I hated school, but it’s pretty much the same thing.

There was a lot of picking on people in the playground at school. I was with a particular friend of mine and we would be together at lunchtime and playtime. I remember a situation where he had to stay in school during break, probably because he’d been naughty and had detention. I went out, and because I was on my own, the people that would normally have a go at us got me to join them. When he came out maybe half an hour later, we all picked on him.

I remember doing it, thinking, “Why am I doing this?” Then a few days later, or a week later, again this memory flashes in that I had to stay in and he went out. I knew when I went out, “Oh, he’s going to be picking on me now.” The friendship dynamic could change because of the absence, even though it was only 20 minutes, half an hour. It completely changes, and that’s the same as in the workplace. Not to the same extreme that you’re picking on people, obviously, because that was kids and kids are horrible, but it’s the same thing. Absence makes you more anxious about something that may or may not happen, and it doesn’t make you want to go back to it.

Joanne: Yes, and I think sometimes it’s the fear of the unknown. Things have probably changed whilst you’ve been away, but you don’t know what’s changed. Quite often when people have been in and covered a role, they’ve done an interim role or a fixed-term role to cover maternity leave or absence or something, there’s always that fear as well that, “What happens if that person has done the job better than me?” That kind of insecurity kicks in as well.

Getting in touch with people early and staying in touch with them and reassuring them is so important. It makes such a difference to them.

Darren: I get the feeling when you took this role on, you’ve embraced it and you’ve loved it and you’ve made a business out of it because you like to help people and make them feel secure, happy, wanted and cherished in the workplace.

Joanne: Yes, exactly.

Darren: But HR can do the opposite though, can’t it?

Joanne: HR has got a really bad name, and sometimes I don’t actually tell people what I do. There’s one particular person who is a professional businessman locally and runs an organisation and delivers training sometimes. I won’t mention him. I went to one of his workshops a long time ago and we did the introductions around the room. When it came to me, I said what I did and he literally sneered at me. For the rest of the workshop, he continued to make these little comments.

It turned out that he’d been made redundant a few years previously and had a bad experience, and he really took that out on me because I was HR. I wasn’t upset by it. I was just a little bit annoyed and a little bit sad, because HR have to deliver a message sometimes, but they don’t make the decisions really. They deliver that message. You know that old saying “Don’t shoot the messenger”, but HR are blamed for it.

We also have to deal with quite negative things, like grievances, absences, dismissals. It does come with negative connotations, but actually we can have a really positive influence as well and we can make a difference to the bottom line. So yes, you’re right. It’s not always the good stuff that we get to do.

Darren: As an employee, and I’ve been there, if you go into a meeting with a manager and there’s somebody from HR in the room, something’s gone wrong. Quite likely you’re in trouble over something that you’ve done or said.

Joanne: Yes.

Darren: I’ve been there a long time ago. You mentioned this guy, obviously he’d made out HR people were the enemy because he’d been made redundant. He’d probably done something… well, I don’t know, I’m not putting words in your mouth. He may have done something to bring that on himself, I don’t know.

Joanne: He might have done. He may well have done.

Darren: But there are a lot of people in business who do, as you say, sneer at HR and think, “Oh, it’s soft skills, it’s people people, touchy-feely. I don’t need any of that crap in my business. I can run it myself. I don’t need HR.”

There are some really awful mistakes you can make if you don’t have HR advisory, HR advice, within your business, aren’t there? Can you give a couple of examples of what those are?

Joanne: Yes. I think it’s a case of you don’t know what you don’t know. My strapline is “people management made simple” because HR is just a process. You have to follow the process. You can make a decision about something that is totally fair, but if you haven’t followed your process, it can be automatically unfair.

For example, I see quite a lot of the time people advertising, usually on social media, usually builders or someone in trade, and they say “Young lad wanted”, “School leaver wanted”, and it makes me cringe. I know what they are saying: they want a young man who’s strong, who can do the job. But from an employment law perspective, they’re really putting themselves at risk.

Quite often I’ll just message them and say, “Look, I’m not after your business. Please just be aware of this. You might want to reword it.”

Darren: I was laughing at that then because there was a guy in our BNI – and he knows who he is if he’s listening to this – he stood up and said, “I’m looking for strong young men, nobody over the age of 40.”

Because he was a builder. And it’s like, “Mate, you can’t say that. You can’t do that. You’ve just said that in a room full of 35 people.”

Sorry, go on.

Joanne: That is a really good example because people don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that they shouldn’t be saying that, whereas actually they should be describing the job so people can decide for themselves whether they can do it or not. Then you would interview.

My daughter is obviously a bit of a feminist because she’s my daughter. She’s a teenager. She said to me a couple of years ago, “Mum, at school today, one of the teachers said, ‘Could I have some strong lads to help move tables?'” And she said, “I said to them, ‘I’m strong and I can move tables.'” And I said, “Yes, you can.” She actually is really strong for being such a small girl, but it’s not just adults that have got this mindset. Even teachers are putting it in these students’ minds from a young age.

It really is about educating and just knowing that when you want to take somebody on, there are rules and things you have to follow, and speaking to an expert can keep you out of trouble. It can be as simple as the wording in a job ad, because you don’t have to employ someone to be taken to an employment tribunal for discrimination.

Darren: They can do that as soon as they apply, can’t they?

Joanne: Yes, which a lot of people don’t realise. Particularly with interviews, there are things that you cannot ask somebody at interview that maybe 30 years ago you would have got away with. Now you’re really on thin ice if you ask them, such as, “Are you expecting to start a family soon?” or even “Do you smoke?”

Darren: The family thing is… I still know people who ask that. “What does your husband do?” And it’s like, “Why is that relevant?” Or, “Do you own your own home?” It’s like, why are these things relevant? I can either do the job or I can’t. It makes no difference whether I’m married or what my husband does or what my wife does or whatever.

I think it’s so easy to get it right, but it’s really easy to get it wrong as well, which can be disastrous for businesses. You say disastrous. What are the implications if somebody were to go for an interview with, let’s say, an elderly dinosaur that would ask this kind of thing, and he asked a woman outright, “Are you expecting to have a baby in the next five years?” What theoretically could happen?

Joanne: If that person didn’t get the job and a man got the job, she could say, “Well, he didn’t give me that job because I said I was going to have a child, and therefore it’s direct sex discrimination.”

In an employment tribunal, there is no cap on the amount that someone can be awarded for discrimination, including sex discrimination. There could be a massive award. Going to an employment tribunal, or even if you settle before an employment tribunal, there’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done: managers’ time, solicitors’ fees. There could be PR implications as well. It can take over your whole life because it takes up so much time, money and resources.

Just asking the wrong question at an interview could cost you thousands, tens of thousands of pounds

Darren: Absolutely.

Joanne: And there’s no excuse in an employment tribunal to say, “Well, I didn’t know,” because as an employer, you should make it your business to know these things.

I often liken it to driving a car. You can have a lovely car, you can go out every day and you can speed if you want, you can not have an MOT, you might not wear your seat belt, and you might always get away with that. You might go through life and never get caught. However, there might be that time where perhaps you have an accident or there’s a police car sitting at the end of the road.

I liken that to HR. You can run a business and you can do whatever you want. You can dismiss people, you can discriminate against people, and it might always be fine, but there might be a day where you get it wrong and someone takes it further, and it could decimate a business.

So I always see myself as a bit of a risk assessor when I’m dealing with cases. I’ll say, “This is the way I think you should deal with it. You could deal with it this way, which, if you wanted to, you can make a commercial decision and deal with it that way. These are the risks, but it’s up to you whether you take that risk.” I tend to give them two or three options.

Darren: I was wincing then because you mentioned speeding, and I’m on nine points. Although by the time this podcast goes out, hopefully it’s still nine points and no more. I’ve got more points than Manchester United right now.

I was going to say Ipswich, but that was last season. I don’t know how they’re doing this season, because I know you’re from Ipswich.

What I was going to say is, in terms of interviews and what people don’t know about HR, do you think there’s a lack of understanding on employees, on people going for jobs, on people in the working environment, about what their rights are with HR?

Off the top of my head, for example, if you work in a job such as ours, you legally have to be given a contract on day one. If you’re not given that, the company is in breach. Do people know their rights on this sort of stuff?

Joanne: I think people know their rights much better than they did a few years ago, probably because of social media and things that are available on the internet. So yes, I think people are more aware of their rights. Whether they always get it right is another matter.

More often than not, I think they do know their rights, but it’s not always quite accurate.

Darren: You can’t really trust social media or AI. ChatGPT is going to tell you what it wants.

Joanne: No. There was an employer recently who went to court and they had used an AI tool to write some case law, and the case law wasn’t real. It wasn’t real case law at all. They have been struck off.

I think especially the younger generation are relying on these AI tools more and more, and it’s not always accurate. You can normally tell, if an employee has written a grievance, whether they’ve written it or whether it’s AI, if you know that employee. They might quote employment law and it’s not quite right.

Darren: In terms of businesses then, there’s a lot of expense that businesses have when they’re starting up. If you go into business, you do it because you want to make the lifestyle you want for yourself and your family. You don’t go in because you necessarily want to employ loads of people and be sitting in endless meetings and one-to-ones and hiring people and dealing with HR and payroll and national insurance contributions. Nobody really wants to do all of that.

So what would you say is the absolute minimum requirement a business needs in terms of HR if they’re going to be taking on staff?

Joanne: The absolute minimum is your employment contract, and a good employment contract that reflects your business. Quite often people will say, “Oh yeah, I used to work for whatever corporate company and I just borrowed theirs and I use theirs.” Those policies, procedures and contracts are written for big corporates, not for small organisations, so they’re not really fit for purpose. They don’t fit.

You want your employment contracts and your policies to work for you, not against you. Whatever is written into those should be happening in practice. If it’s not, then they need to be changed.

So a good employment contract and a good set of essential policies. For example, a disciplinary policy, grievance policy, absence policy, so it’s all laid out and both parties know where they stand. It’s all transparent.

I think those are the most important things.

Darren: I think what’s also important, from experience in companies I’ve worked in before, is how you dismiss staff if that happens. There are a lot of, and I’m going to use the word dinosaur again, there are a lot of dinosaurs in businesses that think you can just say to somebody, “Right, that’s it, you’re fired, get out,” and that’s job done. Because many years ago, that may have been how it used to work, but it’s not how it works now, and that can cost you a lot of money.

I used to work at an agency. I’ll be careful. I won’t name them. They don’t exist anymore, so I probably could name them, but I won’t. I used to work with an agency in Cardiff about 20 years ago. One of the people there got into some trouble because the owners of the company thought he’d given software they owned to somebody else, to an ex-employee. He hadn’t done it. It was another person there. When he wasn’t in, it automatically signed in to his MSN Messenger – this was back then – which auto-signs into your personal Hotmail.

They went into his personal Hotmail and saw emails from this ex-employee asking for a copy of the software, which he didn’t give them. They took that as, “Oh, he’s done it,” and they brought him in and then sacked him. Because they’d accessed his personal email, even though it was on a work machine, you can’t do that. Even though it’s signed in, it’s his personal email. They’re not allowed to look at it, they’re not allowed to see it. They did, they used it, and they dismissed him.

He went to this huge HR law firm called Eversheds. Have you heard of them?

Joanne: Yes.

Darren: Absolute monsters. Would never want to go up against them. They got him a massive settlement and he was able to write his own reference, in their words, all because they didn’t know how to do it. They didn’t have any HR advice whatsoever. They had no consultation. They just went, “You’ve done that. You’re fired.” It massively backfired on them. That’s the sort of stuff that businesses are doing, the kind of mistakes people make if they don’t take advice from people like you.

Joanne: Yes, absolutely. It doesn’t take much just to have a phone call with somebody and say, “Look, this is what I’m thinking of doing. Is that okay?” Then it’s a yes or a no.

Luckily, touch wood, I don’t get too many people now phoning me saying, “Oh, I’ve done this, is it okay?” Most people now will phone me beforehand because I’ve drummed it into them: “Ring me before you do anything,” because a quick phone call can change that course and save them a lot of time and heartache.

As an employer, they should know. A bit like when you drive a car, it’s your responsibility to know what the law is and what the road signs mean. It’s the same with employing people.

Darren: Always back to the road signs. You’ve got to keep rubbing that one in, haven’t you?

Joanne: Always. Absolutely.

Darren: I drive in Wales as well. The road signs lie. Some of them still say 30, but it’s actually 20. I don’t know legally how they can get away with that.

Joanne: Do they still say 30?

Darren: Some of them say 30, but they’re now 20. I’d argue that personally. I’ve not been caught on that particular one yet, but I would definitely argue that. Hopefully it won’t come to it.

Joanne: Yes, I would too.

Darren: So with your own business, you’ve joined BNI. How long ago was that?

Joanne: I joined in 2020, so just over five years ago. I joined in the middle of COVID.

Darren: Fair enough.

Joanne: I hated networking. But I knew, I was a sole trader to begin with for about ten years. Then I decided to become a limited company. That happened in 2019. I knew that I probably had to do some networking. So in 2019 I joined a women’s networking group. I didn’t really like it, to be fair. It was mainly women who were selling to individuals rather than business-to-business, so I didn’t really enjoy it.

My year was up – I’d signed up for a year – and my year was up in March 2020. At that point I left because it just wasn’t working for my business.

A couple of people had said to me, “You should try BNI.” I said, “I’ve heard of them, but I don’t really know much about it.” So I was invited to go along to a meeting in Cambridge – well, online in Cambridge.

At my first meeting there were two other HR consultants there as visitors, who I knew. I knew both of them and I just thought, “They’re not having that seat. I’m having that seat.” So I joined straight away and really loved it from the beginning.

I like the structure, because in my role I like structure and process, so I really liked that part of it. The group itself, they were in the middle of COVID, so I think it was very different. Everyone was very much about supporting each other. I immediately felt part of the group rather than an outsider, which in some networking groups I think can happen. There can be little cliques. I don’t know whether that’s because we were online and we weren’t actually in a physical room at the time, but they were all very supportive and welcomed me into the group.

I saw an immediate return on investment, in terms of getting business and in terms of my confidence in networking. I love networking and I love presenting now, and I hated it before.

For me I always talk about the intangibles of BNI, and those are the key things for me, because those translate into your business as well. When you’re talking to clients, your presenting skills are really important. For me, those are the biggest things I got out of it, as well as the return on investment.

It was an interesting time. Going back in person was quite daunting. I joined in the July. The following April I became president for our group, and we went back in person around the November. I was managing that process. My very first in-person BNI meeting – remember, I hated networking and I hated presenting – my very first in-person BNI meeting, I was president. I was scared, to say the least, because we were in a massive auditorium and we were all spaced out. It was really daunting.

But it was the best thing I ever did because it completely knocked that fear of presenting out of me, and now I’m more than confident to stand up in front of a room.

Darren: I hear a lot of people say that. You talk about the intangible skills and how going to BNI specifically, but other networking sometimes as well, gives them confidence in public speaking, gets them out of themselves, gets them happy to talk to people and to present. It’s something that nobody really goes there with the intention of doing, but it is a skill that a lot of people pick up.

I’m curious as to why you were a member of this other women’s networking group for a year, and you say you hated it and you hated networking as a result of that, but then you loved BNI. What was the difference between the two? What made you love one but hate the other?

Joanne: The first one felt very much like a ladies’ lunch club. I guess my objective for going there was to grow my business and I didn’t get that from it. I was quite busy. I had two very young children. I was running a business, trying to grow the business, and my time was really precious. I had a short amount of time between dropping the kids off and picking them up. That two, two and a half hours in the middle of the day was pretty much my whole day. I couldn’t do much beforehand, couldn’t do much afterwards.

I felt like it was a bit of a waste of time because it was just a lunch club and I needed to be in front of businesses, not consumers. Because of that, it made me feel as though networking wasn’t worth it.

Darren: I’m guessing with that networking group you were in, there wasn’t an attendance policy.

Joanne: There was an attendance policy, so you had to send a sub if you couldn’t make it, but it was only once a month. It wasn’t weekly, it was once a month. You could send a sub, but there wasn’t any accountability in terms of being accountable to other people or having one-to-ones or anything like that.

In BNI, alongside everything we do, there is the training as well. If you don’t know how to stand up and do a 60 seconds, there is support there to help you. If you don’t know how to carry out an effective one-to-one, there is support and training. For me, it’s been a huge five-year-long learning and development journey, which has been fantastic.

Darren:

How quickly did it take for you to get your first really good referral from it?

Joanne: I think it was probably about four months to get a really good referral. I think it’s a bit like finance or independent financial advisers. It takes a little bit of time for people to trust you, because with financial advisers, you’re trusting them with your personal finances. With HR, quite often people are saying, “I know it’s a bit of a mess,” or, “I know I should have done this,” and they’re almost a little bit embarrassed. Whereas actually, the more of a mess you’re in, the more I love it, because the bigger impact I can have to help you improve.

So I think it takes a little while to build that trust. It takes a little while as well for me to show people what I do and to teach them what I do. But once they see that, I’ve still got retained clients from 2020 that are still with me now that I gained through BNI. It’s not a quick fix. For me it’s very much long-term relationships with the people in my BNI chapter and the wider network.

Darren: How do you find, because this is something we do a lot of education slots and talks on in our chapter, that “givers gain” doesn’t necessarily work, because a lot of people who are giving aren’t necessarily gaining, and a lot of people who are gaining aren’t necessarily giving. How did you find it in terms of giving referrals to other people? How easy was it? What strategy do you use?

Joanne: I found it quite easy to give referrals. People often say to me, “I don’t have that many clients,” or, “I work on my own, so I don’t talk to other people.” Most of the referrals I give aren’t from people I already know.

For example, we’ve got a new person in our chapter. He’s been there a couple of months and he has a kitchen and bathroom showroom. He said, “I’d really like to talk to this person in this specific niche,” so I just contacted that person and said, “Look, there’s a guy in my networking group, he does fantastic kitchens and bathrooms. Here’s a link to his website. I’ve been to his showroom. He’s such a nice guy. He’d really like to work with you.”

He agreed to have a call with him. He’s now sent over, I think, 10 projects for kitchens and bathrooms.

Darren: Ten?

Joanne: Yes.

Darren: Wow. And you must have some thank-you business for that.

Joanne: Yes. I think it’s about looking for opportunities. Because I talk about BNI and I love it – some people in my chapter call me Miss BNI because I love it so much – I talk about it a lot. I often big people up in my chapter on my personal Facebook profile, for example, so my clients and my friends will now come to me and say, “Do you know an electrician?” or “Do you know a painter and decorator?”

It’s actually quite easy to pass referrals now because people know I’ve got that network.

Darren: It is when you get to that stage, when you get people asking you, “Who would you recommend for this? You’re well connected, you know loads of people. What electrician would you recommend?” and you’re like, “This is easy. Why doesn’t everybody have multiple referrals every week like me? People just come to me and ask, ‘Do you know a good plumber?'” And you’re, “Yes, I do. I know a really good plumber.” I’m not saying they do that every single week, but it is quite often.

Joanne: Yes, it’s nice because they know that I see those people every single week. A cowboy builder is not going to join BNI, and they’re certainly not going to come along every week where, if they’ve done a bad job, they’ve got to face you the next week. So generally, 99 per cent of the time, they’re trusted individuals who are going to do a really good job.

Darren: You’ve mentioned that. I wasn’t even going to bring that up in this because I’ve literally just recorded a solo podcast on this which will have gone out before this goes live. You say 99 per cent are trusted. There is one per cent that isn’t.

I’ve had that experience where I was working with someone who ended up not paying. I found out afterwards, because nobody talks about it – it’s a British thing I think, we don’t like to talk about it – I found out when he was going to come and visit our group, because he was from another group. I thought, “I’d rather not be in the same room if possible. I’d rather not be there.” I had to explain why. Then someone else came forward and went, “Oh yeah, he’s done that before, to people that I was in another group with in a different region.”

I wish you’d told me that last year, because then I wouldn’t have had this problem.

What’s your take – because obviously this covers HR as well – on dealing with someone who either does a bad job or doesn’t pay? We don’t like to talk about it. We don’t like to out people because it doesn’t reflect well on us if we do that, but we are protecting others from it. What are your thoughts on that?

Joanne: I think it’s really tricky because you often only know one side of the story. It might be that, “Yes, they didn’t pay,” but I’m not saying this is true in your case. It might be that, “Yes, I didn’t pay them because they did a really rubbish job,” or, “They didn’t uphold their end of the bargain.”

For example, I share my office with a marketing person. I know from sharing an office with her that one of the main things when she’s trying to launch a website for a client is that they need certain things from the client as well, so the client has to deliver on their side. When someone says to you, “They didn’t pay me,” how do you know it’s just a case of not paying, rather than they didn’t pay for a particular reason? Or just because that’s happened once doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.

I think it’s really difficult. From a personal perspective, if I’ve seen something like that happen and I see another contact going to work with that person, I might say to them, “Look, just be careful with this. You might want to get some of the money up front,” for example.

Darren: That is exactly what I said to somebody.

Joanne: I’ve only ever had a couple of people who haven’t paid me. One of them, the next time they came back to me, I said, “I’m going to have to ask you to pay up front, because last time we spent quite a lot of time chasing, so we’re just going to ask for the money up front.”

From an HR perspective, quite often what happens is they know someone has had a lot of absence in another role, then they’ve applied for a job and the employer says, “What about if they’re the same?” I say, “What about if the last organisation was really bad and they couldn’t face going to work?” Just ask them about it. Say, “We noticed on your reference that you had a high absence. Can you tell us about it? Is there anything we can do to support you?” Quite often there’s been an issue at that organisation.

So I think sometimes just be upfront about it and talk about it, because we don’t talk about it enough. You’re right.

Darren: That’s good advice. You’re talking about references then. That’s something I think is worth pointing out, because not a lot of companies know that if you’ve got an employee that leaves you under a cloud, for example, and then you get another company come to you and go, “You hired this person, what were they like?” If you don’t have HR advice, your first instinct might be, “I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. Absolute nightmare. Always turned up late, stole from us.” You can’t say that.

Joanne: You can if it’s true, but you are running risks.

One of the main things about references is, if someone asks you for a reference, make sure you ask for the written consent from the person. “Can you show me their consent to share this information?” I tend to say to people, just be factual. Rather than give an opinion, just be factual.

Darren: That’s what we do now, and I’ve found a lot of companies do that. They’ll say, “This was the start date, this was their end date, this is how many days’ absence they had.” That’s it. No personal reference, no skills reference whatsoever, just, “These are the facts,” because companies are too scared now to potentially be sued. “I didn’t get that job because you said this,” and it’s debatable about why that was the case. As you said, you don’t know what the company they worked for was like. There could have been reasons they were off. If they end up not getting a job because the company says that, you’ve got potential legal action again.

Joanne: Absolutely. It’s a minefield.

Darren: It’s a minefield.

Joanne: Yes, it is a little bit.

Darren: You’re putting me off HR now.

Joanne: Hopefully I’m putting other people on to using somebody in HR, because they don’t want to do it themselves. As I say, it is just a process. Things can still go wrong, but as long as you’re following the process and you’re acting in a fair way, then it should be smooth.

Darren: Should be smooth.

Joanne: Should be smooth.

Darren: Should be smooth. Yes, should be smooth.

Okay, so what’s the biggest mistake you’ve seen people make in terms of HR? Or maybe the most common.

Joanne: The most common mistake or the biggest mistake, I think, is probably not keeping their policies and contracts up to date, because they forget what they say. Again, going back to people taking a contract from a previous employer and then maybe trying to dismiss someone and give them a week’s notice, and it’s like, “Well, the contract says that you’ll give them three months’ notice, so you have to do that.”

Not knowing what their contracts or their policies say. My biggest piece of advice is that when you’re going through a process, re-read your policy, re-read your procedure. You might have read it a year ago or two years ago or 10 years ago, but you need to refresh yourself as to what that says, because you have to follow your own process. If it goes to employment tribunal, you will be criticised for not following it.

It can be something simple like making sure you hold a certain meeting and allowing them to have someone present, but you must follow your process. That’s the biggest thing: not keeping them up to date and not reading them.

Darren: I can see that. There’ll be a lot of companies out there, a lot of business owners possibly listening to this, thinking that contracts and processes and terms and conditions, “I know I need these, so I’ll just download one off the internet, change a few words and that’s it. I’ve got it done, tick, I’m okay.” But that’s probably the worst thing you could do, because you don’t even know what it says.

Joanne: Exactly. My biggest thing is, yes, you can go online and download a contract, but one, how do you know it’s up to date, because employment law changes with what you have to have in the contract; and two, do you know what everything means; and three, does it actually reflect what happens in your business?

Shameless plug here. I created a toolkit for people taking on their first employee.

Darren: Tell us about the toolkit.

Joanne: Instead of just being a download of documents – it’s not just a download of a policy and a contract, even though there are those – there is a series of videos that guide people through what they need to know. It gives them the knowledge they really need to know as an employer, and the wider considerations. Then through the contract and the policies, there are little notes to say, “You can put this in, but this is the legal minimum,” or, “You can change this bit, you can’t change that bit.” It really is about giving people knowledge.

People come to me and say, “Can you just draft an employment contract for me?” and they don’t know anything else. That’s a bit like saying, going back to the car situation, “Can you give me a map to get to Leeds,” but they don’t know how to drive. It’s that kind of thing.

Darren: And this toolkit, how can one come by this toolkit?

Joanne: It’s on my website, so mosshr.com, and then toolkits. We’ve got a couple of toolkits on there, but that one in particular is “Simple steps to taking on your first employee”.

Darren: And the cost for accessing this toolkit?

Joanne: The cost is £450 plus VAT, and people get access for an entire year. I wrote it when I was taking on my first employee, so it’s from my HR skills and experience, but also from my experience as a new employer. What I didn’t want was for people to have access to it and then employment law or case law changes. You get access for a whole year so that any changes I make in that time they have access to as well.

Darren: So it’s updated constantly as things change, so that you’re always ahead of the law.

Joanne: Yes, exactly. There are lots of changes coming up with the new Employment Rights Bill, so that will be reflected in the toolkit as well.

Darren: I think that’s worth touching on. We’ve got a few minutes left. As an employer, it’s getting scary, all the different changes that are coming in and the rules from day-one rights. As I understand it, it’s become extremely difficult now to get rid of someone from day one once they’ve started, whereas previously you could have them on a three-month trial or six-month trial and it was much easier, which I think is making it less likely that companies are going to employ because of the fear.

Joanne: At the moment, employees have to have two years’ service to claim unfair dismissal. We talked about discrimination earlier. Discrimination has no service requirement, so before you’re even employed, like with a job ad, you can claim discrimination. But unfair dismissal has a two-year requirement. You have to be employed for two years.

The proposal is that that will be a day-one right. It might change to six months. There might be a statutory probationary period for six months. We don’t actually know yet what that looks like because it’s still going through the process.

In any case, I would suggest people have at least a six-month probationary period. It literally just means, if it does happen that it’s day one that they can claim unfair dismissal from day one of employment, if someone is recruiting in the right way, inducting in the right way and going through a fair probationary period, all of those things reduce people’s risk of an unfair-dismissal claim anyway. So if you’re doing everything in the right way, your risk is limited anyway. It shouldn’t make any difference.

Darren: It shouldn’t make any difference, but it makes it even more important to make sure you’re following those right processes.

Joanne: Of course.

Darren: By using an HR consultant.

Joanne: By using an HR consultant, yes, obviously.

Darren: Obviously. My fear with it was that they’re pushing it too much in favour of employees, which means that companies, employers, would be less likely to employ, which would make the job market more difficult because people wouldn’t be moving as much and companies would be reluctant to grow, because they didn’t want to risk taking somebody on, finding they were grossly wrong for the role in the first couple of days, and then finding they were sued for wrongful dismissal for hiring the wrong person, which theoretically, if this came in and there was no probationary period, could happen.

Joanne: I think it already has had an impact, not least because of the increase in national insurance, for example, from next April, and statutory sick pay, which at the moment is payable from the fourth day of absence, will be payable from the first day of absence.

Darren: I didn’t even know that.

Joanne: Yes, it’s already had an impact. The recruitment market has been tricky for a couple of years and it’s still not recovered, and I think people are afraid to take people on. Yes, absolutely they are.

Darren: Well, that’s a jovial ending, I think.

Joanne: We need to have a different ending, don’t we?

Darren: What’s positive coming in that you can tell us?

Joanne: The positive thing is we can help. Don’t be scared. It’s not all doom and gloom. As long as you do it properly and you use somebody like us, then everything is going to be okay. It can be tickety-boo.

Darren: Yes. But if you try and navigate this alone, there are mistakes you’re going to make, and they’re going to be very costly.

Joanne: Yes, they can.

Darren: Like that company I used to work with that accessed somebody’s personal email, sacked them, and then got sued by Eversheds.

Joanne: Yes. Don’t do that.

Darren: Don’t do that. No.

For anyone listening to this who is thinking, “Oh my God, I need to speak to Jo Moss because quite frankly, I’m a ship heading for the rocks,” what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Joanne: Via the website, mosshr.com, or I’m on LinkedIn, or they can drop me an email, jo@mosshr.com.

Darren: Fantastic. Thank you very much for being a guest on the podcast. I’ve loved it. I’ve learned stuff. You’ve scared me a little bit, but that’s okay. I think it’s important we are all scared once in a while. So Jo, thank you very much.

Joanne: Thank you so much.

Darren: See you later.

About your host:

Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/

Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com

Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk