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Thanks for your interest in working with us. We have an online jobs board, where you can search and apply for jobs.

Becoming an employee in 4 easy steps:

Apply
Have you found the perfect job for you on our site? Apply online before the closing date.
Interview/Assessment
If you are shortlisted you will be invited to attend for an assessment/interview.
Decide
We contact you to let you know that you have been successful and offer feedback if you are unsuccessful.
On-Boarding Process Starts
Our friendly Workforce Resourcing team will be in touch regarding your appointment and will keep in regular contact with you prior to your start date.

Guidance notes for completing an application form

General information

The following information is designed to help you complete the application form as effectively as possible.

Please contact a member of the HR Service, if you require assistance in completing the form, or need the form in an alternative format.

Bexley follows a policy of Valuing Diversity and has an equality action plan. We understand that our workforce consists of individuals who are unique and different and by harnessing these differences we will create an environment where every individual feels valued and encouraged, where talents are recognised, developed and utilised. This will help us meet our organisational goals.

Please read the information pack paying particular attention to the job description and person specification. You can provide a CV in lieu of the application form as long as it includes all the details asked for on the application form. You must still complete and return the recruitment monitoring form.

Section 1

Contact details

Please complete this section fully.

If you are currently working please make sure you indicate if you do not wish to be contacted at work. We would prefer to contact you via e-mail if possible so please confirm your preferred e-mail address in the relevant box. Please provide all previous names.

Section 2

Employment record

Please complete this section in date order, beginning with your most recent job and listing all work undertaken since leaving school/college. You must include all previous employment, including periods of voluntary work. Any breaks between employment or education and employment should be fully explained.

Please continue with this section on a separate sheet if necessary.

Section 3

Education and training

Please complete this section as fully as possible, we will require evidence of your highest and/or relevant qualifications before confirming an appointment and may check your qualifications with the relevant awarding body. Qualifications are not always essential for all posts; you may have undertaken other training that is just as relevant to the post.

Please only complete the questions about holding a driving licence if driving is a duty of the post.

Section 4

Experience and skills

This is the most important section and must be completed fully.

During the short-listing process your skills, experience and knowledge will be assessed against the selection criteria outlined on the person specification.

It is therefore very important that you address all the areas identified in the person specification and give specific examples as to how you meet the selection criteria including the 6 High-Performance Indicator Values.

You may have gained relevant experience through paid employment, or voluntary work in the community or in a school environment, etc.

You may find it helpful to do a rough draft first making sure you have covered all the requirements of the person specification.

Section 5

References

All offers of appointment depend on receiving references satisfactory to the Council. You must give two referees that have had managerial/ supervisory responsibility for you, one of whom must be your manager with your current/most recent employer.

If you have not worked for some time or have not worked, give the name of someone who can comment on your ability to do the job. References will not be accepted from relatives or from people writing solely in the capacity of friends.

Further advice on who is suitable as a referee is available from HR. The Council reserves the right to ask for substitute referees if the one you have provided is not deemed to be suitable.

For certain posts, we reserve the right to contact any previous employer for a reference at any time. We will specifically enquire if disciplinary action has ever been taken or was pending and details of your sickness record. For posts involving working with vulnerable adults or children we will specifically enquire about disciplinary offences relating to these groups, including any which are “time expired”, and whether the applicant has been the subject of child protection concerns, and if so, the outcome of that enquiry or disciplinary procedure. If you are not currently working with these groups but have done so in the past, that previous employer will be asked about those issues.

Section 6

Declaration of criminal offences

You must give details of any warnings, offences, convictions, cautions or bindovers you have, or any court cases pending. Under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, you do not have to disclose information on spent convictions.

Jobs that involve access to persons who are disabled or addicted to drugs or alcohol or under 18 or over 65 are exempt under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 by virtue of the Exception Order. In this case you must reveal details of all convictions spent or otherwise.

These posts are also subject to the Criminal Records Bureau Disclosure - if this applies it will be specified in the information pack.

You may obtain further information on how much time needs to elapse before a conviction is spent, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and the Exception Order from the HR Service.

Section 7

Dismissal, disciplinary or capability procedures

Please provide details on a separate sheet. This will be considered alongside all other information provided in your application and will not automatically prevent your application from progressing further.

Section 8

Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 - Eligibility to Work

Please complete this section fully, the relevant documentation will be checked for the successful candidate.

Section 9

Declaring an interest

Failure to disclose an interest will disqualify you from being appointed to a post within the London Borough of Bexley.

Section 10

Additional information/special arrangements

Please provide dates and times when you are not available for interview, plus any additional information we may need to consider.

Section 11

Declaration

Please read this section carefully before signing your application form.

Failure to sign this part of the form will disqualify you from being appointed to a post with Bexley Council.

Section 12

Personal details

In order to make sure that the Council's policy on Valuing Diversity is working effectively, monitoring information needs to be collected and analysed. This information is confidential and monitored by Human Resources. It will not be used for selection purposes.

Section 13

Disability

The London Borough of Bexley is committed to ensuring that employees who have a disability are given every possible assistance in the workplace, and have achieved the 'Positive about Disabled People' award, which gives all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria in the person specification the opportunity to be interviewed.

If you answer YES to the question and require any special arrangements at interview, please provide details. You will be asked at the interview stage if you require any adjustments that would assist you at work if you were to be successful.

Section 14

Advertising monitoring

This information is required to ensure that the Council can monitor the effectiveness of its recruitment advertising.

Checklist

Read through your completed application form carefully making sure you have fully answered all the questions.
If you have completed separate sheets make sure that these are numbered and clearly marked with your name.
Keep a copy of your application form for reference.
Make sure you return the application form in plenty of time before the closing date appropriately stamped.

What happens next

Your completed application form will be used by the recruiting manager to decide whether or not you are selected for an interview. Managers are encouraged to respond to unsuccessful applicants as soon as possible and this will be via e-mail.

Feedback from the recruiting manager can be requested.

If you are short-listed, you should hear within 3 weeks of the closing date.

If you need any further information, staff in the HR Service will be able to help you. Please give them your name, the job title and reference number of the job.

Thank you very much for completing your application and recruitment monitoring form. We appreciate the time and effort you have taken to complete your form.

Human Resources contact details

For any general enquiries or assistance with the application process please contact the Recruitment Team

Email:recruitment@bexley.gov.uk

Please note you will not be able to send completed application forms to this email address. We can only accept applications made via: https://saas.zellis.com/lbb/wrl/

If you have any queries regarding any aspect of the job role then please refer to the advertisement for contact details.

Should you have any problems using the vacancy site, please contact the Systems Team

Email:TOPSSystemTeam@bexley.gov.uk
Tel: 020 3045 4339. (Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm)

Job Applicant Privacy Notice

The HR Workforce Resourcing Team collect and process personal data relating to job applicants. We are committed to being transparent about how we collect and use that data and to meeting our data protection obligations.

The information we collect

We will collect and process a range of information about you. Depending upon whether you will be a direct employee or worker (including agency workers and consultants) this may include:

your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number
details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history
information about your current level of remuneration, including entitlements to benefits such as pensions or insurance cover
whether or not you have a disability for which the organisation needs to make reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process
information about your entitlement to work in the UK
equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health, and religion or belief

We collect this information in a variety of ways. For example, data is collected through application forms or CVs; obtained from your passport or other identity documents such as your driving licence; from forms completed by you at the start of your employment (such as pension benefit nomination forms); from correspondence with you; or through interviews, meetings or other assessments.

We will also collect personal data about you from third parties, such as references supplied by former employers and in some cases information from Disclosure and Barring checks permitted by law.

Data is stored in a range of different places, including in your HR file, (details are held electronically on the Council’s DocStor system known as Estor), in the HR management systems (TOPS) and in other IT systems (including the Council’s email system).

Where unsolicited speculative CV’s are received for a role which is not currently being advertised/recruited to, in particular for hard-to-fill roles, we may share this with relevant managers and may hold it on file in line with the Council’s retention schedules.

Processing personal data

We process data in order to make decisions on recruitment and appointments. For candidates that are appointed to the Council please also refer to our Privacy Statement covering employees.

We need to process data to ensure that we are complying with our legal obligations. For example, we are required to check a successful applicant’s eligibility to work in the UK before employment starts. For certain positions, it is necessary to carry out Disclosure and Barring checks to ensure that individuals are permitted to undertake the role in question.

We have a legitimate interest in processing personal data during the recruitment process and for keeping records of the process. Processing data from job applicants allows the organisation to manage the recruitment process, assess and confirm a candidate's suitability for employment and decide to whom to offer a job. We may also need to process data from job applicants to respond to and defend against legal claims.

We also process health information to make reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process for candidates who have a disability. This is to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment.

Where we process other special categories of data, ie any information related to a protected characteristic such as information about ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health, religion or belief, age, gender or marital status, this is for equal opportunities monitoring purposes.

For some roles, we are obliged to seek information about criminal convictions and offences. Where we seek this information, we do so because it is necessary to carry out our obligations and exercise specific rights in relation to employment.

If your application is unsuccessful, we will keep your personal data on file for a period of one year in accordance with the Council’s published retention schedules.

Access to data

Relevant information will be shared internally for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes members of the HR and Workforce Resourcing Teams, interviewers involved in the recruitment process, managers in the service area with a vacancy and IT staff if access to the data is necessary for the performance of their roles.

Information shared is limited. In respect of data relating to any protected characteristics, this is restricted to the HR Service. Where an applicant has a disability that requires adjustments to the recruitment processes, relevant information will be provided to the recruiting managers to comply with this legal obligation. Detailed and medical information and records are restricted to the Occupational Health Service.

Occupational Health will, however, provide reports to HR regarding fitness for employment and any measures required to support prospective employees who are affected by health conditions for when they commence their employment with us.
We will not share your data with third parties other than sharing relevant and necessary data with former employers to obtain references for you, employment background check providers to obtain necessary background checks, the Disclosure and Barring Service to obtain necessary criminal records checks and any other relevant professional bodies as necessary to undertake pre-employment checks or to fulfil any other statutory requirements.

The Council is under a duty to protect the public funds it administers and to this end must use the information you provide within its authority for the prevention and detection of crime and fraud. It may also share this information with other bodies administering public funds solely for this purpose. We will not transfer your data to countries outside the European Economic Area.

Protecting your data

We take the security of your data seriously and have controls in place to ensure that your data is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed, and is not accessed except by our employees in the proper performance of their duties.

Where we engage third-party recruiters to process personal data on our behalf (for example a recruitment agency), those third parties are under a duty of confidentiality and are obliged to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of data.

Retaining data

If your application for employment is unsuccessful, the organisation will hold your data on file for one year after the end of the relevant recruitment process. When registering for vacancy alerts, by indicating that you wish to be notified of any future vacancy if you are unsuccessful, you are providing consent to your data being retained for these purposes.

If your application for employment is successful, personal data gathered during the recruitment process will be transferred to your HR file and retained during your employment for the performance of your employment contract and thereafter the Council’s Privacy Notice relating to employees will also apply.

The periods for which your data is also held during and after the end of employment are set out in the Council’s Retention Schedule.

Your rights

As a data subject, you have a number of rights. You can:

access and obtain a copy of your data on request
require us organisation to change incorrect or incomplete data
require us to delete or stop processing your data, for example where the data is no longer necessary for the purposes of processing
object to the processing of your data where we are relying on its legitimate interests as the legal ground for processing
ask us to stop processing data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about whether or not your interests override our legitimate grounds for processing data

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact hradmin@bexley.gov.uk You can make a subject access request by completing the form which can be found at Complaints and feedback page.

If you believe that we have not complied with your data protection rights, you can complain to the Information Commissioner.

Providing personal data

You are under no statutory or contractual obligation to provide data to us during the recruitment process. However, if you do not provide the information, we may not be able to process your application properly or at all.

Certain information, such as contact details, your right to work in the UK and payment details, have to be provided to enable the Council to enter a contract of employment with you. The failure to provide details of a right to work in the UK will mean that we cannot employ you. If you do not provide other information, this will hinder our ability to administer the rights and obligations arising as a result of the employment relationship efficiently.

You are under no obligation to provide information for equal opportunities monitoring purposes and there are no consequences for your application if you choose not to provide such information.

Automated decision-making

Recruitment processes are not based solely on automated decision-making.

Appropriate Policy Document

This is the “appropriate policy document” for the London Borough of Bexley that details how the authority will protect special category and criminal convictions personal data.

It meets the requirements at paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018 that an appropriate policy document is produced where the processing of special category personal data is necessary for the purposes of performing or exercising obligations or rights which are imposed or
conferred by law on the controller or the data subject in connection with employment, social security or social protection.

It also meets the requirement at paragraph 5 of Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018 that an appropriate policy document be in place where the processing of special category personal data is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest. The specific conditions under which data may be
processed for reasons of substantial public interest are set out at paragraphs 6 to 28 of Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018.

Procedure for securing compliance

Article 5 of the General Data Protection Principles (GDPR) sets out the data protection principles. The purpose of the policy is to detail the authority’s procedures for ensuring compliance with the principles.

Principle 1

Personal data shall be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject.