It is important to have a plan in place so that you can work out a realistic timeframe for your recruitment process. If completed thoroughly, following this guide as best practice, you should plan for a three to four month process taking you from planning to appointment stage.

Having a plan also allows you to identify who will manage the process and is a good way of keeping everyone informed about progress against each stage. We have shared our Milestone plan with you which we followed step by step and found to be realistic in terms of time required to complete each stage. This can be adapted to suit your needs.

In addition to having a plan, you will need to discuss your ideas and expectations for recruitment alongside anyone who is going to be involved in the process. With this in mind, we recommend getting a meeting booked in to discuss this as soon as you can. You could use our ‘Planning questions to ask yourself‘ sheet as a guide to aid your discussions.

Lastly, don’t forget to consult with your governing documents which should set out the procedures for electing or appointing new trustees. You will need to ensure your chosen methods of recruitment are permitted under your legal framework. Use NCVO’s guidance as a prompt to what you are looking out for. The Charity Commission has all the latest guidance about who is eligible to become a charity trustee and a current list of those who are exempt.

• Milestone plan
• Planning questions to ask yourself sheet
• NCVOs governing document guidance
• The Charity Commission 

You will need to discuss with your senior management team and board chair how urgent you feel your appointment is and whether you wish to temporarily recruit or ‘co-opt’ someone into the role on a short-term basis.

Again, you will need to consult with your governing documents to ensure this is permitted and that you are following the correct procedure. Whatever your chosen method, we would recommend that formal recruitment is undertaken at some stage to ensure an open and transparent process has been available and accessible to all.

Consider running a trustee skills assessment to help identify what qualities you are looking for from your new recruits. NCVO have produced a Trustees skills audit tool and there is a similar Example Skills Audit available by Lloyds Bank Foundation. We have also included our own Trustee Skills Audit which could be adapted to suit your requirements. Don’t forget to liaise with the wider  board as to whether there are any particular skills or areas of specialist knowledge they are looking for.

Another key part of this second step is to think about the diversity of your board and assess how you would like to address this issue. Having previously reviewed the diversity of our own board, we were certainly keen to develop its makeup, but weren’t sure how to do this. We started by looking at the population breakdown of the local geographical area to determine what the current demographic makeup looked like.

We would recommend this as a good starting point to determine which groups you may wish to encourage applications from to try to redress any imbalance.

The next question for us was how to go about trying to attract applicants from these groups in a fair and legal way. We sought advice from our in-house HR experts who provided a useful document which may help you with this Diversity & Inclusion when recruiting new trustees.

NCVO has produced some useful guides to help you begin the process of reflecting on equality, diversity and inclusion on your board.

• NCVO’s trustees skills audit tool
• Lloyds Bank Foundation Example Skills Audit 
• Trustee Skills Audit
• Diversity & Inclusion when recruiting new trustees 
• NCVO’s equality, diversity and inclusion at board level

Once you have put in the background work involved in the earlier stages, you should find putting together the application pack much easier.

You will first need to describe the role of trustee and what skills and experience you are looking for in a role description and person specification. You will need to do this separately for each of the different types of roles you are recruiting for, as you are likely to require a slightly different set of skills for each. There are a few helpful templates out there to get you started including:

• NCVO’s How to identify skills and experience
• NCVO’s Sample trustee role description

We have shared the ones we developed here with you too which you could adapt for your own purposes:

• Community First Yorkshire’s trustee role description
• Community First Yorkshire’s treasurer role description

You will need to check whether you are legally permitted to request that a DBS check is undertaken for the different roles you are recruiting for and if so, which level of check will be required. A helpful tool to support you with this is the Government’s DBS eligibility checker. This information should be included within your person specification in order to inform the candidate whether this is essential to the role.

Your next task involves deciding upon an application process for your candidates to follow and putting together the rest of the documentation you are choosing to include within your
application packs.

Lloyds Bank Foundation have a useful checklist:

• Application Pack Checklist for putting together a comprehensive application pack for interested candidates.

One of the other fairly detailed documents you’ll need to work on is the advertisement for your role. This is important as it must grab the attention of potential candidates and encourage them to submit an application to your charity as opposed to any other organisation advertising for similar roles. Again, we would recommend producing a separate advert for each role so that, when they are uploaded onto job sites, they can be searched for easily by role.

You may also need to develop a one-page version of your adverts if they go onto more pages as some sites require this or have word limits in some of the editable fields. Don’t forget to include key information: closing date for applications, interview date and key contact information for queries or informal discussions.

In the NCVO’s Trustee Recruitment pack, you will find guidance on How to write a good advert to get you started and our own trustee and treasurer adverts which might help you get started.

To pull your pack together, and provide an introduction to your organisation and board, it is a good idea to produce a cover letter from the board chair. The letter can also give detailed instructions for applicants about how to apply and what they should submit as well as including any other resources you’d like to direct them to. Here is our Signed Chair’s Cover letter which you could adapt.

We have also provided links here to some of the additional resources we would recommend you include within your application packs: CC3 The Essential Trustee and a precis of this, The Jigsaw. These documents act as additional resources to allow potential candidates to assess whether the roles they are applying for are right for them.

There is also a Sample declaration form and Reasons for disqualification table which you may choose to include to alert potential candidates to the fact that they will be required to sign this form upon appointment. Please ensure you use the most up to date forms and guides by taking them from the Charity Commission.

• NCVO’s How to identify skills and experience
• NCVO’s Sample trustee role description
• Community First Yorkshire’s role description trustee
• Community First Yorkshire’s role description treasurer
• DBS eligibility checker
• Lloyds Bank Foundation Application Checklist
• NCVO’s How to write a good advert
• advert for trustee recruitment
• advert for treasurer recruitment
• Signed Chair’s Cover letter
• CC3 The Essential Trustee
• The Jigsaw
• Sample declaration form
• Reasons for disqualification table
• www.gov.uk
• The Charity Commission

This stage is all about creating a promotions strategy to inform people you are recruiting. You will need to decide who you are hoping to target and how to reach them. We found that Lloyds Bank Foundation’s list of recruitment sources is really useful. One extra resource we would like to recommend is our online volunteering directory, Volunteering in North Yorkshire (VINY).

You can find and advertise volunteering opportunities for free. Please contact us if you would like to advertise a vacancy and we will be more than happy to help.

Other things to think about at this stage are whether you are going to incur advertising costs and if so, this is a good time to get these agreed by the relevant person within your organisation. It may also be useful to involve your marketing and communications team at this stage.

In doing so, you can alert them to the fact you may need their help in advertising the vacancies, particularly on social media and you will gain their valuable expertise about where might be good places to advertise. Your recruitment may even fit within a wider organisation marketing campaign, helping to raise its profile to a higher level.

You will have completed a lot of hard work up to this stage and you are now ready to go live with your adverts!

• Lloyds Bank Foundation’s list of recruitment sources 
• Volunteering in North Yorkshire (VINY)

While your adverts are live, it is time to give some thought to the shortlisting and interview stages. You will need to agree your interview panel members, if you haven’t done so already, and consider whether an independent person should join to alleviate the risk of any sub-conscious bias. You may also want to consider including specialists for certain positions e.g. senior finance staff for recruiting a new treasurer.

It is a good idea to design a bespoke shortlisting scoring sheet to support your panel with their shortlisting exercise and to ensure a fair and transparent process has been followed when
selecting those candidates you’d like to invite for interview.

To help you with this task you may wish to use Community First Yorkshire’s shortlisting scoring sheet which we developed specifically for this purpose. Once the vacancy has closed you will need to send the applications to the panel in their chosen format, alongside this scoring sheet to enable them to select which candidates they feel best meet the essential and desirable criteria.

Once shortlisting has taken place, you are ready to set up and hold your interviews. You will need to prepare and agree interview questions and/or a task with the panel. There are some useful ideas about interview questions in Reach Volunteering’s Trustee Recruitment Cycle, and we have developed a set of general trustee interview questions ourselves and also a set of interview questions for the role of treasurer. These documents could be used as ideas to create your own set of relevant questions.

You will need to inform selected candidates of details of your interviews (or open sessions with the panel if you are including this stage), noting any preparations required. You will notice from our template job advert that we detailed the interview date to give candidates plenty of notice.

Once you have held interviews and made your selection, it is time to notify your chosen candidate/s of the good news. Give some thought to their first appointment with you. This could be an induction session, familiarisation meeting or invite to the next board meeting.

• Community First Yorkshire’s shortlisting scoring sheet
• Reach Volunteering’s Trustee Recruitment Cycle
• Community First Yorkshire’s trustee interview questions
• Community First Yorkshire treasurer interview questions
• Community First Yorkshire template job advert

Now that you have recruited some excellent new trustees, it is time to confirm them in post. Lloyds have a useful checklist to guide you with this process: confirmation of a new trustee. Before you can formally appoint your new trustees, you will need to check they are eligible.

The trustee declaration of eligibility form will need to be signed. It is helpful to make sure you are up to date with the Charity Commission’s rules around eligibility and automatic disqualification of trustees and consult with their advice on vetting trustees.

If it has been deemed necessary to complete a DBS check, you will need to instigate this process. References will also need to be taken up at this stage too.

In the meantime, you will need to send out a letter of appointment (which should be subject to all of the necessary checks coming back as satisfactory) and introductory letter from the chair, including details of their induction.

You will also need to give consideration as to when the best time is to inform key stakeholders such as staff members and charity members, and you will need to make an announcement to the board.

Once you have conducted the official checks, it is time to make changes to the relevant documents. Lloyds Bank Foundation have a useful list of the actions that you need to carry out after appointing your new trustee: Formalities: inform and update.

• Confirmation of a new trustee 
• the trustee declaration of eligibility form
• Charity Commission’s rules around eligibility and automatic disqualification of trustees
• advice on vetting trustees
• formalities: inform and update

You will need guidance from the board as to how detailed the induction you would like to provide for your new trustees should be, as the time they have available to spend time with them will be a big factor in this. There is a range of useful documents your new trustees can familiarise themselves with which could be put together for them as an induction pack.

This will allow the new trustee to get to know about the role, the charity and their legal responsibilities. NCVO have developed a useful induction pack checklist to help you to decide which key documents will be relevant to provide, as have Lloyds Bank Foundation.

We have also drawn upon these checklists to develop our own trustee induction pack template. Reach Volunteering provide advice which will be useful if you are planning a more detailed induction programme.

Community First Yorkshire deliver training sessions for new trustees and also provide a treasurers’ network, both of which will be valuable resources for you to signpost to as part of your induction. Take a look at the wide range of trustee training that we have on our website.

Once you have set up and delivered your induction, you may wish to seek feedback on the effectiveness of this or any other parts of the recruitment process to develop these processes in the future.

• NCVO’s Induction pack checklist
• Lloyds Bank Foundation induction pack checklist
• Community First Yorkshire’s trustee induction pack template
• NCVO’s Induction programme planner
• Community First Yorkshire’s training programme