Equality and Human Rights Commission

In general, you must not ask a job applicant questions relating to health or disability. One of the exceptions to this rule applies to monitoring. You are allowed to ask questions about health or disability if the point of this is to find out how many job applicants are disabled people and whether they are shortlisted or appointed.

Answers to monitoring questions about health or disability should be dealt with in the same way as the answers to other monitoring questions, in other words, they should be kept separately from the main application form. The person or people shortlisting and appointing should not see the information before deciding who to interview or appoint.

If, exceptionally, someone’s protected characteristics are playing a part in the decision-making,

For example:

• if you are signed up to the guaranteed interview scheme, or
• if positive action is being used in recruitment for a particular job, or
• if you have applied an occupational requirement, or
• if it is either a legal requirement or otherwise objectively justifiable that someone has to be a particular age to do a job, or
• if you are a religion or belief organisation and the job is one where someone has to be of a particular religion or belief or you are an organised religion, or the job is for the purposes of an organised religion, and the job is one where it is necessary to have or not have a particular characteristic or behave in a particular way

then you should make this clear when you ask people to apply for the job and ask them separately from the monitoring form if they have the relevant protected characteristic. This makes sure that the person or people making the decision about who to interview or employ only see the information about protected characteristics that is relevant and do not need to see the monitoring form itself.

If you do use a monitoring form, then the information that is on it is likely to be personal and you should make sure that it is kept safely so that people’s confidentiality or data protection rights are not broken. This may be particularly important for some protected characteristics, such as gender reassignment, and some disabilities, such as HIV status and mental health conditions.

Equality good practice: what you can do if you want to do more than equality law requires

• Giving every applicant for a job with you a monitoring form will help you to see who has applied for the job and who has been selected, in terms of their protected characteristics. You could then compare who has applied for jobs against the profile of jobseekers in the local community, in your sector and nationally and the profile of employees already in the organisation. This highlights any groups who are not applying or not getting further on in the recruitment. If this is happening, then look again at your assessment processes: are you excluding good applicants unnecessarily?
• A job applicant does not have to fill out a monitoring form if they don’t want to. However, you can say to them that this information can be very helpful in making sure you have a diverse workforce, and this is why you are asking for it.
• There is no point in collecting information unless you intend to use what people tell you to:

Check who is applying for jobs

See if people with protected characteristics are under-represented, for example, compared with your local area and sector, and

Think about what you could do to address this.

• You should tell people why you are collecting this information and what you will do with it. You should also reassure them that the data will be treated confidentially and not be used for shortlisting. You should give applicants the choice to opt out of the process by including the option to tick ‘prefer not to say’ within each category. If someone refuses to give you the information you ask for, do not hold this against them.
• If your organisation is very small and you do not have a Human Resources department, for example, who can make sure the monitoring forms are kept separate, then consider asking each applicant to put their monitoring form in a separate envelope or attach it in a document to a separate email and only look at it after you have decided who to recruit.

You can read more about monitoring in the Equality and Human Rights Commission guide: Good equality practice for employers: equality policies, equality training and monitoring.