Getting hiring managers on board ahead of the January employment law changes
As an HR Leader, the Employment Rights Act is probably taking up a big chunk of your time right now, and you’ll know exactly what it means for your business.
Until now, a lot of businesses have quietly relied on having two years to spot that a hire wasn’t working out and deal with it. From January 2027, that window shrinks to six months, and with the cap on compensation being removed, the cost of getting it wrong could be much higher. That makes it essential to tighten up hiring processes now, so that fewer mistakes are made in the first place, rather than relying on the time afterwards to put them right.
You’ll probably already have a good idea of what a strong recruitment process looks like for your business, even if it doesn’t always play out that way in practice. The challenge we see again and again for the HR leaders we work with isn’t usually knowing what to do, it’s getting it to happen consistently when most of the hiring is done by line managers who are juggling it around the day job. Every manager tends to have their own way of doing things, and when time is tight, the steps that feel optional are often the first to go. That’s why getting your hiring managers on board is so important, and why it’s worth thinking about how to make it as easy as possible for them.
Why hiring managers cut corners
In our experience, it’s rarely because managers don’t care. By the time a role goes out, the gap is usually already being felt, the team is covering extra work and the manager just wants someone in the seat as quickly as possible. Interviews get squeezed between meetings, the first decent candidate starts to look like the right one, and the process can feel like HR are standing between them and a solution.
The consequences don’t show up straight away either. It’s usually a few months in, when the new starter isn’t quite working out, that the shortcuts start to cost something, and by then it’s often HR who’s left to pick up the pieces!
Make the right way the easy way
The managers we see following a good process tend to be the ones who’ve had it made simple for them. Most of them aren’t resisting the process itself, they’re resisting the time it seems to take, so the more you can strip it back to the parts that really matter, the more likely it is to happen.
A good place to start is the brief. Rather than sending a manager a form to fill in, a conversation before the role goes out can cover everything you need, like what the person will actually be doing day to day, what good looks like after three months, and what kind of person will work well within that particular team.
The same goes for interviews. A ready-made scorecard with a few core questions already in it, which the manager can tweak for the role, takes far less effort than a blank page and makes it much more likely that every candidate is assessed in the same way. Keeping the process to two stages helps too, as it’s easier for a manager to commit to, and it means good candidates aren’t lost to someone who moves faster.
It’s also worth planning the timings with them upfront. Booking interviews in blocks rather than one at a time, agreeing when feedback will be given, and pencilling in a decision date all keep things moving, which is exactly what a manager under pressure wants anyway. When the process feels like it’s helping them fill the role faster, rather than slowing them down, it’s much easier to get them on board.
Talk about it in their language
Most line managers won’t be moved by compliance, but they will be moved by their team and their time. Talking about tribunal risk or qualifying periods can feel abstract when they’ve got a busy team and an empty desk, but talking about what a wrong hire would mean for them personally tends to land far better.
Framing it as “if we get this wrong, you could be back to square one in six months, with your team carrying the extra work again” makes the risk real in a way they recognise. Most managers have been through a hire that didn’t work out at some point, so it rarely takes much to remind them how much time and energy it took to deal with. It turns the process into something that protects them and their team, rather than something they have to get through to keep HR happy.
Use January to get leadership behind you
The changes coming in January are a genuine opportunity to get senior leaders backing a consistent approach to hiring. A bad hire has always been expensive, but the risk is now much easier to put in front of a leadership team in terms they’ll recognise.
The strongest case tends to be a simple one. Setting out what a wrong hire costs in recruitment fees, lost productivity, management time and the impact on the rest of the team, alongside what’s changing in January, gives leaders a clear reason to act. From there, it’s about agreeing a small number of non-negotiables, like a brief agreed before every role goes out and structured interviews for every candidate, and asking leadership to set the expectation that every manager follows them.
When that expectation comes from the top, it stops being HR asking for favours and becomes simply how the business hires.
Give managers ownership
One of the things that came up strongly at our recent HR roundtable was getting managers to own the probationary period, rather than leaving it with HR. When managers have been involved in agreeing what good looks like from the start, they’re far more invested in making sure the hire works, and far more likely to raise concerns early while there’s still time to act on them.
In practice, that means the manager running regular, structured check-ins with their new starter from the first month, with HR supporting rather than leading. It gives the new starter a clear picture of how they’re doing, gives the manager a natural point to raise anything that isn’t working, and means there’s a record of those conversations if a difficult decision does need to be made.
It also changes how managers see recruitment. Once they know they’ll be the ones living with the decision and managing those early months, they tend to take far more care over who they hire in the first place.
Getting it right from the start
None of this needs to make recruitment slower or more complicated. If anything, a clear, simple process saves managers time and gives them a much better chance of hiring someone who’s genuinely right for the team, and who stays. For HR, it’s a chance to get ahead of the changes rather than dealing with the fallout, and to build a way of hiring that works for the whole business long after January.
If you’d like to talk through how your hiring process could be adapted ahead of the changes, we’re always happy to have a chat!
