Some requests may be delayed as we prioritise payroll deadlines

September and October are always busy months at the University and they are particularly busy for HR Services, who process recruitment and other staffing requests.

This year, a number of our HR Services team are leaving us to take up new roles during this period. This means that the time to process requests will increase while we appoint and train new staff.

How we will work during this period

Normally, we deal with requests in the order they are received. So we can manage our workload in September and October we will need to focus on requests which must be processed for payroll. This means requests for changes taking place further into the future may not be processed immediately.

We will continue to process as many tasks as possible, but it is likely that any requests approved after the published payroll deadlines of 15 September and 15 October will not be processed until the following month.

We will continue to work through recruitment requests in order of receipt and will notify you of the current lead time for processing on submission of your request.

Thank you for bearing with us! We plan to resume normal service as quickly as possible.

What are we doing to improve?

Recruitment is a major component of the HR Services team's work, and each year we handle more and more requests. In 2018, we managed 810 recruitment exercises, and we expect to manage 900 this year.

In order to maintain and improve the level of service we provide, we have recently been working to reduce the time it takes to recruit. In 2019 we have begun processing vacancy requests in anticipation of departmental, faculty and financial authorisations, and we have changed our candidate briefs in order to make advertising a job quicker for departments and for us.