This guide is designed to help Victorian public sector organisations implement our misconduct policies for all:
The policies:
This policy is only one part of a comprehensive role-based risk assessment process for pre-employment screening.
We define misconduct as per the Public Administration Act 2004 (PAA). This includes:
Other forms of misconduct can include:
As part of their recruitment, candidates must complete a declaration and consent form about their misconduct history.
If misconduct is disclosed, the organisation may do further checks. In some cases, such as Victorian public service executives, the VPSC strongly recommends that the organisation do further checks, even if no misconduct was disclosed.
The screening process must be fair and reasonable and protect candidates from unlawful discrimination.
In practice, this means if screening finds a candidate has a history of misconduct, the candidate should have the opportunity to discuss the declared conduct and respond to any information provided about them.
Before a candidate is ruled out, an organisation needs to confirm their misconduct is of high risk or would mean they’d be unable to do the role.
As a hiring manager, you should:
As a hiring manager, you won’t need to deal with declarations at all.
Your Human Resources team will take care of candidate declarations including if they need to be reviewed or validated.
If you work in human resources, your organisation must include the misconduct declaration and consent form in your recruitment process.
You must have all preferred candidates complete the misconduct declaration and consent form.
You should ensure any offers made are subject to the successful outcome of screening.
You need to set up a ‘consideration panel’ that’s independent from the hiring panel to manage, review and verify completed declarations. Independent consideration panels make a ‘yes or no’ recommendation to the hiring panel about whether a candidate is suitable. Independent consideration panels never share any other information with the hiring panel.
The panel must have the authority to represent your organisation and make decisions. Further information on the composition of the independent consideration panel can be accessed at Pre-employment screening and recruitment.
Executive roles
If the candidate is applying for an executive role in the Victorian public service, always verify their declaration, at a minimum with their current or most recent employer, even if they didn’t declare any misconduct.
Non-executive roles
Validation of misconduct forms for non-executive candidates remains optional but are strongly encouraged based on a risk assessment.
If a non-executive candidate is applying for a role judged to be higher risk, we strongly advise you verify their declaration with their previous employers. You may need to verify it even if they didn’t declare any misconduct. Further information about assessing risk (e.g. decision-making authority, financial delegation and access to significant assets) can be found at role-based risk assessment.
If a non-executive candidate is applying for a low risk role, it’s up to you if you want to verify their information.
You don’t need to do pre-employment screening for Victorian Public Service employees who move between departments on a short-term basis.
If they’re moving to a role with a higher level of risk, use your judgement on whether to do pre-employment screening. This includes roles on the Jobs and Skills Exchange.
If an employee is moving to an ongoing role, you must do pre-employment screening.
Even if an employee already works in your organisation, at the VPS or executive level, you still need to do pre-employment screening.
For non-executive roles, you may choose not to use the misconduct forms if you have:
But still apply some level of screening based on the role’s level of risk.
If you decide to offer a temporary employee an ongoing role, you must have them fill out the misconduct declaration form.
The organisation hiring the candidate is responsible for pre-employment screening.
This even includes temporary placements.
For non-executive roles, decide if you want to use the misconduct declaration form, based on the:
Base short-term offers on the outcome of any relevant screening you do.
If you select more than one preferred candidate for a role, each candidate must:
If a preferred candidate has been self-employed, you can customise the misconduct declaration form and consent templates to seek information from previous clients.
Seek legal advice if you want to do this.
For executive roles, regardless of whether the role is temporary or via secondment, you should require preferred candidates to complete and then you should verify the accuracy of their misconduct declaration form.
Where a candidate has not declared any form of misconduct, employers should validate with:
Where a candidate has declared some form of misconduct, employers should validate an applicant’s declaration with:
You should also advise preferred candidates that they should provide at least one referee from their current or where relevant (i.e. because they are not employed) most recent employer in accordance with the requirements set out in executive reference checks.