Working with an Access Support Worker #2: meeting candidate and setting up contract, negotiating work
Starting my DYCP, I have never worked with an Access Support Worker before and I didn’t know a) what to ask for help with, and b) how to find someone to work with, and set up the working relationship. Here’s an account of how it went for me.
Finding candidates
I considered advertising nationally on Arts Council ArtsJobs and ArtsAdmin e-Digest, and locally on pages like Theatre Bristol. I also could have used Facebook to share a callout.
I was concerned about my capacity to shortlist and manage an interview process alone, so I wanted to find a more realistic solution. In the end, a friend of mine was running an interview process at the same time, so I asked her if she could send my job description to any suitable candidates that she didn’t end up working with. She actually suggested one person and put me in touch directly with them, so capacity wasn’t an issue in the end.
(Although it would be great ethically to open up employment opportunities more publicly, at this time I felt like I had to be mindful of my own capacity. In future, now that I have more experience and if I was working on a project with support available, I would probably do an interview process).
Interview
I arranged to meet the candidate over Zoom. They already had the job description and I read their CV beforehand. I was nervous since I have no experience of being an interviewer, but I was honest about that and it went fine.
In that conversation I gave more details of the project and how I saw the schedule working. I got a sense of what their availability was like, and I also asked them if they had any access needs or considerations to put in place.
We talked about their previous experience and how it related to the role, some specific skills they had and some things I wanted help with but they didn’t have experience with (eg. Budgeting). This was good because it gave me a sense of whether I would need to seek additional support for any areas of the project, and also brought up things they might be really skilled at helping with that I hadn’t already thought of. They also agreed that they were happy to do online research for tutorials for things they are not experienced in, which is really helpful.
Negotiation & setting up work
I was happy to work with the candidate I met, so then we moved on to setting up expectations for the working process. These were the things we had to cover:
Schedule: I made a rough schedule which divided the hours across the period so they knew how many hours per week/month we are likely to work
Flexibility: we agreed to what degree we can be flexible about changing times, dates or amounts of work per week
Payment: on what dates would instalments of the fee be paid and by what method (in the end we agreed that I would pay them a fixed amount every month and we would also keep a log of the actual hours worked, so they could make up any un-used hours flexibly)
Communication: what methods of communication would we use (Zoom, email and Slack)
Time boundaries: when can we contact eachother and how quickly to expect a reply
Contract
We made a freelance contract from a template, outlining the basic details officially, and both signed it electronically.