Selection criteria and methods 


There should be consultation over both the selection criteria and the selection methods to be used.


The law gives employers a lot of freedom to decide on selection criteria. A tribunal will only interfere with criteria that are discriminatory or unlawful in some other way, or that no reasonable employer would have chosen, in other words, where the selection criteria are outside the band of reasonable responses of an employer (see Chapter 10: Band of reasonable responses). 


Tribunals are not allowed to substitute their own views on appropriate selection criteria or methods for those of the employer, for example, by adjusting the employer’s scores, or giving more or less weight to a particular selection criterion. This would be a mistake of law and there are many examples of tribunal decisions being reversed for this reason. Only if the outcome is one that no reasonable employer could have reached is a challenge likely to be successful (see, for an example of a successful challenge, the case of Stephenson College v Jackson [2013] UKEAT 0045/13/0507).


If some selection criteria are more important to the employer’s future business than others, they can be given extra points in the matrix, in a process known as “weighting”. 


Selection criteria must not be discriminatory and can be challenged under the Equality Act 2010 (see Chapter 7). There are also important rights protecting fixed-term and part-time employees when compared with their permanent or full-time colleagues (see Chapter 2).


A public sector employer or a private sector employer carrying out a public function must not breach its Public Sector Equality Duty when carrying out redundancies (see Chapter 7).