If you’ve ever doubted that your recruitment policies can have an effect on your employer brand, this week’s embarrassing headlines for the Body Shop should get you thinking again. A teenager went to the Cambridge branch to apply for a part-time role but the Manager told her the role was for someone who spoke Chinese and as she didn’t, she couldn’t apply for the role.
Embarrassingly for the Body Shop, this story has hit the headlines and they’ve had to do some serious damage limitation. A spokesperson was quoted as saying:
“The Body Shop believes in equality and seeks to find the right person for the job based on skills, regardless of age, sex, race and nationality. “Language skills are an advantage for candidates applying for retail sales positions as we have multi-cultural customer appeal and it’s great when required to speak to customers in their own language. “However, we would not exclude applications on the basis of language skills alone. “In this instance the franchise manager has not followed the company recruitment procedure and we will be following up with him directly.”

I’m feeling scarily organised at the minute. We’ve been asked to deliver a day’s training course for 
