Employing Remote Workers - A Warning

With recruitment markets as challenging as they are, more and more employers are looking to widen their available talent pools and are recruiting employees outside of their normal geographical catchment areas on the premise that successful applicants will work from their homes rather than their employer’s premises.

In many cases, and especially where there’s a considerable distance between the interviewer and interviewee, prospective candidates will be interviewed via one or more video calls, meaning the employee and employer may never meet in person.

A number of our clients successfully employ and manage people that fall into either or both of the above categories, remote management brings specific challenges for the manager and the employee but these can easily be overcome and the benefits to both parties can easily outweigh the challenges.

However, employers need to be vigilant to make sure they don’t fall victim to scams that might leave them liable to prosecution under immigration and/or modern slavery and human trafficking legislation.

We recently came across a company that had made an offer of employment to a remote worker, following a series of video interviews. The company rightly checked the employee’s right to work in the UK during the interview process.

A month after the offer was made, on their first day, an online meeting was arranged with the company’s HR Manager to carry out the employee’s initial induction. The employee logged in on time for the meeting and all seemed well until the new employee’s manager joined the meeting and realised that the person being inducted wasn’t the person that had been interviewed and offered the role. A quick check of the interviewee’s passport photograph confirmed this.

The new starter was challenged and ended the meeting immediately and after some investigation, the address of their computer was traced to an overseas location; the employer had been scammed and fortunately, they’d picked this up within the first hour of employment and hadn't sent any IT equipment to the employee ahead of their start date, but it’s more than possible to see how, in the right circumstances, this might not be picked up and any equipment lost.

Employers face significant fines and criminal prosecution if they employ anyone not eligible to work in the UK or if they are involved in modern slavery or human trafficking. It’s entirely feasible that in the circumstances described above, the person who joined the induction call was a victim of modern slavery or human trafficking.

Employers need to take extreme care that they check the identity and eligibility to work in the UK of prospective employees and then have checks in place to ensure that the person that was interviewed and offered the role is the person that reports for work, irrespective of whether they’re a remote worker or not.

For more information on this or help with any HR matter, please get in touch.