Working at Young Scot

Find out what it’s like to be

part of our team.

Help us make Scotland the best place for young people to grow up!

From #YSHive to the Young Scot National Entitlement Card and Youth Information, we work with young people, local authorities and organisations all over Scotland to Inform, Empower and Connect young people to information and opportunities.

Achieving the best outcomes for young people across Scotland, we inspire and empower our staff by giving them the right support and tools they need to deliver the best possible services to the highest quality. You can read more about this approach in our Young Scot People Strategy.

The benefits:

Health and wellbeing

Holidays
We offer a generous holiday entitlement of 25 days a year, plus 10 public holiday days. We close the office over Christmas and New Year, giving staff an extra three days as a thank you for their hard work throughout the year. We also give an extra day holiday for every five years of service and an hour of time off in lieu for birthdays (and a lucky-dip birthday gift too).

Sickness absence
We pay sickness pay at an enhanced rate from the day you start your employment with us.

Bereavement leave
Staff can request up to 10 days’ leave in the event of the bereavement of a close family member or friend.

Medical appointments
Staff are given paid time off to attend medical appointments.

Staff Wellbeing Group
We are accredited with Healthy Working Lives Gold award and we have a staff group to support health and wellbeing.

Looking after your future

We offer a generous pension package to all staff from their first day with Young Scot, and we offer an auto enrolment pension scheme with People’s Pension. Staff contribute 5% of their salary and we contribute 10% of your salary. All staff are covered by a life assurance scheme that pays four times their basic salary in the event of death in service.

Looking after your nearest and dearest

Maternity and paternity leave
We pay statutory maternity and paternity pay to eligible staff.

Carer leave
Our staff can request a maximum of five days per year for caring responsibilities.

Paw-ternity leave
Our staff can request two working days a year paid leave to care for their pets.

Flexible working
Our staff can apply for a change to their working hours.

Professional and personal development

Our staff are entitled to two days of paid leave per year to volunteer or undertake personal development. We hold an annual training festival - providing staff with two consecutive days of professional development opportunities.

Flexible working

We are committed to supporting our staff to work flexibly and offer a blended model of remote and office working. Our staff can choose whether to work remotely or in our lovely and bright office in Edinburgh. We also offer ‘Design your Day’, and options for staff to work with their line managers to schedule daily and weekly hours effectively.

Everyone at Young Scot has the legal right to request flexible working options – and we encourage staff to request a working pattern that suits their home, caring and wellbeing commitments.

Some of the options we may consider*:

Part-time: working fewer than full-time hours (usually by working fewer days).

Staggered hours: having a different start, finish and break time from colleagues.
Term-time working: having a permanent contract but unpaid leave during school holidays.
Flexitime: working full or part-time hours and choosing, within agreed limits, when to begin and end work.
Compressed hours: working full-time hours but over fewer days.
Job-sharing: two (or more) staff do one job and split the hours.

Career breaks: unpaid career breaks or extended periods of unpaid leave.
Phased retirement: older workers reducing their hours and working part time.

*Some of these may need to be balanced with both the operational and financial needs of Young Scot as a charity, so please discuss these as early as possible with us if you would like to explore any of these options.

Our People Strategy

Download our people strategy

How to fill in an application form at Young Scot

Click here for helpful tips on writing and submitting your application ↓

Thank you for your interest in joining Young Scot – we're really excited to read your application telling us why we should consider you to help us in our vital work with young people.

You can save your online application form by entering your email address from the second page onwards, and returning to it at any point.  You can find the online application form within each job description we are advertising.
If you'd prefer to fill in your application as a Word document, please download it here and email it to us at recruitment@young.scot by the deadline noted on the advert.
If you need any support or have any questions, please email us or call on 0131 313 2488 or email recruitment@young.scot.

Blind recruitment

We run a 'blind' recruitment process here at Young Scot. This means we remove your name, address and any other information that identifies you from the application forms we share with the panel shortlisting for the role. We also intentionally don't ask for your age or information about your education. You can tell us about any education or training that's relevant to the role, but please don't share any school/college/university names or dates.

Running blind recruitment helps us to reduce unconscious bias. On each page of our online application form, we let you know if we will be sharing the information you record on that page with the Young Scot panel who are shortlisting for the role. We do share all the information you give us with our Human Resources colleagues, but they are not involved in shortlisting or interviews. Please do take a look at our data protection policy for more information on how we use any data you share with us.

Getting started

Please allow enough time to fill in the application form before the deadline listed on the Job Description. We are sorry but we simply can't accept late applications as that will delay our recruitment processes and would be unfair to other candidates.

The online application form includes the following sections:

Information about you
Your references
Your paid work, work experience and volunteering history
What makes you a great candidate for the role
Information about any criminal activity you may have been involved in
More information about you and your background

Information about you

The information we ask for is:

Name
Address. If we offer you a job at Young Scot, we will postal mail information to you before you start with us. Please tell us the best postal address to send this to.
Email address
Mobile number
Are you legally entitled to work in the UK? We can't accept applications from you if you don't have the legal right to work in the UK. If we offer you a job, we will also ask for a copy of your passport or work visa. We will issue your employment contract after we've received these.

Are you a member of the Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) scheme?

Don't worry if you're not a member of the Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme. If we offer you a job, we will also support you in joining the scheme.

Your references

Information about your current or most recent employer. If you don't have a recent employer, then use your school, college, university or a support worker.

Information about a personal referee (this can be a friend or mentor, but not a family member) or another previous employer.
We won't contact either of these people before you take part in an interview.

Your employment history

Please tell us about your most recent employer, and about the role and your responsibilities. It's vital that you don't include information about your current salary – what we have stated on the job advert is what we will pay.
If you don't have a most recent employer, please tell us about any other work experiences or volunteering roles that make you a great candidate.

Tell us what makes you a great candidate for this role

This section is where you tell us about your experiences and skills that make you a great candidate. Our interview panel will use this information (and the information about your previous employment, work experience and volunteering) to decide whether to invite you for an interview.

Your answer should be no more than 750 words. The Job Description lists the mix of skills and experiences that we are looking for. Please relate your skills and experiences to those we list in the Job Description. We suggest that you break your answer up into the following sections:

Why you are applying for this role (up to 150 words)
Your skills and experiences that make you a great candidate (up to 600 words)

Why you are applying for this role

Tell us why you want to work at Young Scot and what is it about our work that interests you. We would also like to hear about why the role interests you.

Your skills and experiences that make you a great candidate

We don't expect you to have all the skills and experiences listed in the Job Description, but we want to hear more about the ones you do have. The type of information you might choose to share includes:

previous paid work or work experience that's relevant to the job role.
skills and experience you gained outside of paid work (for example from domestic and caring responsibilities, unpaid or voluntary work).

training and education you have undertaken, including courses that didn't lead to a qualification. These could be non-vocational classes or in-house training with your current or previous employer (please don't tell us the name of any school/college/university).

skills you've developed whilst in education, volunteering, work experiences or paid work.

volunteering you've done and the skills you developed whilst taking part.

other relevant achievements, such as being a member of a professional body or association.

Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exclusions and Exemptions) (Scotland) Amendment Order 2015

In this section, we are asking for information about and convictions for criminal offences, and any criminal charges pending? If you have any unspent convictions or cautions, then please do let us know.

More information about you and your background

We are committed to being an explicitly anti-racist organisation committed to equality of opportunity for all job applicants and employees.

It’s important for us to monitor the backgrounds of everyone who applies for a job at Young Scot. This helps us to make sure we are achieving our objectives and understanding who is applying for our roles. We want to have as diverse a staff team as possible and this is one of the ways we measure that.

Please be assured, this information is used only for monitoring purposes and isn’t part of your application. The information is stored separately and that’s why we ask ‘What position are you applying for?’.

If you don’t want to share this information with us, then please use the ‘Prefer not to say’ options.

Next steps

We'll send you a copy of your application to your email for your reference. Also, we respond to everyone who applies to let them know the outcome of their application.

If you need any support or have any questions, please email us or call on 0131 313 2488 or email recruitment@young.scot

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Our journey to becoming anti-racist

At Young Scot, we’re working hard to become an explicitly anti-racist organisation. We are doing this by taking a close look at our organisation and identifying what it is we do that contributes to structural racism. 

In the past, we’ve had a strong focus on ‘Equality and Diversity’. However, we recognise that we must always work harder and with a continued  focus to create positive change.  

We have heard from young people from all communities and backgrounds that we must act to tackle racism – not just words and demonstrations. We recognise that we are at the beginning of this journey, with ongoing developments including: 

Embedding a culture of learning to build on training that was delivered by educators in diversity, Radiant and Brighter.
Developing our volunteer recruitment process in line with our recently reviewed staff recruitment – ensuring it is anti-racist and representative of the 11-26-year-olds we are here to serve.

Delivering anti-racist digital information, activities, and opportunities for young Black people and young people of colour. This follows an external audit from brand consultants, Brand by Me.
Developing and sustaining strong partnerships with Black and people of colour-led organisations, to support and enhance our services.
Creating an anti-racist model for bids for future work.
Regularly reviewing our systems and policies and embedding diversity, equity and inclusion at their core.
Undertaking the Investors in Diversity accreditation programme – aiming to achieve by March 2022.

Continuing to embed our Equalities Impact Assessment process across Young Scot and ensuring it’s expanded across more levels of activity.

This work is part of our  Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy (DEI). Our DEI Staff Programme Board is responsible for delivering this and we will soon be recruiting a diverse group of young people to partner with us on this. The DEI staff team now produce an annual Young Scot Equalities Outcomes Report

Please keep an eye on this page for updates on this work – and please do hold us to account too! 

Our anti-racist approach to recruitment

As part of our work to become an anti-racist organisation, we’ve reviewed our recruitment processes and made several changes.

We’ve changed how we communicate with potential candidates:

Published clear information about our new recruitment processes.
Improved our guide on how to complete our new online application form.

Published what flexible working options candidates can apply for.
Worked to advertise our roles to a wider and more diverse network of stakeholders.
Made our recruitment correspondence more inclusive.
Let candidates know that we don’t expect them to dress smartly at interviews.

We’ve updated our recruitment processes:

Created a new standard template for job descriptions and recruitment adverts.
Ensuring we are advertising all roles both internally and externally at the same time.
‘Returning to market’ if we don’t attract applications from candidates from a diversity of backgrounds.
Redesigned our application form and removed competency-based questions.
Will now share interview questions with candidates before their interview.

Are scheduling a limited number of interviews per day, to take account for interviewer fatigue leading to less engagement in the process.
Created an updated marking framework for scoring of interviews.
Created a sign-off process to ratify that our new recruitment processes have been adhered to.
Created a post-recruitment review process using data.

Staff on interview panels must take part in unconscious bias training.

Staff taking part in shortlisting and interview panels must have attended a minimum of a half day of unconscious bias training in the previous 12 months.

Working to create a culture of inclusivity, including:

We are creating resources for Black people and people of colour who work at Young Scot about specific groups, networks and support for them.
We will create a staff network for Black people and people of colour who work at Young Scot, when appropriate.
We are publicising our refreshed complaints procedures for staff who feel they are discriminated against (new procedure to be launched in 21/22).

We are reviewing our Young Scot staff handbook to ensure it communicates our anti-racist work and aspirations.
Creating a ‘Your First 100 Days at Young Scot’ plan to support onboarding for new staff members.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy aligns with our strategic plan, and will drive systematic change across our internal services, policies, practice and values as an employer – but also in our role as the national information and citizenship charity for all young people aged 11-26 across Scotland.

This strategy is designed to support us to deliver key strategic goals, specifically to:

Create an inclusive working culture, recognising the value of diversity and fostering a culture where everyone feels valued and respected.
Ensure our services for young people are accessible to all young people, recognising the intersectional diversity of their needs.
Learn from and share best practice in the third sector, demonstrating our work to eliminate discrimination, recognise and promote equality and diversity, address inequity and be inclusive in all that we do.

The strategy and accompanying action plans will help us drive progress to ensure that we are embedding diversity, equity and inclusion into our day-to-day work and taking account of these across all our services, policies, practice and values.

Learn more