Recruitment: do you have to inform a job candidate about the content of your internal reporting procedure?

Legal entities which have to establish internal reporting procedures. They now include all private entities hiring at least 250 people. Later, private entities hiring at least 50 and less than 250 people.

Applicants for jobs to be performed under:

 

The job candidate should be informed about the procedure at the start of recruitment or negotiations preceding the contract.

What does it mean in practice to provide information about an internal reporting procedure? Does the obliged entity have to inform the job candidates about the existence of the procedure or provide them the content of the procedure? What should associated enterprises do? Neither the bill nor the explanatory notes to the bill answer these questions. They only mention an imprecise term “information about the procedure”.

We can try to clear the doubts by consulting the bill’s current and previous versions. This applies in particular when it comes to the list of persons covered by the bill. 

In its first version, the bill covered, among others, job candidates who learnt about a breach of law during the recruitment process or during negotiations preceding the contract.

In the second version of the bill, the legislator deleted the above-mentioned persons from the list.

The third and fourth version of the bill have not been amended in this respect, that is, job candidates were not on the list of persons covered by the bill.  

This means that the resulting legislative act will not apply to candidates for jobs to be performed under a contract of employment or any other legal relationship based on which the candidate is to perform work, services, a function or duty. 

Thus, it seems that the information about an internal procedure for reporting breaches is limited solely to information that such a procedure is in place. Disclosing the content of the procedure would be unreasonable because a candidate for a job which he or she will not take up will not be able to report a breach in the way foreseen in the bill.

Information about breaches of law, obtained in connection with work performance before entering into an employment relationship or any other legal relationship underlying the work or services, performing a function in or for a legal entity or performing duty in a legal entity can be reported by persons referred to in Article 4(1).  

The persons listed there do not include job candidates.