NHS Scotland job advert terms explained
Our job adverts use terms and acronyms that might be new to you. Here's what the most common ones mean.
Pay, hours and contracts
- Agenda for Change (AfC): our national pay system for most staff. It groups jobs into pay bands from 1 to 9 based on the skills and knowledge each job needs. Doctors, dentists and senior managers have separate pay systems.
- Bands: under Agenda for Change, every job sits in a pay band. Each band has pay points, and your pay goes up as you gain experience and move up the points.
- FTE or WTE: full-time equivalent or whole-time equivalent. It's a standard way to measure working hours, where 1.0 is a full-time week. If full-time is 36 hours a week, someone working 36 hours is 1.0 WTE and someone working 18 hours is 0.5 WTE.
- Fixed-term: a contract that lasts for a set time, for example 6 months or 1 year.
- Permanent: a contract that continues until you resign or your employer ends it.
The job advert and job pack
- Job pack: the documents that explain a role, including the job description and person specification. You'll find it on each job advert on our recruitment website.
- Job description: a document that sets out information about the health board that's recruiting, what the role is for, its main tasks, the systems and equipment you'll use, the physical, mental and emotional demands of the role and the working environment.
- Person specification: a checklist of the skills and experience we're looking for. Your application needs to show how you meet them.
- Essential criteria: the skills, qualifications or experience you must have to get an interview. You'll find them in the job pack.
- Desirable criteria: skills that are nice to have but not essential. Meeting them strengthens your application, especially when lots of people apply.
- Hiring manager: the person recruiting for the role, usually the manager you'd report to. Their contact details are usually at the bottom of the job advert.
- Jobtrain: the system behind our recruitment website, where you search for jobs and complete and submit your application.
Applying and interviews
- Shortlisting: when the hiring manager and interview panel score applications against the person specification to decide who to invite to interview.
- Recognition of prior learning (RPL): using your past experience or informal workplace training to meet a job requirement instead of a qualification or exam grade.
- SCQF Inclusive Recruiter: employers who use the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) when recruiting. We ask for specific qualifications or equivalent skills and experience, so you can use vocational qualifications, life experience or work-based learning certificates to show you can do the job.
- Values-based recruitment (VBR): a way of recruiting that looks at your values and behaviours as well as your knowledge, skills and experience. [Read about our values]
- STAR method: a way to structure interview answers: situation, task, action, result. [See an example STAR answer]
- Guaranteed interview scheme: if you're disabled or care experienced and you meet the minimum criteria in the job pack, you'll usually be offered an interview. [How the scheme works]
- Reasonable adjustments: changes an employer makes to remove barriers that put disabled, injured or neurodivergent people at a disadvantage.
- Generative AI (gen AI): tools like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or Microsoft Copilot. You can use them to help with your application, but your final answers must be in your own words and about your own experience.
Job offers, pre-employment checks, and right to work
- Conditional offer: a job offer that depends on your pre-employment checks being completed successfully.
- Unconditional offer: your confirmed job offer, sent with your contract once all checks are complete.
- Right to work: the legal permission you need to be employed in the UK. We check it for everyone we employ.
- Disclosure Scotland: the Scottish Government agency that carries out criminal record checks, manages the PVG scheme and keeps a list of people barred from working with vulnerable groups.
- Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) scheme: a background check managed by Disclosure Scotland. You'll need to join if your role involves working with children or protected adults.
- Occupational health: the service that checks you're fit for the role and sets up any support you need at work. You'll fill in a confidential questionnaire before you start.
- Graduate visa: a visa that lets international students stay and work in the UK after finishing a degree, without a job offer or sponsorship. For bachelor's and master's graduates it lasts 2 years if you apply on or before 31 December 2026, and 18 months if you apply on or after 1 January 2027. PhD graduates get 3 years. [Check the Graduate visa rules on GOV.UK]
- Health and Care Worker visa: a type of Skilled Worker visa for qualified health and care professionals with a job offer from an approved employer, such as an NHS Scotland health board. [Check the Health and Care Worker visa rules on GOV.UK]
- Pastoral care: support we give applicants from outside Scotland through recruitment, relocation and starting work.
Our commitments as an employer
- Armed Forces Covenant: a promise that people who serve or have served in the armed forces, and their families, are treated fairly. We're committed to the Employer Recognition Scheme and actively employ and support the armed forces community. [Armed Forces Talent Programme]
- Care experienced: anyone who has spent any time in the care system as a child or young person, including people in care now and people who were in care in the past.
- Carer Positive: a Scottish award for employers that support staff with unpaid caring responsibilities, for example through flexible working.
- Disability Confident: a voluntary scheme that encourages employers to recruit, keep and develop disabled people and people with long-term health conditions. It helps us remove barriers at work and challenge negative attitudes to disability.
- Equally Safe at Work: an accreditation for employers committed to gender equality and to keeping staff safe at work. Some NHS Scotland health boards have achieved it.
- Healthy Working Lives: a Public Health Scotland (PHS) programme that gives free, confidential advice to help employers and employees build safer, healthier and fairer workplaces.
- Investors in People: a community interest company that assesses and accredits how employers manage, support and develop their staff.
- Investors in Young People: an accreditation that helps employers improve how they attract, recruit, develop and keep young people.
- Investing in Volunteers: the UK quality standard for organisations that involve volunteers. It confirms they follow good practice, offer a meaningful and safe experience and value volunteers' time. [Volunteering with NHS Scotland]
