University of St Andrews

All Academic (Education and Research) posts which are paid for by an external body will require Finance (FAS) approval prior to advertising.  The Recruitment team will obtain this on your behalf when you contact them with your vacancy details. 

Please note that receiving an Award Letter or other indication that the grant application has been successful is not enough to proceed to advert if the grant code has not been set up and the money has yet to be transferred to the University. 

However, if there are good grounds for advertising before the grant code has been confirmed, then the Head of School may seek permission from the Master to allow the School to temporarily underwrite the post from central funding.  In the unlikely event that the money does not materialise from the funder, the post would be withdrawn (usually ahead of interviews and certainly before an appointment is made). 

What to do next is covered in our Advertising section.

All Academic (Education and Research) posts which are paid partially or wholly by a School cost centre and which have not been formally approved at Strategic Planning (see section below) require Workforce Planning Group (WPG) approval prior to advertising. 

Workforce Planning applications for new or replacement posts should be submitted via the online portal. You will be required to sign in via single-sign on which will take you to your dashboard and provide access to previous applications as well as allowing you to submit further staffing requests.  Please note that only Heads of School can submit applications unless they have nominated someone else in the School as a delegate.  How to use the dashboard, nominate delegates and complete applications can be found in our Workforce Planning Guidance.

If the post is approved via the Workforce Planning Group (WPG), HR will contact the Head of School re next steps.

Occasionally, the Master may be prepared to approve requests for academic posts offline eg where there is a very urgent need to replace an employee.  If the Master approves the post offline, please follow the steps in the Advertising section. 

Where approval to recruit for an academic post has been given at the School’s Strategic Planning Meeting, please send details of the post to the Recruitment team along with the formal written approval - either the planning outcome letter or an email from the Master. Posts which have been approved in principle only will require final approval via a Workforce Planning application (see internally funded posts section).

If you are unsure whether or not the post has been approved via your Planning meeting, please contact the Recruitment team to discuss.