Horsfield Menzies – Blog vs Behaviour : JOANNE ALVEY – SHOW YOUR FUCKING WORKING

By TCAP / October 5, 2026

Joanne Alvey has written an article about recruitment decision-making which ought to make somebody at Horsfield Menzies slightly uncomfortable around the Cepac file. In “BEYOND BELIEF”, Alvey extracts the practical lessons from Ngole v Touchstone Leeds, a case involving a job applicant whose historic social-media posts were discovered after the employer Googled him. Her conclusions are not remotely subtle: employers need “evidence based risk, not assumptions”, each decision should have its own identifiable rationale, and “contemporaneous notes are critical” if the employer later needs to demonstrate why it acted as it did.

That is excellent employment-law advice. It is also close to a fucking checklist for the unresolved recruitment dispute Horsfield Menzies defended for Cepac. On 21 August 2024, Page Outsourcing called me about a production role, discussed a £27,000 training wage rising towards £29,000 and, according to my account, offered an interview for the week after the bank holiday. During that same conversation, I disclosed that mental-health treatment explained the substantial gap in my employment history. Page said another call would confirm the precise interview time, but that call never came. Later, Cepac denied that Page had offered an interview at all.

Alvey says contemporaneous notes are critical.

Mine said “Interview next week”.

Where is theirs?

Blog: Evidence Based Risk, Not Assumptions

Alvey’s central lesson from Ngole is that employers should make recruitment decisions using evidence rather than assumptions. That sounds obvious until you remember how much employment litigation consists of trying to reconstruct what somebody supposedly thought months earlier, after the email trails have become argumentative and everybody has acquired a solicitor.

The EAT case itself involved a very different protected characteristic and a very different factual setting. Touchstone Leeds had offered Mr Ngole a role, encountered difficulties with his references, Googled him and discovered historic reporting about social-media posts concerning same-sex relationships. The legal issues concerned religion or belief, expression and whether the employer had properly distinguished protected belief from legitimate role-related concerns. None of that magically decides a disability-discrimination dispute about recruitment at Cepac.

The methodological point is what matters here. Alvey says an employer should identify the real risk, connect it to evidence and avoid letting assumptions do the decision-making. That is precisely why the original Cepac questions remain so stubborn: what did Page record during the call, what did it send to Cepac, who considered the application, when did the candidate’s status change and what evidence actually drove that change?

Those questions are not philosophical.

They are the fucking recruitment file.

Behaviour: The First Record Said “Interview Next Week”

A contemporaneous record already exists from 21 August 2024, but inconveniently for the later corporate account it did not come from Cepac. After the Page call, I messaged a friend and recorded two ordinary pieces of good news: “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”. The recipient retained the exchange and later provided a witness statement confirming its origin and context.

That timing matters more than theatrical recollection years later. Nobody had complained to Cepac. ACAS had not entered the picture. There was no Employment Tribunal claim, no Horsfield Menzies, no TCAP and no conceivable litigation advantage in inventing an interview to a mate while discussing a new job. I had received what I understood to be good news and recorded it because normal people sometimes tell their friends when they think they have an interview.

That does not automatically prove every word said on the call. A WhatsApp message is not a recording of Page’s telephone conversation. What it does provide is a contemporaneous account created before anybody needed a legal position, and that makes the later denial something that requires explaining rather than simply repeating until it becomes corporate scripture.

Joanne Alvey says contemporaneous notes are critical.

I could not agree more.

Blog: Record And Justify Each Step

Alvey’s next practical lesson is even more awkward. She says employers should record and justify each step in a recruitment decision on its own rationale. In Ngole, that meant separately analysing the withdrawal of the offer, the later meeting and the decision not to reinstate it rather than blending several decisions together into one convenient lump.

Apply that discipline to the Cepac recruitment chain and the chronology suddenly becomes brutally simple. Page screened the candidate. Page discussed the role and salary. Mental health entered the conversation. A CV went forward to Cepac. My contemporaneous message recorded an interview expected the following week. The promised confirmation call then disappeared, and Cepac later said I had simply failed to make the shortlist.

Fine.

Show the fucking working.

What was the candidate’s status immediately after the Page call? When did it change? Who changed it? What information sat in front of the person making that decision? If Page never offered an interview, what exactly produced the salary discussion and my same-day expectation of one? If the employer independently decided not to shortlist me, where is the contemporaneous rationale showing that decision being made before anybody had a discrimination complaint to answer?

Alvey says each decision needs its own identifiable reason.

The Cepac file needed exactly that.

Behaviour: A Clean Explanation Arrived After The Problem

When I complained to Cepac in October 2024, its response supplied a clean corporate history. Page had carried out initial screening, sent a group of candidate CVs to the recruiting manager and I had not made the shortlist. The manager, I was told, would not have known about the mental-health information discussed with the agency recruiter. Page should apparently have communicated the result better, and any impression that an interview had been promised became unfortunate confusion.

That explanation has always been tidy enough to sit comfortably in an HR template. The difficulty is that it arrived after the missing callback and after I had complained about discrimination. It therefore deserves comparison with records created while the recruitment process was actually happening.

This is exactly where Alvey’s enthusiasm for contemporaneous reasoning earns its keep. An explanation constructed after the dispute starts is not automatically false. Organisations routinely have to reconstruct decisions after complaints. But the later the explanation arrives, the more important the original evidence becomes because otherwise hindsight can walk into the room wearing a name badge marked process and start rearranging the furniture.

The question is not whether Cepac eventually produced an explanation.

The question is what evidence existed when the fucking decision was made.

Blog: Contemporaneous Notes Are Critical

Alvey could hardly have chosen a more useful phrase for TCAP. “Contemporaneous notes are critical.” She explains that detailed written reasoning improves legal defensibility because the record can demonstrate what actually motivated a decision before the allegation arrives and everybody suddenly develops perfect retrospective clarity.

Exactly.

An employer facing a discrimination allegation should want the boring paperwork. Timestamped notes, candidate-status changes, recruiter records, shortlisting criteria, communications between agency and client and whatever contemporaneous document shows the point at which the candidate left the process. Boring records are beautiful because they do not know yet what the lawyers will need them to say.

The WhatsApp message has precisely that quality. It is not polished evidence. It contains no legal analysis, no accusation and no strategic wording. It says “Interview next week” and records the wage because that was what I understood had just happened.

If Page or Cepac held a contemporaneous record saying something materially different, that was the obvious thing to put against it and have the merits Tribunal decide which account made sense.

Instead, the merits never received that final determination.

The Employer’s Notes Matter More Than The Employer’s Memory

This is where Alvey’s article becomes more than a convenient quotation. Recruitment disputes frequently turn on reasons, and reasons are notoriously easy to tidy up after the event. A decision-maker may honestly reconstruct what they believe happened, yet memory can still absorb later information, correspondence and explanations until the original thought process becomes indistinguishable from the defence subsequently built around it.

That is why contemporaneous records matter so much. They freeze the decision before the argument contaminates it.

In the Cepac dispute, the central issue should have encouraged exactly that forensic discipline. Find Page’s call notes. Find the candidate record. Identify the CV transmission. Locate whatever status Page applied after the call. Establish what the recruiting manager received. Then identify the record showing when the candidate stopped progressing and why.

If those records prove that no interview had been offered and the decision arose from ordinary shortlisting, there is the defence.

If they do not, then somebody has a fucking problem.

Blog: Analyse Decisions Separately

Alvey also warns against treating several steps as though they were one decision. Each stage may involve a different decision-maker, different information and a different reason. That insight matters enormously in an outsourced recruitment model because Page and Cepac did not occupy the same chair.

Page knew what its recruiter heard and recorded. Cepac knew what Page transmitted and what its own recruiting manager did with it. Those are separate evidential lanes, and simply saying “the agency handled screening” does not resolve what moved between them.

The later pleaded case made that separation even more important. One part of Cepac’s position distanced the recruiting decision from knowledge of my mental-health condition, while another part of the recruitment narrative recorded health information Page had supplied. General knowledge of health problems is not automatically legal knowledge of disability, and information existing somewhere in a recruitment chain does not automatically prove a particular decision-maker knew it at the material time.

Which is why you trace the fucking chain.

Who knew what?

When?

From whom?

That is Alvey’s method, not TCAP inventing evidential hoops for fun.

Behaviour: Page Eventually Found The Search Bar

Then the story acquires a particularly nasty echo of Ngole.

Page’s later disclosure showed that, after my discrimination complaint, somebody internally Googled me and my previous employment history and found the Cummins Tribunal case. An internal message suggested that I might be a candidate who did this kind of thing regularly.

The timing matters, so let us not bastardise it. That Google search was not the original recruitment decision in August. It came after the discrimination allegation had entered the room, so this is not an accusation that Page rejected me because somebody had Googled my litigation history before the missing interview.

The juxtaposition is still filthy.

When challenged about what happened during recruitment, the organisation eventually found enough curiosity to investigate the candidate online. My previous Tribunal history became discoverable. Character context entered the internal discussion. Yet the original issue remained achingly mundane: what did your own recruitment records say happened on 21 August?

That is the difference between investigating the decision and investigating the person who challenged it.

One requires a file.

The other merely requires Google and a slightly shitty attitude.

The Search Bar Is Not A Recruitment Rationale

Alvey’s Ngole article is fundamentally about the danger of allowing information discovered online to substitute for disciplined decision-making. Employers may legitimately investigate role-specific risk in appropriate circumstances, but her advice insists that the concern must remain evidence-based and linked to the actual role rather than growing from assumptions about the individual.

Page’s later Google activity illustrates a different but related institutional reflex. Once I alleged discrimination, attention could shift away from the disputed recruitment event and towards the person making the allegation. Previous litigation history becomes interesting. Public information becomes interesting. Whether the candidate looks like somebody who complains regularly becomes interesting.

That may help an organisation assess litigation risk.

It does fuck-all to prove what happened during the original phone call.

If anything, it demonstrates how quickly a straightforward evidential problem can mutate into claimant profiling once lawyers and internal advisers smell smoke. Instead of asking only “what did our records show?”, somebody starts asking “who exactly is this bloke?”

The second question may be strategically interesting.

The first one decides the recruitment dispute.

The Same-Day Message Is Annoying Because It Has No Lawyer In It

The WhatsApp evidence has always mattered for a simple reason. It predates everybody’s incentive to harden their version.

Page had no claim to defend when I sent it. Cepac had received no complaint. I had no reason to create evidence for litigation that did not exist. Horsfield Menzies was nowhere near the file.

That does not make the message infallible, but it makes it wonderfully unprocessed.

Legal disputes eventually become crowded with professionally constructed documents. Pleadings summarise. Witness statements reconstruct. Skeleton arguments organise. Judgments select. Solicitors turn facts into propositions because that is their bloody job.

The WhatsApp did none of that.

It just sat there saying “Interview next week”.

No wonder I keep bringing the bastard back.

Joanne Says The Quality Of The Record Can Be Decisive

Alvey concludes that the decision-making process itself, together with the quality of the record keeping, can prove decisive. That is not an obscure procedural footnote. It goes to the heart of discrimination cases because unlawful reasons are rarely announced with a trumpet and a signed confession.

Tribunals often have to infer why something happened from chronology, documents, comparators, explanations and the quality of the employer’s evidence. Good contemporaneous records can protect an employer from a false allegation because they show a legitimate rationale existing before anybody accused the organisation of discrimination.

Poor records create the opposite problem. They force later explanations to carry weight those explanations were never designed to bear.

That is why “we did not shortlist him” should not end the enquiry when a same-day record says an interview had already been offered. It starts the enquiry.

Show the contemporaneous shortlisting decision.

Show the candidate-status history.

Show the rationale.

Show your fucking working.

The Case Became Enormous Around A Tiny Question

The bleak comedy is what happened afterwards. A recruitment dispute capable of being expressed in a handful of questions eventually became litigation measured in thousands of pages, applications, conduct evidence, blog posts, X entries, costs arguments and procedural warfare.

By April 2026, the main bundle ran to 1,657 pages excluding its index. The Tribunal ultimately struck out my claims because of its findings about my conduct of the proceedings and ordered me to pay Cepac £20,000 in costs. The original recruitment allegations therefore never received the completed merits determination that would have required somebody finally to decide what happened on 21 August 2024.

That outcome does not retroactively answer the recruitment question.

It ended the case before the question received its full answer.

This is why Alvey’s tidy little recruitment checklist feels almost obscene beside the file. Evidence-based decision. Separate rationale. Contemporary notes. Robust documentation. Clear reasoning.

The original dispute needed all of those things.

What it eventually got was a fucking character prosecution.

Horsfield Menzies Knows Exactly What Good Recruitment Evidence Looks Like

That is the real Blog vs Behaviour point.

Horsfield Menzies plainly understands how employers should defend recruitment decisions. Joanne Alvey has set it out beautifully. Use evidence rather than assumption, identify the real reason for each decision, keep contemporaneous notes and make sure the record shows why the treatment occurred.

Nobody at TCAP needs to improve that advice.

We only need to apply it to the client Horsfield Menzies actually defended.

Cepac said no interview had been offered.

My contemporaneous record says “Interview next week.”

Page’s own records placed health in the recruitment chronology.

The expected confirmation vanished.

Later explanations arrived.

Page subsequently Googled the complainant.

And nobody completed the merits hearing that should have put those records beside the witnesses and decided what the fuck actually happened.

That is not an abstract tension between blog and behaviour.

It is almost a worked example.

Show Your Fucking Working

Joanne Alvey’s article is good because it understands the simplest truth in employment litigation: reasons matter, but recorded reasons matter more.

If an employer withdraws an offer, changes course or refuses to progress somebody, the decision should leave footprints. The clearer those footprints are before the dispute begins, the less anybody has to rely on retrospective reconstruction afterwards.

That principle should make employers safer from weak discrimination claims.

It should also expose weak explanations when the paperwork does not match them.

So let us apply Joanne’s rule without fear or favour.

Page called me on 21 August 2024. We discussed a production role and the salary. I disclosed the mental-health reason for my employment gap. My same-day WhatsApp says “Interview next week”. The promised confirmation disappeared. Cepac later said no interview had been offered and that I had simply failed to make the shortlist.

Joanne Alvey says contemporaneous notes are critical.

Wonderful.

Mine survived.

Show me theirs.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

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