Get involved with running Nine Worlds
If you think you'd like to take on a role, email jobs@nineworlds.co.uk.
What to include in your application
To apply for a role, email jobs@nineworlds.co.uk with the name of the role in the subject line. Please explain how you meet each of the necessary and desirable criteria, and your experience with Nine Worlds or similar events.
How you choose to show that you meet a criterion is up to you. A simple and convincing way of doing so is to talk about previous roles or life experiences that have had the same requirement. If you disclose membership of a marginalised group then this will be counted as lived experience in assessing the 'understanding of barriers to inclusion faced by marginalised groups' criterion.
If you'd like to apply for multiple roles, please send one email per role as we'll be assessing and recruiting for each of them separately.
We may post up answers to questions received on this page to keep everyone informed.
How we will handle your application
For formal recruitments, once applications close for a role, we will:
- Sift the applications to ensure they meet basic criteria
- Notify any applicants who don't meet basic criteria
- Transfer the application information into an anonymised form
- Share the anonymised information with third parties for marking and comments
- Filter down to a final shortlist using this assessment
- Notify applicants whether they are / aren't in the final shortlist
- Discuss the role and plans for it with the shortlisted applicants, clarify outstanding questions or concerns on both sides, and arrange introductions to potential co-organisers as appropriate
- Make a final decision on appointment to role
- Notify shortlisted applicants of the decision
- Confirm with the applicant that they wish to proceed with the role, provide an induction and introductions to the wider team, and start rolling
Whatever the outcome of your application, we will give feedback on the reasons for our decisions on request.
If a recruitment is unsuccessful for any reason, we may extend our deadline or readvertise the role, rethink the role and its place in the organisational structure, or fall back to alternative recruitment methods.
We aim to confirm appointments for all roles within one month of applications closing, but this process will take different amounts of time for different roles. During the recruitment process, we will acknowledge or respond to all applications and enquiries arriving in the jobs@nineworlds.co.uk account within one week.
Our aims in recruitment
We aim to be a maximally inclusive event. This impacts on all areas of our operation and content. It also impacts on our recruitment: understanding of the needs and wants of historically excluded groups is a desirable criterion for all roles, and lived experience is strong evidence of this. We have a code of conduct which applies to staff and volunteers as well as attendees.
We aim to recruit fairly and without favouring existing interpersonal relationships, when possible. This is frankly not always sensible - personal connections are faster and bring a baseline of trust that takes substantial work to replicate through formal recruitment processes, and formal recruitment can take longer to carry out on all sides than the resultant roles are worth. However, formal recruitment also opens up the organising community, gives more people the opportunity to get involved, improves inclusion, and gives greater transparency and accountability for the work and rewards being offered. All of the roles advertised here are being recruited formally.
We aim to reward work fairly. This is an ongoing challenge - we operate against a landscape partly made up of volunteer-driven conventions where people spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds in order to volunteer their expertise with little or no reward, as a service to the wider community, and also of expo events which use celebrity signings and photos as a profit engine. Our own ethos has been set out previously, and we detail the expected rewards for any paid positions, reimbursement of volunteer expenses, and justification for each of the roles as part of the role description.
The show must go on. We have to get the job done and put on a financially sustainable, enjoyable event for the ticket holders who give us their money. Accordingly, we will only accept people in role if we are confident that they have the capability, capacity and commitment to carry it out successfully. We're building redundancy throughout the event's staffing, with multiple-person teams or deputies in all critical areas, but this should be to cover emergencies only.
Legal stuff
There is a volunteer agreement which sets out the responsibilities on either side of our relationship with people who contribute to the organising and running of Nine Worlds. It is not legally binding, but gives an outline of our expectations.
Under English employment law, Nine Worlds is not permitted to reward volunteers in any way. We ask a lot from our volunteers, but where possible we try to mitigate the out of pocket expenses that come with offering your time to the convention. As circumstances allow and depending on the demands of the role, we may be able to help cover expenses by offering free entry to the event (either day or weekend), and/or shared accommodation either at or near the convention. The anticipated categories of expenses for each role are set out in the descriptions below. In exceptional circumstances it may be possible for further expenses (e.g. travel) to be covered.
We may also ask volunteers to spread the word about the convention by providing them with promotional items such as T-shirts, badges or keyrings.
While we try to use different terminology when talking about voluntary and paid roles, there are words in common use that we use for both types of role, such as 'recruit', 'staff', 'task', 'work', 'job', 'role' and 'hours'. For the avoidance of doubt, we use these words in their common meaning and without implying that a voluntary role is a paid role, or vice versa.
