Social mobility


…when talking to staff at


Oxford and Cambridge about individual students’ GCSE and A Level grades, we had noticed that they often asked about candidates’ educational and social


backgrounds before taking a position on their applications.


Putting Graduates into Context


When Raphael Mokades founded diversity company, Rare, in 2005, companies who thought about class or social mobility were very much in the minority, and those that did tended to take a slightly haphazard approach to addressing the issue. Times have changed, and contextual data has opened up a world of valuable knowledge for employers – and reaped results, as he explains…


I


n June 2013 I hired an employee called Josh to do some research. “Clients keep asking us about social


mobility,” I told him. “There’s a lot of noise about it but none of it seems to be terribly scientific or evidence-based. Could you take a look at all the evidence, investigate what they do in universities, and make some recommendations? I expect we’ll end up recommending that firms make some sort of adjustment and drop an A Level grade or something for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. But that’s just my instinct.”


18 Graduate Recruiter | www.agr.org.uk


This idea of rough-and-ready adjustment was not new. Sarah Langton, then Head of Recruitment at McKinsey, told me that she looked for candidates with AAA from private schools or AAB from state schools. At about the same time, Graham White, Graduate Recruitment Partner at Slaughter and May, told me that the firm didn’t have set grade requirements but took into account the sort of school someone had attended. But neither Sarah, who is now Head of Resourcing at Clifford Chance, nor Graham, now a non-executive director of Rare, had any systems or databases.


They did not collect social mobility information beyond school attended and there was no statistical evidence base for any adjustments made. Any analysis of candidates’ schools was done on an ad hoc, manual basis. At a time when there was no pressure on firms to consider social mobility, McKinsey and Slaughter and May were unusual for considering candidates’ educational backgrounds, but they were simply two employers trying to find the best candidates and be fair to all applicants.


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