Why does the Civil Service recruitment process ask about your background?

[TravellingSpoon]

It asks if you were ever in reciept of FSM as a child, or whether you grew up in a household that was in receipt of income support.

Do they collate these details?

To check the diversity of applicants.

The data is stored separately from your application and is not available to the recruiters

And when I say check I mean 'is the proportion of applicants from an ethnic minority background increasing or decreasing annually?' Etc

They want to diversify the people who apply/are selected, and monitor progress. It is a pretty homogeneous workforce, although less so than it used to be.

Yes they'll collate it. Presumably it is a non-compulsory question?

However you dont have to those questions, I certainly didn't !

They will want to be employing an increasing proportion of people who were on FSM. But they won’t be able to associate the responses with individuals….

It's to measure social mobility in the workforce.

Thank you.

It's a crude measure of social mobility and deprivation. But a start at least.

Definitely not seen by recruiters so safe to answer.