To think being prejudiced against the privately educated is OK

[EastLondonObserver]

I have spent 25 years working in the advertising industry at some of the most highly regarded agencies in the world. Most of these have been dominated (in certain roles, at least) by the privately educated who gained their entry to the industry through having personal/family contacts in it, were subbed by rich parents while working in low-paid or free internships to gain experience and had that empty confidence private schools instil.

Perfectly capable graduates educated comprehensive schools didn't get much of a look in. However a few managed to break through, including myself.

Consequently, throughout my career I have actively rejected almost all privately educated graduates applying for entry level positions. This runs into hundreds of applicants. I have managed to do this without being called out. Sometimes I have rejected them even when they clearly would have done a better job than a comprehensive school educated alternative. These were corporate companies - it made no meaningful difference to me if they were mildly less successful as a consequence. The only exception was one graduate educated at Harrow and Bristol. I gave him the job as an experiment. He was average at best.

I did this in the name of social justice: re-distributing opportunities away from those with unearned privilege.

Have I been unreasonable? Has anyone else done the same?

Absolutely!

And I love it when talent reaches the top - there’s girl in the year above dds at her school lives in low income area mother a cleaner single mum and she’s so clever she’s being mentored by an Oxford college. How marvellous to see her leap frog the privileged kids on merit alone. Dh like that. More of that please!

The fact that some kids are less privileged when they enter private school doesn't undo the fact that they gain an unfair advantage by being at private school. Smaller classes, better environment for learning, teachers more able to do a good job and pay attention to them, more extra curricular built into core school life, more intensive, targeted careers support, and the ability to build friendships and become part of elite networks. Regardless of whether they are privileged to start with, by the time they graduate they are! Doesn't mean they aren't nice people or they never have anything bad happen to them, but they ARE at an advantage on the job market.

A lot of you are responding as if the OP is turning these candidates down to punish them. (Ie Centering the rejection of the privileged person). That's not it. She's not walking around the streets hitting privately educated folk on the head. She has a further advantage to hand out (a job). She is simply choosing to give that advantage to people who haven't had as many advantages though their education. What happens to the privileged people actually isn't the point! She's simply handing a little bit of advantage out to those who don't normally get it.

Of course one can invalidate any action by picking unrepresentative cases, but overall positive discrimination is an adjustment in the right direction, and needed until the world becomes more just overall. The 'hidden privilege of the upper 5% in the state system? I'm sure OP will sniff them out at interview!

I once got the doubtful comment on the school I’d been to: ‘but you’ve blossomed since?’

She's simply handing a little bit of advantage out to those who don't normally get it.

But that would s not what her company is paying her for.

Her job is to fine the best candidates. Not to socially engineer her company.

Sorry is

Companies are generally in the business to make money. So hiring managers will choose those candidates who they think will do the best job for the company.

Yep. It's really instructive just how nasty they become. This thread is a long succession of abuse, and deletions, all aimed at the OP for doing something that challenges privilege.

Yes, what she's doing is not very professional. Yes, it could be a breach of employment law. But these same things happen every single day in her industry (one which I know well) in the other direction, and none of the PPs dishing out vitriol bat an eyelid at that. But when it's their own kids' privilege being challenged...

Companies are generally in the business to make money. So hiring managers will choose those candidates who they think will do the best job for the company.

And hiring managers disproportionately seem to believe that is someone who is privately educated. Why is that prejudice OK - because it is so normalised in the UK? The OP is tipping the balance a teeny weeny bit the other way, but don't fret - the scales are still heavily weighted towards the privately educated.

I admire the calm way you have with the outrage on this thread OP - keep on keeping on ✊

That’s not necessarily true.

I am mixed race. I know several families in my fathers community that opted for private school to try and redress the fact that their children will automatically be disadvantaged due to their name or skin colour. This has, in some cases, been archived through scholarships.

So while private education may give them a privilege in regards to education they gave more disadvantage across the board.

Op has admitted that her process discriminated against anyone who perhaps attended private school for reasons other than their parents wealth, Including candidates with disabilities (though clearly doesn’t understand how disabilities are recorded for interview candidates and how that information is used) she could also be furthering the disadvantage of non white candidates. Especially since she claims to have done this across multiple companies.

and no, I don’t think op could ‘sniff out’ someone who is a privileged state school attendee. That suggests candidates who are not from the ‘top 5%’ are a homogenous group that display the same behaviours and op can just tell they aren’t from a privileged background.

What do you believe though behaviours are?

Her job is to fine the best candidates. Not to socially engineer her company
This is the issue in a nutshell.

If the company has a recruitment process then it should be followed, and it's unlikely any company will have a policy that says to bin any application if the person shortlisting had an ideological objection to the school an adult attended as a child.

If things need to change in the industry, and it sounds like they do, then the way to go about them is with bigger changes within recruitment and hiring, as well as outreach to widen the net of people coming through. The way forward isn't an employee binning applications and then smugly congratulating themselves for taking on the establishment.

The best candidates for the job - surely in advertising and in fact most fields, will be from a range of backgrounds. The team should reflect the customers who buy the products. My mate who works in advertising would never buy the stuff he promotes. His team are not remotely diverse. As OP says, her steps are aimed at redressing the bias that currently exists.

I find it extraordinary that people make recruitment decisions based on the candidate's school. Surely their degree outcome is the main thing? If we are saying all privately educated people had an unfair advantage, would that not have been levelled out at university? I've done a lot of recruitment in my time and couldn't care less where they went to school

The best candidates for the job - surely in advertising and in fact most fields, will be from a range of backgrounds. The team should reflect the customers who buy the products.

I'm sure the CEO/owners of advertising firms will know what is best for their company and will hire accordingly!

They don't need someone in the hiring department to secretly bin applications of people whose school she dislikes.

Quite.

in my field state school candidates with the same and often better degrees than private school ones have been rejected in favour of private school kids for decades.

I think to reject a candidate purely based on something over which they have no control is basically an evil thing to do. To reject someone purely based on a decision their parents made that they have no ability to change is plain nasty.

(i) If you've got a privately-educated applicant, and one from a council house background, with exactly the same a-levels and degree, the latter is probably the more capable and talented. They have come further to achieve the same result, and are probably on a steeper flight-path. From a hard-headed business perspective, they're probably the better recruit.

(ii) it's interesting that posters like you have nothing to say about employers actively discriminating in favour of the privately-schooled, to a huge degree, for many decades; and only start squealing when you become aware of one instance, or a handful of instances, where the boot is on the other foot. What inference should we draw?

If you genuinely believe this, go and protest about the prevalence of the publically- and privately- educated in all our major professions - politics, law, accountancy etc etc. It's by far the bigger evil. Or are you only upset about poorer kids getting a leg up?

I try and think beyond what is written on my job description.

How quaint! And a demonstration of forelock tugging.

Many CEOs make terrible decisions all the time: bad acquisitions, bad hires, financial screw ups, strategic decisions and so on.

Their background often means they are part of the problem and pay lip service to diversity but do little to diversify in terms of educational and social background. This is even the case when it is in their bests interests to do so - for instance, in advertising the need to have people who intuitively ‘get’ ordinary people.

and no, I don’t think op could ‘sniff out’ someone who is a privileged state school attendee. That suggests candidates who are not from the ‘top 5%’ are a homogenous group that display the same behaviours and op can just tell they aren’t from a privileged background.

It totally doesn't imply that non privileged people have all the same traits. It does imply that the privileged have certain recognizeable traits, and can be identified from an otherwise diverse and varied larger pool of non-privileged candidates.

What would those traits be? Many would be on the cv already in the names of areas and schools and extra curricular activities, travel abroad experiences, etc. others would come up in interview- Eg: how they got an unpaid internship, or when asked to describe a situation that took resilience, they talk about getting rejected from the netball team or some such 'trauma', instead of a real life struggle. There may well also be a sense of entitlement or privilege in how they present themselves, interpret and answer questions etc. Eg if asked about the marketing of a low cost product, they may show a lack of understanding for why that product might be desirable or how small price variations would be very important.

The whole point of an interview is you get to know the candidate better. So doesn't seem a leap to me that by the end of an interview you would have some sense of the person's level of economic and educational privilege.

digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/privileged-kids-on-a-plate-pencilsword-toby-morris/

applause

I’m with you OP - and I have done what you do.
because I want to even out the playing field a bit and my company do F all to actually make a difference when it comes to DE&I.
Our company is stuffed with overconfident, over ambitious public school educated people as it is.
If I see two candidates, pretty much capable equally of doing the job, and one is WC and one is privately educated I KNOW that the WC is almost certainly going to be harder working, more resilient and more grounded than the posh candidate.

I think there’s going to be more and more ‘prejudice’ against privately educated candidates as more WC people like me get to the top, and DE&I practices actually come into play.