Graduate recruiters ‘filter out’ poorer and minority applicants

UK employers are less likely to progress working-class and ethnic-minority graduates through to the final stages of their hiring process, leading to less diverse workforces, a report has found.

A comprehensive study of graduate outcomes conducted by UCL and the Nuffield Foundation found that graduates from a low socio-economic background were 32 per cent less likely to receive a job offer than those from more wealthy backgrounds. 

Meanwhile, black and Asian applicants are 45 per cent and 29 per cent respectively less likely to receive an offer than white applicants, says the report, which analyses the recruitment data from 17 large and anonymised employers.

The research said that “half of these job offer gaps” can be attributed to applicants not passing initial online sifts and application tests, while the other half emerges during the face-to-face stages of the recruitment process. 

In particular, black applicants are 37 per cent less likely to pass the online application sift and online testing stages than their comparable white graduates, it says.

Lead author Lindsey Macmillan, director of UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, said that the report was “significant” as it is “the first time ever” that “we’ve been able to disentangle the reasons for why working-class young people and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in professional roles”. 

She said that the report makes clear that low socio-economic and minority-ethnic applicants “are actually well represented among applicants, but are being disproportionately filtered out across the recruitment processes”.

The findings potentially have significant implications for universities, which are often assessed by policymakers and regulators on the proportion of graduates finding work, particularly in professional roles.

There have long been concerns that the use of such data in England’s Teaching Excellence Framework, for example, penalises institutions that do the “heavy lifting” on widening access, without acknowledging the inequalities that their graduates face in the labour market.

Exploring the reasons for the poorer performance of certain student groups, the report outlines that working-class students typically apply to graduate positions “later” than those from wealthier backgrounds, and Macmillan says that “applying earlier to a graduate scheme means you’re more likely to get a position, because these graduate schemes literally fill up throughout the year”. 

The report says that greater guidance should be provided to working-class applicants outlining the “timelines and requirements” of graduate scheme applications to “improve their ‘application readiness’”. 

It says that lower socio-economic and ethnic-minority students may be less likely to pass application assessments as “these applicants are less likely to have parents or networks with experience of these tests”.

While universities have a role in supporting students to better understand application processes, she said that it is “pretty clear” that “employers are playing a major role” in graduate outcomes.

“The emphasis really is on employers here to understand what’s happening in their recruitment processes. But that’s not to say universities can’t better support applicants to make it through various stages of the process, or offer targeted advice to potential applicants that might aid them along the way, such as the date of application being an important factor.”

The report notes that internships can provide a major route into employment, stating that in one firm that took part 80 per cent of its interns were offered a position upon graduating. Students from private schools are “hugely overrepresented” in the number of internship holders, but the report acknowledges that black applicants are 20 per cent more likely to receive internship offers than their white or Asian peers, “reflecting the use of internships to build more diverse talent pipelines”. 

The report recommends that universities and employers should “foster stronger connections” and collaborate on data sharing to enhance career guidance and recruitment strategies, particularly to support underrepresented students. 

It adds that universities can “boost confidence” and “help students without support networks navigate the recruitment process more effectively” by providing guidance on preparation for psychometric tests.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com