When you meet a stranger look at his shoes. Are you ready to ELBA?
OK, let’s talk about footwear. There is an expression “when you meet a stranger look at his shoes”, and it’s often not a bad place to start for striking up conversations with people you meet in a kind of “you don’t see many people wearing ice skates at the zoo” way. But when it comes to using footwear to decide entry to a profession, that’s something else altogether.
This week the “brown shoes with a suit” debate was plastered over the media as a result of the latest Social Mobility Commission report into investment banking and the life sciences.
The report was a thorough review of recruitment practice for new entrants into front office positions and confirmed that the tendency to recruit “people like us” is still prevalent in some banks. People from certain social classes who have been to Russell Group universities are much more likely to get jobs than those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The analysis looks at the factors that lead to this position – is it driven by education choices that are made long before the point of application; is there an information inequality whereby disadvantaged young people simply don’t know the how attendance at certain universities opens access to some professions? What role does the intelligence which derives from family and social networks play – intelligence which is not available to all?
It is a very important report and adds weight to the ongoing work of ELBA and our corporate partners. We support hundreds of people every year to get a start in City professions. Often into back-office or supporting roles, but even so, we are still getting them in through the door. For us the key thing is not to approach employers with a deficit model – playing the guilt card, but to show the talent they are missing out on. London Works, ELBA’s ethical recruitment agency is placing people with very prominent social mobility characteristics – for the last cohort, 92% are from ethnic minorities, 78% were in the pupil premium group at school, 77% are the first generation in their family to go to university, 88% are from social housing backgrounds. These figures show what can be done, and in many ways it is a shame that the Social Mobility Commission report did not spend more time looking at employers who are making changes – perhaps there is more to be learned from this than easy (but telling) comments about brown shoes, baggy suits and loud ties. Employers like ELBA corporate partners Macquarie who recruit only on merit, but who can see that the talent pool is much wider than a clone of the people they already have in the office. Employers like Credit Suisse, Barclays and Chaucer who provide employment for six month placements and intensive support for bright east London graduates who are finding it difficult to get graduate level employment.
But back to footwear, you really cannot get away from it. So as well as debating whether recruiters should pay attention to brown shoes with a suit, the ELBA office has been filled with strident debate over the news story a few weeks ago when a female front of house worker had been asked to wear shoes with 2 inch heels, when her male colleagues did not. For myself, my footwear touchstone is flip-flops. Try as I might, I just cannot take seriously a gentleman who turns up for work in flip-flops. Possibly they are required uniform in the creative sector, but I just cannot see it – but I may be a dinosaur.
