The Ethics of Job Referrals
We live in an era where job referrals are accepted as making up the fabric of graduate recruitment: if you know the right person you can be set for life. That’s not to say that it is necessarily a bad thing, many of the business leaders of today probably owe a lot to the people who helped them get those all-important first steps in the business world.
However, it becomes an issue when you consider the disparity in the UK between the backgrounds of those in top jobs and the proportion they make up of the UK population. We live in a diverse country where a lot of cultures and classes are still under-represented in jobs.
Mention the elite, male-dominant power structure of the government cabinet and everyone is disgusted that such blatant nepotism is allowed to take place and that a privileged group from wealthy backgrounds who have such a specific and limited experience of British life are able to represent an incredibly diverse nation that is a mixing pot of cultures and life experiences.
Apply the same mechanism to a business context, however, and it is typically met with general apathy and a shrug of the shoulders followed by every dejected graduate’s favourite quote: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
On a fundamental level, this approach makes a lot of sense. It takes a lot of time and man hours to sift through job application after job application so it is completely understandable that someone working in HR would take the word of a well-respected higher-up in the business rather than assessing the individual merits of infinite faceless scribbles of paper.
But surely, as a society, we can do better than this.
Whilst this may be a broad issue facing the business world, there are a lot of companies working hard to make sure nepotism doesn’t seep into their recruitment process.
For instance, a whole host of companies, such as civil service, BBC, NHS, local government, KPMG, HSBC, Deloitte and Virgin Money, and Universities have adopted name-blind recruitment following various studies that found recruiters discriminated against ethnic-sounding names. Some companies have even gone further in removing gender from the application process.
I would argue that the conventionally held belief should be inverted, instead of “who you know” it should be “who knows you”. Instead of having success be a birth-right for some, hard work should be acknowledged for those whose efforts have been so remarkable that they merit the recognition of the higher-ups, in which case referrals are very much justified.
Networking is a key skill in business and always will be but there is a huge difference between networking and privilege and it’s important to address that. Hopefully, in years, decades, generations to come, the steps these companies are taking today will lead to much more diversity in the business world and people getting the jobs they deserve.
