UCL research reveals the importance of building an evidence base to inform action on social mobility, explains Dr Claire Tyler, ISE’s Head of Insights.
Employers are increasingly implementing social mobility strategies to attract a wider pool of high potential candidates.
Many ISE members are leading the way, accounting for two-thirds (48) of the top 75 employers in the Social Mobility Employer Index and many are also UK Social Mobility Award winners.
In fact, attendees at our EDI Conference reported ‘social mobility’ as their primary EDI focus for 2025.
Data challenges are a key barrier
Despite the growth of social mobility initiatives, employers often lack a strong evidence base to inform their early careers social mobility or broader EDI strategy.
Our Student Recruitment Survey 2024 revealed half (54%) of employers are dissatisfied with graduate EDI disclosure rates and 29% of employers are unable to access or track graduate EDI data.
This echoes employer sentiment at the ISE EDI Conference where ‘data’ was the primary factor holding back EDI strategies.
In relation to social mobility specifically, only 10% of ISE employer members have a recruitment target for graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds (LSEB), likely influenced in part by these data challenges.
New ‘early careers recruitment data hub’
To support employers and policy makers improve social mobility though data, Prof. Lindsey Macmillan (UCL), Dr Catherine Dilnot (Oxford Brookes) and I have created an ‘early careers recruitment data hub’ containing detailed data on over 2.5 million job applicants (and growing) to entry level roles (graduates, school leavers, apprentices and interns) across a range of sectors and multiple years.
We are using this untapped recruitment data resource to support employers and policy makers to build an evidence base for EDI recruitment initiatives, including those related to social mobility, and assess their impact.
New research – recruitment processes create social mobility barriers
Our recent research 'Inequalities in Access to Professional Careers', funded by the Nuffield Foundation, reveals for the first time that LSEB graduates are well represented in applicant pools to professional occupations but are less likely to be hired, even when they have the same level of education, and this picture appears to be worsening.
Figure 1 shows that LSEB candidates (in green) account for 24% of the graduate talent pool available to employers (benchmark) and 27% of applications to our sample of employers.
This is good news – it suggests no ‘dearth of aspiration’ and/or that outreach activity appears to be working. However, despite LSEB candidates applying, they are disproportionately rejected during the recruitment process, accounting for 22% of those who passed the initial screening and online testing stages, and 19% of those who received job offers.
Figure 1: Socioeconomic background of graduate scheme applicants by stage of the process
Headline figures
Once we remove candidates who voluntarily withdraw from the process (to ensure these aren’t driving our results), we find that:
- LSEB applicants are 32% less likely to get a professional graduate job offer than applicants from professional backgrounds.
- LSEB ethnic minority applicants face a double disadvantage – they are 45% less likely to get an offer than white applicants from professional backgrounds.
Can this be explained?
We can explain about half of the social class gap with available recruitment data – such as other demographic characteristics, educational background and application choices (including date of application, type of role and office location).
In fact, for the accounting sector, where we have the most complete data, we can specifically quantify the role of each of these factors to show what matters for social mobility and crucially what doesn’t. For example, over half of the social class gap in accountancy derives from social gradients in UCAS tariffs and attendance at higher ranked universities.
What remains unexplained?
Even when we adjust for all these prior inequalities and only compare candidates who ‘look the same on paper’ much of the social class gap still remains unexplained:
- LSEB applicants are still 18% less likely to receive a job offer than ‘like for like’ candidates from a professional background.
- LSEB ethnic minority applicants are still 37% less likely to get an offer than ‘like for like’ white applicants from professional backgrounds.
- Half of the unexplained social class gap occurs at the initial online application sift and testing stage, while the other half emerges during face-to-face stages of the recruitment process.
The challenge is now to grow this quantitative evidence base to better understand what might be causing these 'unexplained gaps' so they can be addressed.
This is also particularly timely given shifts towards skills-based recruitment (57% of ISE members plan to move to this in future) where LSEB candidates are not only navigating persistent inequalities in the education system but may lack a support network to help them learn ‘the new rules of the game’ in their transition from education to work.
Why does this matter?
Campaigners explain that education and labour market inequalities, such as lower levels of social mobility, create a misallocation of talent with negative consequences for individuals, businesses and the economy.
Employers who prioritise social mobility are often motivated by accessing untapped talent pools to better prepared for future challenges such as skills shortages, declining birth rates and UK legislative changes on the horizon.
In fact, in the recent ISE Student Development Survey, most employers (72%) believed that EDI will become increasingly important in future, signaling a strong focus on inclusive workplace practices, despite a challenging policy environment in the US.
Recommendations
For employers keen to progress on their social mobility journey, here are a few recommendations to consider, with many more in our report and blogs (on key findings, what matters, applying early and online testing):
- Collect social background data from applicants (successful and unsuccessful ones) and design a process whereby this data can be used for monitoring of recruitment outcomes.
- Review barriers to application and hiring for LSEB applicants by each stage of the recruitment process – is outreach the issue or barriers within the selection process?
- Review potential adverse impact of recruitment process changes, such as closing recruitment campaigns earlier (a change likely to disadvantage LSEB candidates), or shifting to skills based recruitment.