Ahead of this year’s ISE Development Conference, Joe Mackley, Head of Strategic Partnerships at The 93% Club, considers why many employers don’t fail at attracting working-class talent, but they do fail to keep it.
There's a striking contradiction sitting at the heart of early careers hiring.
On one hand, organisations are investing more than ever in socio-economic diversity - contextual recruitment, outreach programmes, internships targeted at underrepresented groups. On the other, the very people these initiatives are designed to support are leaving, stagnating or opting out entirely once they arrive.
The problem is that if you're only looking at hiring data you'll miss it completely.
The uncomfortable truth is this: many organisations aren't failing to attract working-class talent; they're failing to keep it. And more than that, they're unintentionally designing environments where that talent struggles to succeed.
The evidence is hard to ignore
Research by the Bridge Group has found that, in financial services, socio-economic background has a greater impact on progression than gender or ethnicity. Employees from working-class backgrounds take significantly longer to be promoted - and are consistently underrepresented at senior levels.
When you ask individuals themselves, the picture becomes even clearer.
The 93% Club's Big State School Survey, capturing the experiences of over 10,000 state-educated individuals, found that 15% have either resigned or seriously considered resigning because of issues linked to their background. Among working-class professionals, that rises to 24%.
That's nearly one in four people questioning whether they belong in the very organisations that worked so hard to recruit them.
So, what's going wrong?
It's not usually policy. It's not even always intent. It's culture. It's systems. It's signals. The informal networks. It's the things that are never written down but always understood.
83% of professionals say there's an unspoken ‘rulebook’ at work. A set of behaviours, norms, and expectations that determine who progresses. But here's the catch: not everyone has access to that rulebook.
If you grew up around professional environments, you've likely absorbed these cues without realising it. How to speak in meetings. When to push back. How to build relationships with senior stakeholders. Even how to ask for help without seeming incapable.
If you didn't, you're expected to learn them on the job, often without guidance, and always under pressure. That gap isn't about ability. It's about exposure. And it shows up in ways that shape entire careers.
61% of professionals say they hold back from advocating for themselves because they're worried about jeopardising their role. Among working-class individuals, that rises to 68%. Not because they lack ambition, but because the risks feel higher when you don't have a safety net.
At the same time, opportunity often flows through informal networks. 87% of working-class professionals report seeing colleagues use school or family connections to build relationships at work. Meanwhile, 88% observe senior leaders hiring people who resemble themselves.
Add to that the daily friction of not quite fitting in. 66% of respondents say they've been mocked at work because of their background. Among working-class individuals, it's 74%. Among those from Northern regions, 83%.
Sometimes it's jokes about accents. Sometimes it's a focus on where someone went to school. Sometimes it's assumptions about interests, holidays, or even what's considered ‘normal’.
Individually, these moments seem small. Collectively, they send a clear message: you are different, and different is harder. Over time, that message becomes exhausting.
So, people adapt. They code-switch. They stay silent in meetings. They avoid risks. They work twice as hard to prove themselves. Or eventually, they leave.
And when they do, organisations often misread it. They call it a ‘lack of fit’ or a ‘better opportunity elsewhere’. Rarely do they ask whether the environment itself played a role.
But here's the reality: if your systems reward those who already understand the rules, your organisation isn't a meritocracy; it's a familiarity contest.
So, what needs to change?
First, organisations need to stop treating socio-economic diversity as purely a hiring metric and start treating it as a progression issue. Because if people aren't advancing at the same rate, or are leaving altogether, you haven't really achieved inclusion. You have churn.
Second, make the invisible visible. If success depends on unwritten rules, those rules need to be written down. What does ‘good’ actually look like? How do people get promoted? What behaviours are valued, and which ones are penalised without anyone saying so?
Clarity is one of the simplest, most powerful levellers.
Third, rethink how opportunity is distributed. If career-defining moments, high-profile projects, client exposure, senior sponsorship, are allocated informally, they will continue to favour those already in the room. Transparency matters.
Fourth, build networks on purpose. Not everyone arrives with a ready-made set of connections. Creating intentional opportunities for relationship-building, across levels, teams, and backgrounds, can fundamentally shift who gets access to what.
The 93% Club is leading this change
This is where The 93% Club's Professionals network is doing something genuinely important.
Built by and for state-schooled professionals in top careers, it exists to provide what many organisations still fail to offer: community, visibility, and the kind of candid knowledge-sharing that helps people not just survive elite workplaces but thrive in them. Members connect across sectors (law, finance, consulting, media, tech, and more) sharing unwritten rules, sponsoring one another, and building the social capital that others often inherit. It's peer-powered progression. And it's working.
The Professionals network is proof that when working-class talent is given the right infrastructure and genuine community, they thrive. It challenges the idea that fitting in is the only path to getting on and replaces it with something more powerful: a network that changes what ‘fitting in’ means in the first place.
A final takeaway
The biggest piece of advice is also the simplest. Organisations need to listen. Not always through polished engagement surveys, but through honest conversations about experience. Because the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.
None of this is about lowering standards. It's about removing hidden advantages. Because talent is not evenly distributed, but opportunity certainly isn't either.
Right now, many organisations are investing heavily in widening access, while unintentionally not focusing on progression. They're opening the front door but leaving the internal pathways unchanged.
And that's why they're losing people. Not because those individuals lack capability. Not because they don't want to succeed. But because the system was never designed with them in mind.
If organisations truly want to unlock the potential of the next generation workforce, they need to go further than recruitment. They need to interrogate what success looks like, who it currently serves, and who it systematically excludes.
Because inclusion isn't about bringing people into the room. It's about changing what happens once they're there.
Hear more from Joe at this year’s ISE Student Development Conference on 7 May 2026.