Bizcuits | Talent outside the box

Leanda Lee

A few years ago, Ernst & Young, the fifth largest recruiter of graduates in the UK, removed from their employment criteria the requirement for a university degree. It is not that academic qualifications are not important, but as all good evidence-based management goes, E&Y looked at their data and found that university grades were not the best predictor of job success; a part but not the whole story.

Beyond our areas of expertise, we are notoriously poor at assessing quality. That’s why we latch onto and take cues from symbols of quality, like brands. My father started to complain when labels appeared on the outside of clothes in the 70s: “They should pay me to wear their advertising,” he’d joke.

Marketing was beginning to take a hold in the garment industry and shoe trade (now the “Fashion Industry”) in which he had worked for over 40 years. His thinking was driven by a distaste for two things: for what he perceived – and often rightly so – to be a manipulation by marketers to make something appear what it is not, and for the uninformed consumer who didn’t know the difference.

We use shortcuts to get a sense of worth of things and people. We haven’t the capacity to sift through all the information we have, let alone collect the information we need, to observe with fidelity and then objectively assess a person’s suitability for a role.  Even with perfect information, we are humanly fallible: our biases, our preferences, our inattention, our interpretations from our limited lived experience, ego and self-protection, and the influence of others mean we can never really know someone well enough to make a foolproof assessment of their fitness for a role. Good recruitment processes attempt to remove those biases through things like psychometric tests, selection panels which triangulate viewpoints, and multi-stage onboarding processes. It’s such a pity a simple cue like success at a decent university does not sift the chaff from the wheat anymore.

It is not that Ernst & Young suddenly decided that the massification of education had undermined the value of the once elite university degree. The professional services company simply recognised that by making it a hurdle requirement, they had been missing out on some potentially very talented people. It’s akin to male dominated hiring practices of yore – what’s the sense in restricting the talent pool by gender, race, residency status, or even academic qualifications when evidence suggests it’s not a valid criterion?

A friend used to bemoan not having a tertiary degree to put on his CV, limiting his career opportunities. The degree is but one cue, yes, I acknowledged that, but it is not the only indicator of individual intellectual worth; good hiring practices will see beyond that. Well, friend, E & Y’s decision – and PwC’s since – has vindicated me.

At the other end of the spectrum from the laudification of higher degrees are the sub-C-suite executives who “came from the shop-floor/mail room/dirt-digging apprenticeship to where I am today”. Many managers in this cohort belittle any knowledge and skill acquisition that is not gained from direct experience climbing the corporate ladder. In this kind of atmosphere, anyone with a higher degree risks being labelled as (inexplicably) ‘too’ academic and of narrow experience, to the extent that PhD holders become all but unemployable outside academic circles, regardless of the depth of any prior experience or the self-evident ability to learn anything new. It’s the tall-poppy syndrome.

As author Brian Herbert once said, “The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.” A&Y have learnt not to put people in boxes, or to be too quick to judge on outdated criteria. Neither the degree, nor lack thereof, should define you.