CEPEO Seminar Series - Lindsey Macmillan

While previous research has shown that disadvantaged young people are less likely to work in professional occupations than their advantaged peers, even conditional on their education, until now little has been known about the reasons for this - are they applying for professional entry-level roles and not being hired, or are they not applying in the first place? Using unique recruitment data from 17 large employers' graduate programmes, we are able to answer this question for the first time. We find that applicants from lower SEB groups and ethnic minority groups are well represented among the applicant pool, but disproportionately do not receive job offers, even when considering applicants with similar prior attainment and other demographic characteristics applying to similar roles. Around half of the gap in job offers between working class and professional background applicants appears during the application sift and online test phase of the process.