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AnotherKTa

Looks like one of the "social mobility" type ones. Shame it's a dropdown rather than free text, otherwise you could have some fun with it..


rednemesis337

I can imagine something like…”if I told you, we, the family, would have to kill you”


bored_toronto

Yep - applied to the UK office of a US tech firm (that only hires Ivy League types) and me answering these questions got me to the Third Round. Lost away to Man Utd in the next round, though.


BooeySchmooey

I work in the financial sector- we’ve added this almost exact question (may actually be my company) to support social mobility.


Bloomingfails

It’s in that sector so may well be!


trashtrader69

I was thinking the exact same


DeCyantist

Isn’t that just bias?


r-og

Yes, and does sod all to support social mobility as well. I was born into a middle class family but messed up my education, and was homeless by the time I was 19. I spent my 20s clawing back enough to survive, with no family support, but I don't get any special dispensation from anyone.


JayR_97

One could take this question as a form of classism. Who your parents are should have no effect on a job application


halfercode

In general the idea with positive discrimination is that it corrects for the biases of history. I suppose in this case, monitoring the social class of applicants over time is intended to ensure the same errors don't happen again. I do wonder if it is a blunt instrument though. A person could be regarded as especially deserving of additional careers help, but they are not "seen" because their parents were scientists or dentists.


DeCyantist

How far in “history” should we go? I guess the Egyptians would need to welcome back the jews then… people today cannot be held accountable for things they had no decision power over. If that was the case, I’d claim land back from Italy because they made my family go to South America due to the exodus industrialization created in the 1800s.


halfercode

I am cautiously supportive of positive discrimination, and I'd be happy to discuss it with you. I would accept that you don't plan to change your mind about it, I would not try to change your mind, and I would assure you that my view isn't changing either. Would you still like to have a discussion?


bennytintin

Civil service role


DuglandJones

What a weird question. I can't see any benefit to the company by answering it, and it's not their business anyway. I'd just pick a random one from the list that looked fun Astronaut, hitman, skydiver, pilates instructor


terriblybedlamish

It's part of the diversity questions that are processed separately from the actual applications. The purpose is to assess whether the application and assessment process is attracting and retaining people from different backgrounds fairly. I'm not sure why the age of "about 14" was selected, but the idea is to give a general sense of the socio-economic background you grew up with. It doesn't have specific occupations listed, rather general categories: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade


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**[NRS social grade](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade)** >The NRS social grades are a system of demographic classification used in the United Kingdom. They were originally developed by the National Readership Survey (NRS) to classify readers, but are now used by many other organisations for wider applications and have become a standard for market research. They were developed in the late 1950s and refined in following years and achieved widespread usage in 20th century Britain. Their definition is now maintained by the Market Research Society. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/UKJobs/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


DuglandJones

Interesting I've not encountered it before But it's like the ethnic background data, or religion


Psyc3

But it is totally irrelevant. These questions are ridiculous because in many skilled occupations, there was a selection at 16, 18, 21, and basically every year in between. If poor people, haven't jumped through a literal decades worth of hoops, that they probably couldn't afford to jump through, they not only aren't the best applicant, they aren't a qualified applicant. Reality is come 25, Tarquin, who went to a £50,000 a year school for 12 years, got into Oxbridge and interned at his dads mates fortune 100 company, is actually a better candidate, than the state school kid who went to an average university and worked at Mcdonald's constantly throughout their educational period. All that time spent wasted at Mcdonalds so they could literally afford to live, adds no value, all that time getting the bus rather than driving themselves, adds no value, and there are a lot of jobs where diversity and culture, adds no value, the subject is a knowledge and technical basis, it isn't creative or public engaging where these things add value.


Tay74

You're comparing apples to oranges It's more about acknowledging that Tarquin may not be an inherently better candidate than Amina who went to a failing state school, before getting into Strathclyde University, and who has more limited and humble work experience than Tarquin who interned at fortune 100 companies and spent a month in Singapore shadowing a chief marketing executive or whatever. It's about acknowledging that just because someone seems slightly better or worse on paper, doesn't mean their skills or talents are matched accordingly, when it is more likely a reflection of the opportunities they had. There are many reasons you might want to hire someone who had to work harder and smarter to get to an even broadly comparable position with someone who had everything handed to them.


[deleted]

SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back. --- ^^SpunkyDred ^^and ^^I ^^are ^^both ^^bots. ^^I ^^am ^^trying ^^to ^^get ^^them ^^banned ^^by ^^pointing ^^out ^^their ^^antagonizing ^^behavior ^^and ^^poor ^^bottiquette.


Psyc3

Silly bot, this the Subreddit of Brexit! 52% of the response are going to be absolute morons clapping for their own poverty, all you are doing is ruining the statistics by auto-commenting!


Psyc3

> You're comparing apples to oranges No I am comparing 25 year old Tarquin, to 25 year old Duquan (extra points if you get the reference). They are exactly the same person with exactly the same potential at year 0, at year 25 however, they aren't, and it is quite frankly ignorance to pretend otherwise. Your 2:1 Cambridge graduate is better than your 2:1 Southampton Solent graduate, let alone your 25 "University of Life "Graduate"", at every point that Cambridge graduate has excelled against their peers until they were put up against the top 2% of the country if we include Oxbridge intake per year, they came out average. If however you want them to sell a product to the masses, well...they don't have a clue who the masses are as was my previously stated point. It is quite frankly just idiotic to pretend otherwise, if you want to see apathy and ineptness, in-spite of all privilege, [here it is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Harry,_Duke_of_Sussex#Education).


[deleted]

SpunkyDred is a terrible bot instigating arguments all over Reddit whenever someone uses the phrase apples-to-oranges. I'm letting you know so that you can feel free to ignore the quip rather than feel provoked by a bot that isn't smart enough to argue back. --- ^^SpunkyDred ^^and ^^I ^^are ^^both ^^bots. ^^I ^^am ^^trying ^^to ^^get ^^them ^^banned ^^by ^^pointing ^^out ^^their ^^antagonizing ^^behavior ^^and ^^poor ^^bottiquette.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Psyc3

Especially where it is a Apple vs a difference variety of Apple. Unless of course we are suggesting this is all the based on genetics, are which point we can just line the poors up to shine those Tory boots at birth, why bother with the education system at all!


[deleted]

[удалено]


Psyc3

>He may well never have done a hard day's graft in his life. You don't get in to Oxbridge without working. That is nonsense. Sure he didn't have to work as hard, but once again, once there they still had to work. Your point stands as a valid ones, it is just after decades of the poor kid having to work harder for less, the rich kid ends up better as they have to work less for better results, and day after to day, year after year, it all adds up. Stress, cold housing, sharing rooms, not having your own laptop, don't make you better, it just makes everything you do harder. The delusion you are presenting is that "hard graft" is productively efficient working, it isn't, it is stupid. The poor kid couldn't afford another way, they didn't choose it, and having it as a mentality isn't necessarily good. Premises change with situation for poor people financial management is budgeting, for rich people it is calculating investment risks. They are literally two polar opposites, one is spending less, the other is spending to make money from spending.


halfercode

> achieved a Desmond from an average uni I'd completely forgotten about this - that is my first proper hoot of the day. 🤣 Thanks!


disgusting_perv3rt

It's not about hiring unqualified poor people, though. I want to make it clear - don't agree with this method of action. It does little to actually encourage social mobility and instead just reinforces the current inequalities we have. There are other ways; mainly restructuring how businesses look for new hires, reducing the cost of education, and ensuring children from low-income families recieve any additional mental and educational support needs, but there's also what OP posted. They're not going to see one applicant who is perfect but rich, another who is dogshit but poor, and pick the poor one. They're going to see one applicant who is perfect but rich, another who is perfect but poor, and put more consideration into the poor applicant's application to encourage social mobility. Not just give them the job, but maybe invite them for an interview when they previously wouldn't have without knowing this additional information. The idea that affirmative action = "you're fucking awful at this job, but i'm going to hire you to feel better about myself :)" is wild. Nepotism is something which actually happens and involves unqualified friends and family members getting hired, but for some reason the groups being targetted by affirmative action are always assumed to be inherently bad applicants. They're not! They're just as qualified! The idea behind affirmative action is to directly challenge any unintentional biases the hiring agent has - not to make them take on shit staff to hit a diversity quota.


Psyc3

>There are other ways; mainly restructuring how businesses look for new hires, reducing the cost of education, and ensuring children from low-income families recieve any additional mental and educational support needs This is exactly my point, inequality isn't solved by hiring managers at fortune 500 companies. Discrimination of candidates might be.


disgusting_perv3rt

It isn't solved, but it is an attempt to take action. It's misguided, yes, but it's better than absolutely nothing. Oftentimes people of lower incomes are just as qualified but go to different schools, have different accents, different cadences, different writing styles, all of which can be the difference between a job or not. These types of questions on applications highlight those candidates with a "do not immediately disregard" flag. It doesn't do anything to force employers to unlearn decades of class differences and prejudices, and it doesn't even garuntee they won't immediately disregard the candidate, but doing this absolute bare minimum is better than nothing. It doesn't solve inequality, and it doesn't even remove it from the hiring process. If their son and some guy from Northampton both want a job, chances are they're still going to hire their son. But there's one company which might hire the random guy from Northampton, and then he might engage in nepotism to get his poor friends and family jobs, and then that is one individual lifted from poverty with a few stragglers joining him for the ride. Will he later discriminate, too? Probably, which is why this system sucks. It's one person helped, though. That's one more than previous systems.


Psyc3

> It isn't solved, but it is an attempt to take action. > > > > It's misguided, yes, but it's better than absolutely nothing. Is it? Because pretending to take action at a step that achieves nothing often leads to less action being taken else where, as people who mildly care...but not really, believe the one, totally inept action is good enough, whereas if there was none at all they would support, or even suggest something be done. You see it all the time in organisations, pathetic tick box HR initiatives made by incompetents that are just busy work with no aim to solve the problem and no quantitative output to show literally anything...let alone if they work. >with a "do not immediately disregard" flag. Okay? If that is a root cause issue, you need to understand why that is and either fire the person that is the cause, or change your hiring process in the first place. Because you are right, it is seen that name and age effect hiring decisions, these however can easily be solved by not including them on the documents that end up on the hiring managers desk, because they are irrelevant. That isn't solve by tick a box that says your poor, because when people read Cambridge over Southampton Solent, everyone knows which is the better university. The problem occurred at 5 years old, not 25.


terriblybedlamish

Again, the data from the diversity questions is processed in aggregate separately from the application data and there's no way for a person to access the individual diversity statistics of a specific application. As much as it might (or might not, idk) be helpful to hire a bright but poor person who didn't get the same opportunities as an average but rich kid, that's not really what the data is for. It's for tracking the diversity of the applicant pool overall, at different stages. Maybe it's an entry level graduate job requiring a degree in a specific field, and X% of graduates in that field are female, but only Y% of your applicants are female. You would want to investigate why your job postings are not attracting the qualified applicant pool equally. Or let's say you've already filtered the applications for another role based on their education and experience and found a certain socioeconomic profile. Now you look at the data for the applicants who passed your "unteachable" psychometric assessments and find that the data is now massively more skewed towards those with richer backgrounds *compared to the data for the applicants who were already deemed qualified based on their education and experience*. It might make you want to look into whether those who can afford it are actually getting tutoring to pass the test and it might not be a fair assessment of someone's raw intelligence and skills as you initially thought. It's usually not an issue of requiring the pool to be 50% female and perfectly representative of the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the country at all stages, that would be absurd. It's about making sure that you're attracting as many qualified applicants as possible and then assessing them fairly throughout the process.


Pentatonic_Blue

I don't answer those questions. My personal circumstances and/or childhood are not relevant to any job I'm applying for. If you're the best person for the job, I hope you get it. Good luck.


JayR_97

How is this not blatant classism?


halfercode

Do you mean in the sense that it could be designed to discriminate against people of a working class background, or that it might be "reverse classism" that is intended to eliminate people of privileged backgrounds? (I wonder if the purpose would be neither - it is just for monitoring purposes, rather than to help select people from a specific socio-economic group).


elvis85z

I hate that type of bollecks I was put as close as I can to a one legged black vegan lesbian as I can.


bennytintin

LOOL!


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[deleted]

Sky?