While some employers in the legal and accountancy sectors are making progress in looking beyond the UK’s elite educational establishments to find talent, most firms in these sectors need to do more to measure return on investment on their diversity strategies, recruiters say.

The government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission today published research showing elite firms in the legal, accountancy and finance sectors are “systematically” excluding bright working-class applicants from their workforce. 

The data shows as much as 70% of job offers in 2014 were to graduates who had been educated at a selective state or fee-paying school. This compares to 4% (selective state school) and 7% (fee-paying school) of the population as a whole.

Commenting on the report’s findings John Smith, associate director at accountancy staffing specialist RK Accountancy, told Recruiter the world of accountancy at least is increasingly placing more emphasis on a candidate’s degree qualification rather than where they studied.

“I think increasingly they’re less bothered; they’re looking for a 2:1 and above.

“I think the difference comes now in terms of classification. If you’ve got a 2:2 or a third, that’s perceived much more poorly [compared to] whether you got your 2:1 from Nottingham or Nottingham Trent.”

Meanwhile, Nick Root, a partner at legal recruiter Taylor Root, told Recruiter while the UK’s current pool of qualified lawyers is not that diverse, times are changing. “There is a lot happening in the legal world, with a lot of law firms making efforts to bring in a more diverse group of people,” he says. 

The Law Society within the last decade introduced a survey for law firms to circulate within their professional workforces to find out how many were the first members of their families to attend university, as a reflection of social mobility.

Root added his own firm works with some medium-sized law firms by going into local schools to help students with their CVs and with interview preparation.

He says his firm is not only motivated by it “being a good thing to do” but also because more diversity is good for businesses. The result of law firms’ efforts “is already starting to come through”, says Root. However, he acknowledges that given the long lead time to train graduates, it will be some time before they come to full fruition. 

And beyond “being a good thing to do”, Raj Tulsiani, co-founder and CEO of Green Park Interim & Executive Search, told Recruiter diversity strategies set up to create a more inclusive recruitment strategy need to focus on return on investment for the business.

“Businesses generally want to be seen to be doing something, but what they are doing is either tokenistic or poorly benchmarked, so nothing actually changes; then it suddenly moves itself into the too-difficult box.

“I think we are at a critical stage in equality and diversity in this country. We need to know which organisations are going to take it seriously and share their learnings rather than what we have got at the moment, which is fantastic learnings but not underpinned by statistical changes,” he added.

“So talking about it isn’t enough, and rather like race it is a generational issue that needs to be addressed throughout the whole organisation rather than just topping and tailing with a number of high profile appointments.”

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