The Brokerage The Overlooked Advantage - Flipbook - Page 3
Foreword
Just like our candidates, at various stages of my life I have been defined by those with more
privilege as ‘disadvantaged’. For me it was as a result of being the child of a teenage mother; a
third generation immigrant; having attended a highly disruptive, poor performing state school in
one of the most deprived Council wards of the UK, and later starting University as a young
parent myself.
Although challenging, these experiences afforded me the opportunity to develop a range of
skills and mindsets that have enabled me to succeed in a working environment and have a
successful career. For me, this included: being familiar and comfortable with self-directed
learning, an ability to focus in chaotic and high-stress environments, resilience,
resourcefulness, confidence (even when out of my comfort zone) and an empathetic leadership
style.
Unfortunately, at the time I was going through the challenging life experiences mentioned
above, I, like many young people and employers, overlooked the fact that these lived
experiences served as valuable catalysts for my personal growth and development. Instead,
when comparing myself to my more privileged and successful peers, I focused on my deficits
and saw my differences in a purely negative light. When perspective employers did the same,
this inevitably led to feelings of shame and not being ‘enough’.
Over a decade later with a new vantage point, I can see that the only deficit that existed was in
the recruitment practices of the corporate firms I was applying to. Instead of focusing on ways
to uncover the unique value of every individual, current practices are often based around biased
benchmarks of achievement, that replicate the status quo. These incentivise candidates to try
and fit a pre-existing type or mould, even if unattainable, and to hide the true essence and
foundation of their identities that, as my personal experience shows, gives them the exact skills
we know will allow them to thrive in a working environment. As a result, these outdated
practices mean that employers lose out on talent and young people are robbed of their career
aspirations and confidence.
At The Brokerage, we are more than aware of the amazing strengths and talents our young
people have and chose to commission an independent researcher to uncover this in more
detail. The five key strengths identified certainly read across to my own experience, and we
know these are replicated again and again amongst our candidates and other working class
young people and those from minority ethnic communities.
It is my hope that with this research, that young people are able to recognise the strengths they
bring because of, not in spite of the challenging life circumstances they face and redefine the
labels placed on them with confidence and pride. Equally, I hope that in the context of the
current skills shortage and ‘war for talent’ employers are experiencing, that they recognise that
their current recruitment practices are holiding them back.
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