BBC attacks 'posh privilege' by ignoring jobseekers' qualifications

  • 16/09/2017
Degrees are now useless at the broadcaster.
Degrees are now useless at the broadcaster. Photo credit: Getty

That venerable broadcasting institution, the BBC, will now delete any mention of qualifications from jobseekers' CVs.

The changes were made after the BBC decided too many of its employees were posh.

As a result, students who have spent years studying - and run up tens of thousands of course fees - will no longer be able to use their degrees to get a foot in the door.

BBC boss James Purnell - who himself attended Oxford - says the changes were made to prevent any bias against lower-class applicants.

"We don't have targets on socio-economic [backgrounds], but we're thinking about it," he says.

"We would love to have a target; we would be very happy to do that."

Research shows 61 percent of the BBC's staff have parents who were senior managers or professionals more than double the national average.

And 17 percent of the BBC's staff and 24 percent of managers went to private schools, compared to just 7 percent of the UK's population.

Candidates will now be assessed using questionnaires, interviews and competency tests. Mr Purnell says these diversity measures are increasingly common in different jobs.

"We are now doing anonymised recruitment, so you take off the name and you take off the degree," he says.

"It's something lots of organisations are doing - across accountancy, across law - and the theory, which I think is right, is that you can get that evidence in other ways."

Newshub.