The London Lounge

I could bore you senseless on the knotty history of successive governments’ policy ideas with regard to “access to the professions" – and it is indeed a very sad story.

Not sad, that is, because deserving candidates spend their working lives as bus drivers when they should be carrying out brain surgery – but because it amply demonstrates the shallowness of the average career politician.

There is a consensus (just) across the UK political spectrum that well-paid work in the professions is controlled by a cartel of moustache twirling masterminds, whereas in reality the truth is very different. Almost all professional organisations fall over themselves to ensure meritocratic objectivity in recruitment; why wouldn’t they?

Since advanced training within any of the professions is usually one-to-one between active professionals with a heavy workload and young entrants who have already gained extensive tertiary education, finding recruits who will fit in and not disrupt the workplace is understandably high amongst the list of criteria.

To get to the job interview however, you have to get your application past the CV-sifters. The sad fact is that those who have not been academic high achievers, will generally be at a major disadvantage, since academic results are not only very readily compared against other candidates, but also prove to be a good indicator of potential ability in most professional disciplines.

Those unfortunate enough to have received poor teaching are consequently at a disadvantage. School standards are ultimately the responsibility of government – so the ticking parcel that is being lobbed at various targets is ultimately laid back at the politicians’ door.

In my current line, we recruit 2 candidates every other year and generally have between 300 and 400 applications for those 2 positions. Application forms are in identical format and are anonymised, removing cues as to ethnic origin and age. We go through an iterative selection process reducing applicants to 20 candidates to be interviewed, and from which we select the (lucky?) 2.

We still make mistakes about half the time.

In my earlier professional life, the selection process comprised having tea with Uncle Roger. I don't think he was anyone's uncle really, but his avuncular style belied a very sharp mind. Topics of conversation were either horses or gardening (ideally both) but a total absence of knowledge could easily be compensated for by a line of questioning that showed intelligent curiosity.

Needless to say this process had a far higher long-term success rate than the ultra-meritocratic equivalent.

I don't think I have ever come across a respectable organisation who would be stupid enough to base selection criteria on quality or indeed colour of footwear, but care in appearance (and maintenance of clothes) surely indicate personal traits that might be in issue from a recruitment perspective?

I suspect that the candidate dressed in charity shop attire, with an ironed white shirt or blouse and clean, polished shoes will always win over the rich man's son in a Brioni off the peg number who can't tie shoelaces properly.

On that sort of point, I find my female colleagues are far less forgiving than I am.

During my training the most helpful sartorial advice was to dress for interview, and indeed work, as if one were attending a state funeral.

Suits me fine.

Thanks, for this, Melcombe. Keen insights.

Compared to acquiring the academic knowledge and skills necessary to begin, let alone complete, a decent tertiary education (which I don't limit to Oxbridge or their challengers), the amount of effort necessary to ask about and learn the basics of professional dress is tiny. Your concluding aphorism pretty much encompasses it. You'd think any aspirant would be curious enough to seek it out, or be counseled for five minutes in school. Apparently not.

So there's something else going on. Not limited to London finance, though perhaps more apparent there than in the States or elsewhere.

Certain elements of attire are still so regarded by many as class markers that adopting them raises all the class anxieties that a strictly meritocratic ideal wants to wish away. People from working-class backgrounds absorb much of their identity as young people from their surroundings, which may include people who are prideful about their working heritage and suspicious of people who "get above themselves." So learning that stokers wear overalls and surgeons were scrubs or white coats and bankers wear dark suits and black shoes, is not merely learning a value-neutral choice as it might be presented in a U.S. public high school or state university. It's felt by some as confronting a choice to change your societal affiliations, possibly "forgetting where you came from," etc. The U.S. has long had a mythology of upward mobility that has significantly diluted this anxiety, but it's still strong in many areas.

As a personal example, my partner was a grammar school girl from the Midlands, who faced social ostracism from her lower-middle-class peers who went to the state community school and their families. She won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge (before Thatcher), and then completed her doctorate at Yale thanks to a Mellon fellowship. She is now a distinguished professor of renaissance (or early modern, as they now say) English literature at the University of Virginia, one of the best departments in the country. She has many cordial professional relationships across the U.S. and the U.K. now, but is quite clear-eyed in asserting that she could not have built an equivalent academic career had she remained in England when she was starting out, because her Midlands-via-Cambridge accent and social background were too posh for her origins and not posh enough for her potential academic employers. Things are somewhat more fluid in Britain now, apparently, but at the cost of some chilling government requirements to demonstrate the "public usefulness" of one's scholarship at such short intervals that books are rushed to publication and many important research projects are never attempted because they would take too long. A book like Auerbach's Mimesis could not be written today under those conditions.

And when I worked for the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a conservator, I found plenty of aggressive "take the piss out" colleagues among the packers and art handlers, many of whom were working artists themselves and devoted to the collection, but who strongly identified with Philly's long blue-collar tradition. I had come from the very independent and "make your way" culture of suburban Texas, and it took me a while to orient myself to the class and union allegiances I had to acknowledge and respect. I had to learn enough about the local football and baseball teams to keep up my end of a hallway encounter and to drink a beer-and-a-shot (or several) on enough occasional after-work bar visits not to seem like I was holding myself apart. Interacting with my professional peers was a completely different experience.

So I think what the Bloomberg article hints at, but doesn't say, is that what the aspirants (or the social advocates trying to engineer improvements in their prospects) really want is not for hirers to overlook their brown shoes or provincial backgrounds until they can learn to conform to the dress and behavior codes of the profession. What they really want is for the profession to accept the brown shoes and heterogeneous preparation of otherwise talented aspirants, so that those aspirants don't have to face becoming "class traitors" by abandoning the familiar markers that form part of their sense of identity—but can still expect to thrive in the profession. Obviously that raises questions about broader professional standards and excellence of the sort explored in Tom Nichols's book The Death of Expertise.

Until society can untangle the uniform from the class and see it merely as the conventional dress for a given occupation, this anxiety will probably persist.

In my experience, success in the financial world often follows success in dealing with people. Unlike other professions, such as technology or science, where your success depends on hard skills and an understanding in science, working in finance is about dealing with people, managing expectations and reputations, negotiating (and wining and dining) with and providing value for clients, and jumping on opportunities.

In short, if you have the right mindset, relative to more scientific fields, anybody can succeed. As a result, skills are less prioritized than soft skills, so image is a differentiator. Because given multiple individuals who have nearly identical chances of success, clients and managers would prefer to take a chance on the person from the "right" schools or the "right" backgrounds. In a field where reputation (relative to intelligence or hard skills) is important, you want to "fit in" and make the conservative choice. For the most part, you don't want to be that guy rocking the boat or standing out, even if it might be the better decision.

So if you work in a culture where wearing brown shoes is a faux paus, you end up making decisions based on sartorial choices.

Absolutely agree, ballmouse. And as Melcombe says, one probably chooses a candidate who makes the effort within his resources over one who has the resources but doesn't know or care. But contrary to what the Bloomberg piece implies, the basics of expected dress (or behavior) for professional fields are not "arcane" or hard to find in the age of the Internet. So the question is why all aspirants don't make the effort. That's where class/cultural attitudes come into play.

couch wrote:... one probably chooses a candidate who makes the effort within his resources over one who has the resources but doesn't know or care.

Besides, meritocracy is overrated and even unfair as a choosing mechanism, at least until the playing field is leveled with the same opportunities for everybody. Although I don´t expect that the HHRR people at my workplace be the first to play the role of social healers, selecting on other basis independent from pre-conditioned qualifications (maybe color of the shoes it´s a bit extreme) might not be as arbitrary at it seems.

In my not so little 'corner' of international finance, I can assure you that nobody cares a whit what colour shoes you wear.