Deloitte no longer wants to know where its job applicants studied

The new process will be held during next year’s recruitment round to fill 1,500 jobs with graduates and school leavers.

Interviewers will no longer have access to details of an applicant’s school or university until an offer has been made. (Rex Features)

Deloitte has said it plans to introduce school and university blind interviews to help prevent unconscious bias and boost diversity, starting from next year in the UK.

Deloitte, one of the ‘big four’ professional services firms, will recruit graduates using ‘contextualised data’, which allows managers to look at the context in which candidates achieved their goals, focusing on their personal and economic background.

Interviewers will no longer have access to details of an applicant’s school or university until an offer has been made.

For David Sproul, senior partner and chief executive of Deloitte UK, it is a ‘business imperative’ to ‘get this right’ in order to hire people who think and innovate differently.

“We are working hard to ensure that our talent pool is diverse and reflects the make-up of today’s society. We want to show that everyone can thrive, develop and succeed in our firm based on their talent, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other dimension that can be used to differentiate people from one another. This includes an individual’s social or economic background, which we know continues to be used to hold some people back,” Mr Sproul said in a statement.

The new process will be held during next year’s recruitment round to fill 1,500 jobs with graduates and school leavers.

The move comes as graduate recruiters are making an effort to look beyond academic results. A new research by the UK government also found that children with fewer abilities from wealthier backgrounds were 35 per cent more likely to become high earners than bright but poor counterparts.

Eight leading international law firms, Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Linklaters, Macfarlanes, Norton Rose Fulbright, Slaughter and May, and Travers Smith have already announced that they plan to use the Contextual Recruitment System, according to specialist in diversity recruitment Rare

While multinational professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this year also announced that it would stop using A-levels grades as a threshold for selecting graduate recruits.