My mum once told me about a man she knew who’d come from a poor background and had no luck finding a job. He’d applied for over 400 positions but never got a response, but then he made one change to his CV and the next job he landed straight away. What did he do? He used a friend’s address, a friend who lived in a neighbouring postcode.
The point of her story was that perseverance and lateral thinking will win out in the end, but what I took from it was that employers tend to choose people on arbitrary grounds.
Postcodes are just one way in which employers use direct or indirect discrimination to get the right person, because when they’re going through 300 applicants firms are bound to use shorthand of some sort.
That is one of the reasons why discrimination laws are perhaps unnecessary – because they are generally ineffective at protecting the disadvantaged.
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