Indeed: "Look at my skills not my identity"

Indeed has released a hiring advertising poster with the tagline "Look at my skills not my identity."

The tagline would seem to suggest that employers who are looking into hiring people should focus on one's skills and not what they look like. In a perfect world, we would like to think that employers would look at a person's knowledge and skills before their race, religion, or personal background, but research and facts have seemed to suggest otherwise.

A few years back, former PM David Cameron mentioned at a Conservative Party speech that people with "white-sounding names are nearly twice as likely to get call backs for jobs than people with ethnic-sounding names." Cameron would also go on to say that "one young black girl had to change her name to Elizabeth before she got any calls to interviews." All of these comment made by the former PM seemed to suggest that the government was going to take a harder stance when it came to the hiring of BME people in the UK. But OBV and even surveys done by the government on this issue reveals who really wields power in UK society.

OBV's most recent project "The Colour of Power" found that of the 1,049 people in positions of power in the UK, just 36 are BME, or 3.4% of the total. Overall, Britain's most powerful elite is 97% white. The ability for a BME person to get the top jobs in UK society is practically impossible. The facts of the racial disparity in UK society is in direct paradox to the poster and its message.

Along with "The Colour of Power" project a recent government audit also revealed more statistics highlighting increasing racial inequality that is ingrained across the country. This audit revealed the disparities between ethnic minorities and white people throughout the different systems in society including their access to healthcare, education, employment, and in the criminal justice system. It is becoming more and more clear to top government officials that something has to be done to fix the racial gap that continues to widen in UK society.

The Indeed tagline imagines a society where people are hired on their skills and merit, but we today live in a society that seems disinterested in hiring individuals like that, but who instead have different names and are of different race than society would like them to be.

Zak Ott