Diversity, nepo-babies and The Spectator

It’s a bit of a late entry for phrase of the year, but the term ‘nepo babies’ has captured attention this week. It was first used in this article in New York magazine to describe the children of celebrities cushioned by their parents’ famous name. Lucy Fisher, chief political commentator for Times Radio, has also pointed out how many ‘nepo babies’ there are in Westminster. I was reading her article while trying to make sense of Jamie Oliver’s guest editorship of the Today programme this morning: he is also a ‘nepo baby’ insofar as he learned to cook by helping out in his parents’ pub. But was that nepotism? Or just human nature in following the family trade?

I tried to be a ‘nepo baby’ and follow my dad into the RAF but, luckily for our national security, I failed the tests. But was it so odd for me to try? Following a family career pattern has long been done by accountants, chefs, doctors, musicians, actors – and, most certainly, writers. People are more inclined to do what they know, or what they see. Often, they do it well. J.C. Bach followed J.S.; Martin Amis followed Kingsley, Mary Shelley learnt from Mary Wollstonecraft, David Updike from John. Pick up a newspaper and you’ll see the family factor at work: Giles Coren after Alan, Tom Utley after Peter.  All first-rate writers. A family link isn’t always nepotism.

Since becoming an editor, and entering the business of hiring writers, I’ve seen how prejudice works both ways. I’ll get the odd email from a parent (or grandparent) advocating a young talent. It tends not to work. The Spectator hires via a no-CV policy for most posts. Not all: when we hired a Steerpike reporter, it was a senior job and we wanted someone with years of Westminster experience – we hired James Heale. But for entry-level jobs, we have developed an internship scheme where people are selected on aptitude alone. The Spectator’s model of journalism is very different from newspapers: we’re cross-platform, we work all hours, we’re unusually collaborative. So we have a bias towards training and promoting internally. That’s why the internship scheme matters so much to us.

Only when we send out the acceptances do we see the names/genders of who we have selected. Only when they show up do we find out who they are. One year, the standout intern was Dan Hitchens (yes: son of, nephew of). Someone suggested that we may have been subliminally swayed by seeing such a famous surname on a CV. What bugged me was the idea that Dan would have made it through on anything other than his (immense) talent. He went on to be deputy editor of the Catholic Herald straight after his time with us: I’d say he was an objectively good choice.

So four years ago, we made our system no-name as well as no-CV. Every entrant is now assigned a city name: ‘Glasgow’, ‘Manchester’ etc and their application is marked out of 100. This means there is zero chance of skin colour, family name, gender, school etc being a positive or negative factor. So you could have the Eton-schooled son of a famous writer or the son of a cleaner both coming through (and they do: in recent years, we’ve hired both). Everyone is there on ability. You play the hand you’re dealt in life: it’s all any of us can do. And having no discrimination means not judging someone for being poor or posh; well-connected or not-at-all connected. I once wrote a cover story against the idea of the civil service socially assessing applicants – to discriminate against the well-connected. No one can help who their parents are. Everyone deserves to be judged on merit. That’s what a no-name, no-CV system does.

Now and again, I’m asked how we go about the scheme – and whether it works. The below is a version of how I normally reply. Obviously, jobs where professional qualifications are needed will do things differently. But a no-CV, no-name internship scheme can be set up by anyone. If you’re reading this, and are in any position of influence, you could make it a new year’s resolution. So here are some pointers…

1. The first, difficult step, is to ban informal internships: This is very hard to do in larger outfits, because everyone likes to be able to dole out work experience to children of friends. This chumocracy is at its strongest in higher managerial circles, a privilege that is fiercely defended. It’s human nature to do something to help the child of a good friend; if you’re unable to do so because of a no-nepotism policy it can be enraging. Having Andrew Neil as Spectator chairman made our scheme possible: he’s passionate about meritocracy (and wrote a chapter in his book about it).

There’s still an idea that because internships don’t pay they’re not valuable. No: they are the golden tickets: just see how much internships fetch in charity auctions. A no-CV, no-name policy does not mean banning friends and relatives of the well-connected: it just means they have to go through the same application process.  It need not be a complete ban: an accountancy firm may have a strategic need to butter up a target client, etc. But in general, internships should be formalised and open to all. 

2. The Spectator’s internship scheme is the main way we recruit: Our scheme brought us (among others) John Connolly (our news editor), Cindy Yu (broadcast editor – recently promoted to assistant editor), Max Jeffery (her no.2) and Gus Carter (currently on the magazine’s features desk). Svitlana Morenets was a Ukrainian refugee when she heard about the scheme and applied; she is now part of our team. We keep in touch with former interns and often reach out to them when a place becomes available. Sebastian Payne was at the Telegraph before rejoining us. Cindy had gone into retail (managing a Lidl store) when the right vacancy opened up and I persuaded her to join us full-time. This year, we had a budget for a no.2 for Danielle Wall, our managing editor (and my boss: formerly my PA, but that’s another story). She waited six months for the graduation of Lukas Degutis, our best intern last year. The Spectator has all kinds of disciplines: editing, tech, broadcast, management. We’re a very small team, so nothing – absolutely nothing – makes a bigger difference to our chances of success than the quality of the people we hire. The faff is worth it.

3. Create an aptitude test. Make it tough. You’ll want a manageable number of applications (10:1 ratio max) so it should deter all but the most determined. And yes, it’s a lot to organise. Some poor soul has to strip the applications into an anonymised Google Doc, then hyperlink them to the relevant codenames on a Google sheet. Marks go alongside it each city name. So you’d have the below on a Google sheet (hyperlinking to a letter). Job done.

The reputation of a good scheme should build over time. Ours is quite well-known by now: those without any connections know it’s the only way into the industry where they won’t be asked about their background. Those with impeccable connections want to test themselves against what is perhaps the toughest application system in Fleet Street.

We typically have 200 applicants for about 12 places: a higher application ratio than Oxford or Harvard. We whittle down to the final 50, after which three staffers each judge. An average score is taken, and the top 12 scores are invited in for a week. Is a week long enough to get a feel for someone? Of course not, but it’s better than a dry CV or a half-hour sofa chat: interviews give the advantage to extroverts and bullshitters and do not reflect an ability to do the job. Interviews can weed out obvious nutters, but they seldom get through. One intern was fired on day two for kicking a bin in anger when his blog was not published. (Being fired is, I’d argue, an educational experience.)

4. Examples of past Spectator internship applications You can find past Spectator aptitude tests for 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. We split them into specialities in later years.

5. Diversity can come in unexpected forms – and that’s the point: The Daily Telegraph recently had a story about a billionaire’s daughter given help by a charity which (then) was designed to get more BME people into journalism. A great story, but not her fault: don’t we all take any help we can get? The fault, if any, lies with defining diversity too narrowly. Set one criteria, and you’ll get it wrong. We get a disproportionate number of applicants from the great universities – Ivy League and Oxbridge, Glasgow – but that’s as you’d expect given how good these places now are at finding talent. You get diversity in ways you did not expect. For example, I’ll confess to expecting that our scheme would bring a greater variety of 20-year-old undergraduates. Instead, we ended up with:

• Career-changers: not everyone makes the right career choice aged 21. Not everyone wants to follow timelines set out in teenage years – especially those who could have chosen a number of directions. For example, Madeleine Kearns was an opera singer and qualified teacher when she applied to our scheme. She was a smash hit, wrote a cover story and ended up working for the National Review in the United States.
• Older interns: Katherine Forster was a 48-year-old mother of three who started a family at a young age and never quite embarked upon a career path. When her kids grew old enough she threw the dice and applied to our scheme. In spite of never having never worked in media before she went on to the Sunday Times and (now) GB News. We haven’t (yet) had a pensioner as an intern, but I’m hoping. After all, experience never gets old.
• Brilliant people who flunked their A-levels: I once arranged to meet the best two applicants from the 2019 intake. One was an Oxford-educated Classics don who had trained as a barrister and was seeking a career change. The other was a student who scored EEE at A-level. If we’d have looked at his results, we might have thrown his application in the bin. But the results were a freak; he was – is – brilliant. After our internship, he went on to work for Business Insider and the Daily Telegraph. A-levels are a snapshot of how well things were going for you at a certain time in your life. Nothing more.
• Outsiders: When my colleague Svitlana Morenets arrived here as a refugee in Easter, she was assessed by a JobCentre (as was standard) and told them she had been an award-winning journalist in Ukraine. Sorry, she was told: no chance of using those skills here as immigrants are not employed as journalists in the UK. Rude advice but depressingly accurate. We know that immigrants account for 20 per cent of all UK workers but probably less than 0.2 per cent of UK journalists (how many can you think of?). This is not true in Australia, Canada or America. I suspect this is a bias that UK publications are not aware of (who, in a 100 per cent native newsroom, would point it out?) and won’t try to correct. Svitlana Morenets came through our 2022 scheme and has brought us an invaluable perspective to what is right now the world’s biggest story. Another example of diversity that I was absolutely not expecting. 

6. Offer internships to those who are, at most, two years away from job seeking: If you intend your internship scheme to be a precursor to employment, then you don’t want 16-year-olds (however brilliant) who are seven years away from the labour market. But a teen who wants to skip university? Absolutely. Last year we had 17-year-old Alexa Rendell, who turned down a job offer with us to work with an electronic version of Formula One. She was incredibly accomplished and unusually clear-eyed. She had an offer to study politics at a top university but knew what she wanted to do with her life and quite rightly asked: why load up with all that debt? Would the salary premium be worth it? She instead went for an apprenticeship and starting her career earlier.

We can expect more bright young teenagers to reach this conclusion. We are entering an era where the brightest people choose to skip university entirely, by calculating that the lost time (let alone lost money) won’t be worth it. Our latest recruit at The Spectator (who I’d better not name) had so few scheduled classes in the third year of his university history degree that he pretty much worked full-time from our office while (nominally) at campus. So many arts degrees are now a straightforward racket – and employers should be open to entrepreneurial students who are unwilling to put up with it. If undergraduates think they can balance part-time work while nominally full-time ‘study’ then I’d be inclined to let them. I would not have said that in the pre-Covid years.

7. Pay interns. Offer to cover accommodation if necessary: Bear in mind that not everyone can stay in London. The Spectator is a tiny company and could never have afforded to put all 12 interns up – but we said we would where necessary. We’ve been doing this for years and have found that interns do not abuse the offer. Most do find friends or relatives to stay with, and those who can’t ask us for help. So no one is unable to take up an internship offer due to financial considerations. Yes, all this comes at a cost. But it’s a small one for any company that cares about meritocratic recruitment.

8. Stay in touch with promising interns: Vacancies might arise a year or two later on. Companies often keep tabs on potential high-level recruits, but if you are serious about finding the best young people who work their way up then the same should apply for entry-level people to hire when the vacancy arises. At The Spectator, the biggest and most important changes over the years have been suggested by people who were nominally junior. James Forsyth developed Coffee House, our blog, when he was aged 25. Sebastian Payne launched our podcasts when he was interning for us. In fast-changing digital environments, the best ideas can come from anywhere – so having genuinely brilliant junior people matters more than you’d think. 

9. There’s no worker shortage if you look beyond the uni milk rounds: Society still does a poor job of matching talent with jobs. The ‘graduate recruitment’ way of hiring can tie companies to cliches that are no longer relevant (if they ever were). The digital era opens you to everyone: career-changers, older starters, everyone. There is a wealth of talent out there. Not just in universities but in discount grocery stores, at the school gates and a myriad of other places that a CV searchlight could never find. 

10. All you need is a web page. Google Docs and Sheets will do the rest: You don’t need an agency, a protocol or even an HR department. You just need one person to process the applications, three people to spend six hours each marking them – and someone to coordinate the arrivals. The Spectator is a tiny company so it’s easier to make changes. But it’s been one of the best things we’ve done and can be replicated by anyone, anywhere. I’d be happy to provide any further details to anyone interested. We live in an amazing country with amazing people – but they come in all shapes, sizes, ages and places that you might not expect. A recruitment scheme that adjusts to this fact has never been easier to set in place.