Alison McGovern, Labour’s shadow employment minister is one of those politicians  who are always worth watching. She combines the ability to look and speak like a normal human being – a rare thing at Westminster – with a genuine policy wonk’s fascination for data and trends and ideas.

She also has fans at the top of the Labour party. While other shadow ministers are rendered almost mute by the message discipline of Team Starmer, McGovern has the confidence and license to think out loud.

This week she was at the Social Market Foundation to talk about social mobility, which covers a lot of ground.

There were several significant takeaways from that event, some of which I’ll try to capture briefly here.

• The Labour war on ‘social mobility’ is over. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour declared that the whole concept was effectively a right-wing failure: Angela Rayner promised to scrap Whitehall’s social mobility machinery and focus instead on a wider ‘social justice’ agenda. By contrast, McGovern is openly enthusiastic about ‘social mobility’, cheerily declaring she’d like to talk about it more.

• That said, the Starmer-era conception of social mobility is different to some that have come before. First, it puts more emphasis on the role of work and employers, rather than the education-is-all approach that sometimes defines social mobility conversations. In McGovern’s account, work is the best way for people to improve their socio-economic position.  In a very striking line, she noted: ‘The history of the Labour party is people achieving social mobility through work.’

• Starmer-era thinking on social mobility is also unabashed about the role of social class. As others have noted, today’s Labour party leadership is heavy on people who consider themselves working class and are quite comfortable talking about economics and society in terms of social class.  McGovern used her SMF appearance to repeat concerns that people who – like her – have accents from places such as Merseyside, the north-west or north-east face class-based disadvantage in the labour market. ‘People make assumptions about us because of our accents. We do have to address the fact that assumptions are made about people culturally.’

There were also some intriguing comments about the importance of place and economic geography in Labour thinking. (‘every place should have a plan to grow’) and, to my mind, a correct and too-rare acknowledgement that post-Covid inequalities don’t get discussed enough in politics today.

But the most striking bits of McGovern’s talk were about recruitment and skills. I think big employers should pay close attention to comments about class and work from Labour. Smart businesses are already thinking hard about the socio-economic background of their staff and recruits, not least because the wider your recruiting net the greater the pool of talent you can access.  Ensuring your workforce is diverse in terms of social class is likely to be both good business and smart politics in future.

And it was on recruitment practices that McGovern was possibly most interesting this week.

As shadow employment minister, she spends a lot of time with employers, talking and thinking about how they recruit and how recruitment practices affect the range of people who apply and get hired.

In that context, she spoke positively about ‘fantastic’ businesses who are moving away from traditional recruiting practices. Some, she noted, are no longer asking applicants to say on their CV where they went to school or university.  Some, she noted, aren’t even asking for CVs at all:

There is incredible innovation going on that the government could learn from. Simple things, like taking schools off CVs, or maybe not even asking for CVs. I have spoken to businesses who recruit by  asking young people to make some video content for them. That is a more relevant skill for them than the ability to write a good CV. Innovative businesses are doing good things. There is a question for government about how to transfer some of that knowledge.

In an earlier life as a political reporter, I might have seized on that to spin up some sort of headline about ‘Labour declares the CV is dead and tells firms to hire via TikTok’. And I suppose that some of the ideas McGovern captured in those words might well come as news to the people of the Westminster village, who are often behind the times when it comes to modern HR (and business practices in general).

Employment practices for politicos and media types can still be informal and antiquated. And  SW1A remains heavy on people who either went to Oxbridge or wish they had, so the idea of not talking about their shiny degree from their shiny college is almost unthinkable. Hence the fact that no journalistic profile of a senior politician is complete without a reference to where they went to university or – in a few rare cases – the fact they didn’t go.

In fact, all McGovern was really doing was pointing to real trends in the real labour market.  The CV really is fading in importance for many big employers.  More and more of them are moving to what’s called a ‘skills-first’ approach, asking applicants to demonstrate what they can do rather than where they studied or the certificates they got there.

Starmer’s Labour means to overturn the dominance of Westminster’s posh PPE bluffers

Big recruiters such as PWC, for instance, are strong supporters of the skills-first approach to hiring: would-be accountants and consultants are likely to be asked to complete online tasks and submit videos as part of the recruitment process. LinkedIn, a site that many people regard as built on CVs, is rife with people talking about ‘skills-first hiring’.

There are, inevitably, downsides to novel approaches to recruiting, and not everyone likes this stuff.  Especially if they are of an age and background that means they worked hard to get into a good university which became the platform on which they built their career.

I fit that description, but I have the sneaking feeling that the credentialist worldview that categorises and judges people by the institutions they attended is fading as my generation ages. And when it comes to politics and government, it’s hard to argue that a country run by people from a very narrow range of educational backgrounds, often possessing very similar outlooks and skills, has been a roaring success,

In that context, I note another comment from the clever and interesting Ally McGovern, about class and background and power. In recent times, ‘certain people have been listened to more because of their backgrounds’, she noted. By contrast, Labour’s idea of ‘inclusive growth’ means background will matter less than skills.

I don’t want to over-interpret, but I think it was fairly clear which people McGovern was talking about, So I take that as a sign that Starmer’s Labour means to overturn the dominance of Westminster’s posh PPE bluffers, and putting more value on the skills that people can bring to jobs.  Speaking as something of a (non-posh) PPE bluffer myself, that strikes me as a very sound ambition.