In this episode, Philippa welcomes Tom Lyas, Head of Resourcing and Social Mobility at Browne Jacobson, where he has built one of the most impactful social mobility programmes in the UK legal sector and the architect behind FAIRE, an initiative that has opened up real work experience to over 87,000 aspiring legal professionals, many from communities historically shut out of the professions entirely.
Under his leadership, Browne Jacobson became the number one ranked employer in the Social Mobility Foundation index. Tom has given evidence in the House of Lords, been named LexisNexis Legal Awards Personality of the Year, and was recently recognised as Leader of the Year at the British Recruitment Awards. His background spans industrial and retail recruitment, including Tesco and Whitbread, before joining Browne Jacobson nearly a decade ago.
Together, they explore what fair access actually looks like when someone decides to build it from scratch, what it takes to change a hiring culture, and why the profession is better for it.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
- How Tom’s early career in retail recruitment revealed a pattern hiding in plain sight: the candidate who was “a bit more polished” kept winning, and no one was asking why
- What happened when Tom removed Browne Jacobson’s academic grade requirements in his first week, the board meeting that followed, and the three bullet points that settled it
- How FAIRE was born from a single data point: 96% of work experience placements were going to partners’ and clients’ children, and no one had noticed
- Why Browne Jacobson high-fives when a student uses FAIRE to land a job at a rival firm, and what 87,000 participants and 4,500 tangible outcomes says about what the programme is actually for
- The story behind the Reach mentoring programme and how the firm went from hiring one Black trainee in five years to 29% of a training cohort in year one
- The accent bias research commissioned with the University of Nottingham, what the findings revealed about professional services culture, and why having an accent is described as the last taboo
- Why disclosure rates are Tom’s single most important measure of culture, and what a 90%+ disclosure rate tells you about trust inside an organisation
- The case for making socioeconomic background a protected characteristic, and where that conversation currently sits
- His advice to young people who feel professional services might not be for them, including a frank observation about what social media does to your sense of what success is supposed to look like
Key takeaway
Hiring systems rarely fail by design, they fail through habit. For over a decade, Tom Lyas has focused on changing those habits, replacing instinct with evidence. When firms prioritise potential over ‘polish’, teams are stronger for it.
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