In this op-ed, Born Creators founder and managing partner Sive Buckley challenges the industry to stop asking stupid questions that discriminates against talent by their school uniform or postcode.
There’s a question that gets asked in Australian advertising that I still find so fucking weird.
It comes up at every industry drink, every intro coffee, usually inside the first two minutes: “So, what school did you go to?”
Everyone gets asked this. Whether you’re 20 or 50… It’s practically the industry handshake.
But it only exists in a world where the right school opens the conversation, and the wrong one quietly closes it.
I never had the right answer.
I don’t even understand the question. Where I come from, in a part of Ireland that nobody puts on a postcard, nobody asks what school you went to. Because the answer is whichever one was closest to home and would have you.
Very private school energy for an industry that’s supposed to run on outsiders and difference.
We are supposed to be the creative industry, the one that sells difference for a living, and we’ve somehow built it out of copy-paste people: same schools, same suburbs, same CVs.
Pedigree-based exclusion.
For a very long time, I did not fit in here in Australia.
The longer I’m here, the more I think the problem was never fitting in. It’s about the “right answer.”
I Was The Diversity In The Room
For years, I sat in big agency meetings as the diversity in the room, and probably didn’t even realise it. Not because of anything I’d lived, thought or made.
Dare I say this was because I had a vagina.
Or because I was blonde.
Or because the accent gave the room a bit of texture when a client was visiting.
Tick, tick, tick.
Nobody ever asked about, well, me. The school I got kicked out of. The undiagnosed ADHD that earned me the official title of “troublesome” for thirty years. The uncanny ability to read a room and a brief in five minutes flat, the actual thing they were paying for.
None of that met the diversity criteria. The box got ticked anyway.
That’s the problem with how this industry identifies diversity.
Say the (buzz)word in a meeting and watch what happens: the first thing out of anyone’s mouth is gender. Then maybe ethnicity, if the room’s feeling brave. Then the conversation quietly wraps itself up, satisfied, as if we’ve covered the whole thing.
Two dimensions. Out of about a hundred.
Tokenism With Better Production Values
Our industry has spent a decade getting better at diversity, or at least at the version of it that photographs well.
We count what we can see.
We build the panels, the shortlists, the capability slides, and we feel pretty good about ourselves right up until it hits: the beloved awards season, when suddenly everyone has an awesome diversity story, polished to two hundred words and submitted twelve minutes before the extended deadline.
That’s not inclusion. That’s tokenism with better production values.
Meanwhile, think about who’s actually around you. The creative director who never went to uni and learned the craft from the ground up. The strategist quietly building elegant workarounds for an office designed for somebody else’s brain. The account lead who grew up in a postcode that’s never once appeared in a pitch deck except as a target audience.
Some research suggests a striking share of people in creative roles are neurodivergent, and that many spend their day masking just to fit a mould someone else built.
You could go to a year of industry events and never hear a word about what those brains are actually bringing to the table
And then there’s the one “token” we really don’t say out loud: money.
Class might be the biggest diversity gap our industry has, and the one we talk about the least. An industry built on unpaid internships, entry-level salaries that quietly assume you live at home, and networks made at the right schools (there’s that question again) has filtered out half the country before talent ever gets a say.
None of this shows up on a slide. None of it photographs well. But it’s the actual texture of who gets to be in the room, and it’s about time we started counting it.
We Hire For Sameness, Then Wonder Why The Work All Looks The Same
Nowhere is our narrow-mindedness more obvious than in how we hire.
Look at any job description in our industry: three to five years agency experience, relevant degree, portfolio of integrated work. We sell ourselves as the industry that understands people, while building teams almost wholly out of one kind of person.
We’ve built a recruitment machine exquisitely designed to find people exactly like the people we already have, then sit in brainstorms wondering why every idea feels familiar, why there’s no momentum.
Some of my best colleagues are an ex-teacher, an ex-hospo worker, an ex-landscaper. The teacher can set a deadline, perform under pressure, and read a room in ways no comms degree teaches. The one who carried plates on a Saturday night understands customers, pressure and graft in a way no graduate program ever will.
None of them would have made it past the first CV screen at most agencies. That should terrify us.
The same goes for international hires. Someone who’s worked markets we’ve never set foot in arrives with a whole other playbook in their head, and we treat that experience like it needs a discount applied, or worse, make them start again from the bottom. Honestly, that’s where the best ideas I get come from: not another local awards case study, but a conversation with someone who’s seen how a different culture cracks a problem we’d all quietly stopped questioning.
That collision is the whole job. It’s strange that we sell it to clients and screen it out of our own teams.
The fix starts in the interview. Stop asking “have you done this exact job before” and start asking “what do you know that nobody else in this building knows?” That question finds the teacher, the hospo worker, the landscaper. A CV never will. I’ll back graft over a glossy resume every time, because this is a hard industry, and hard industries need people who actually want to do the work, not just people who look good having done it.
Then I Saw What It Looks Like When It’s Real
I know this works because I’ve watched it work.
The team I get to build with now spans countries, cultures, faiths, accents and career paths that make mine look conventional, and the thing we have in common is the only thing that ever needed to be common: the work.
Nobody ticked a box to get there. Nobody is anybody’s quota. The place feels different because it is different: different conversations, different references, different instincts colliding on the same brief.
I used to wonder whether Australia would get it. That’s the wrong question. The real one is why this is still rare enough to write a piece about.
So What Do We Do About It?
Not a framework. Not a pledge. And please, not another panel.
A few things that would actually help, in no particular order:
Tell people’s stories because they’re good and real stories, not because a deadline or a calendar gave us permission to.
Make visibility normal instead of novel, not once a year and not only when there’s a trophy attached.
Rewrite the job spec. If every line of it describes someone you already employ, start again.
Get people back into actual rooms together. Experienced folks and emerging ones to just meet diversity first-hand.
Because the kid getting kicked out of a school somewhere right now, the one with the unfashionable postcode and the brain that won’t sit still, might be the best creative mind this industry never hires.
I’d quite like us to be the industry that asks her a better question than what school she went to.
