A few years ago my employer, the advertising agency Ogilvy, introduced a recruitment scheme called ‘The Pipe’. It was a ‘non-graduate’ recruitment scheme, the name a pun on the smoking implement of choice of the company’s founder, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy himself was kicked out of Oxford in 1931, so this seemed doubly appropriate.

The idea was conceived and promoted by two people in our creative department alarmed by the risk of monotone uniformity which results from formalised, risk-averse recruitment procedures. Our aim, in short, was to introduce a kind of stereophonic sound to hiring.

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