In the UK, it's illegal to block people from getting the job for anything which doesn't fall under the General Operating Requirements (GOR) of the job. This means that you can refuse to hire someone in a wheelchair for a bricklaying job (for the sake of pedantry, lets assume they cannot physically do the job) but you cannot just because someone has a certain religion.
It's a shockingly sensible piece of legislation.
Some interesting consequences that I know have been tested in court:
You can't be 'over-qualified' for a job, that's a form of age discrimination. An over-qualified person shouldn't be less able to do the job.
You can fire someone for wearing a niqab if it stops them from doing their job (e.g. teaching English to young students to whom English is a second language).
So, if you can show that not having the qualification doesn't disadvantage you then I would expect that'd be a legal issue.
Did you just say that education requirements are legally risky?
Yes, I did say that. I was surprised to find, upon a close reading of the Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case,[1] that the Supreme Court held in that case that not only was an IQ test an illegal hiring requirement, in the circumstances of that case, but so was a high school diploma requirement. The usual headline description of that case mentions only the holding about the IQ tests, not the holding about school credentials. Either kind of requirement could be challenged by a rejected job applicant based on that Supreme Court precedent.
The Duke Power decision was unconstitutional, and it involved total racial segregation and galling defiance of the courts. It has very little applicability to highly-educated employees, if for no other reason than there are virtually no Africans capable of doing the jobs.
Uh, why the downvotes? There are virtually no such Africans. It's an established fact, you just go around and take a census. Plenty of farm boys from Idaho, Japanese, girl engineers from rural China, guys from India with accents thick enough to stop bullets, you name it. All are welcome in the universities, all succeed and prosper. Just no Africans. You don't have to worry about illegally performance testing them during a job interview, because it is a fact that there are virtually none.
And if you still disagree, don't downvote to express your mindless politics. Simply give me the names of the vast horde of African engineers and scientists waiting for a chance. I will hire them and become the world's first trillionaire.
But anyway back when I was living in France I've had the chance of studying and then working with a lot of great engineers (electrical engineers mostly) coming from Africa: Marocco, Tunisia, Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda, etc.
This is neither a rare nor surprising occurrence: engineers coming from african countries are plentiful and very competent. Maybe you didn't find them because they are not waiting for you to give them a chance: turns out they are as hard and expensive to hire as anyone else...
If I was hiring, I would hire homosexual Martian Nazis if they made good employees. The few African colleagues I have had were skilled and pleasant. The trouble is that, at least in the U.S., that they are very rare.
I suspect that a lot of what you were seeing in France was selection bias. The most talented third-worlders immigrate at a very high rate to the former imperial states. France gets the Africans because they colonized Africa extensively and were not especially vicious. If you moved your company to Rwanda, you would find that very very few locals would be trainable for engineering work.
They're only risky to the point where you can't make a case for them. In the Duke Power case, there was little reason whatsoever to require a high school diploma. Using education requirements for exempt job with more autonomous decision-making and reliance on knowledge wouldn't be a problem.
That is brand new to me. I would love it to be true, but I've never encountered it in reality.