What role can recruitment play in creating a gender-balanced workforce throughout the technology industry? Giancarlo Hirsch, Director for Glocomms, US, shares his thoughts for International Women's Day 2020.
The 2020 International Womenโs Day theme is that an equal world is an enabled world. What does that mean to you in technology?
Within the technology industry women are drastically outnumbered and it has created a snowball effect. In order to enable better business growth, an equal gender workforce is required. The current landscape requires businesses to scale and grow with only 50% of the human perspective. By diversifying and equalizing the workforce and world, we will need better, diverse perspectives to drive innovation in the technology industry.
What sort of conversations around gender equality do you have with clients and candidates in your sector?
Companies are very aware of their need to hire and secure strong female talent, especially in the technology industry. What we have seen is that those businesses that have struggled to hire senior women early on in their growth have a much harder time to grow their female workforce as the company becomes larger because of the impact that growth has on the lack of gender diversity.
Often a concern from a female candidates perspective is what the leadership team looks like from a gender diversity perspective. Women are less likely to be excited about joining an organization that does not practice D&I in their recruitment strategy. From an optimistic perspective, we have seen organizations that do emphasize diversity initiatives in their recruitment strategy offer enormous increases and much higher salaries for women in leadership seats. This is because having a senior female leader will help the business to continue to grow a diverse team.
What role can recruiters play in creating an equal world?
We can continue to partner with organizations that care, and we can continue to work closely with strong female talent in an attempt to continue to diminish the gender pay gap and unbalanced workforce. Furthermore, we can provide consultation to clients around the value and benefits of having a diverse workforce and the significance of hiring senior female engineers during early growth stages.
What advice would you give to a company trying to create a diverse hiring strategy?
The most important piece of advice I would give is that if you can implement and execute a diverse hiring strategy effectively, the overall performance and innovation capacity of the business will grow. Homogenized workforces are less successful than diverse ones at building reputable and scalable businesses. It is important for companies to focus on hiring senior women for their engineering departments as early as possible so that future female hires have senior female leadership to look up to as they are onboarded.
Giancarlo Hirsch is the Director for Glocomms in the US. His role has been to build a team that focuses on delivering top emerging tech talent across the US, namely within the Data and Security space. Working with many large enterprise clients as well as some of the worlds coolest and most innovative start ups, his team takes pride in the impact made on clients' ability to hire and retain diverse talent. For advice on building a diverse hiring strategy, get in touch with the Glocomms team.
About us
Glocomms is a leading specialist recruitment agency for the technology industry. Our continual investment in best-in-class technologies and consultant training enables us to recruit with speed, precision and accuracy. Today, Glocomms provides permanent, contract and multi-hire recruitment from our global hubs all over the world.