Tech alone won’t solve the legacy problems of workplace bias and restricted opportunities for minority talent. But it can be a major part of the solution.
Tech, especially well-placed recruitment tech, can offer targeted solutions to some of the most pressing issues of the day, namely: access to opportunity for those who have been historically underrepresented in the workplace.
Now we’re not saying Tech is a DEI silver bullet, but we want to draw attention to how recruitment innovations in the tech space are leading the line for positive change, and how providers of recruitment tech are trying to do their part to improve representation and diverse leadership retention.
This blog is inspired by the newest McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2022 report. Every year McKinsey publishes an incredibly well-researched long-form report on the state of women and minority women in-work representation.
This year, the report focuses on leadership and c-suite level representation for women and women of colour, and how, despite the general shift to positive action by many firms across the world over the last decade, more women are leaving leadership roles than ever post-COVID.
So what’s the solution? Well, the report contains many, including hyper-focusing on remote work and inclusive flexible working patterns, and understanding intersectional experiences in the workplace.
But we want to focus on how recruitment tech, specifically the platforms we use day-in-day-out as recruiters and talent resourcers, can help improve representation in work.
So here are some key takeaways from the report, with some ideas on how tech can provide further support for Women and minority Women leaders in work.
“More than two-thirds of women under 30 want to be senior leaders”.
Let’s start with a positive spin – more women than ever are pushing to climb the career ladder and stamp their authority on their industry. However, as the report stipulates, the leadership attrition rate for women, especially women of colour, is immense and outweighs that of men by a considerable amount.
This is due to multiple factors including in-work bias, a lack of career support and a lack of women-led visibility at the c-suite level.
So how does recruitment tech help?
- Recruitment Tech plays a huge role in helping employers build an understanding of candidate expectations during initial screening and hiring stages. For example, a well-positioned recruitment CRM will, if utilised correctly, provide granular detail of your candidate’s motivations, dreams and expectations from this job and all future jobs, and provide cross-business visibility. This is vitally important to breaking down barriers between legacy ideas of female leadership, and actual, real-life, tangible Women-led leadership and expectations of it.
“Women of colour are more ambitious despite getting less support: 41 per cent of women of colour want to be top executives, compared with 27 per cent of White women”.
Further to the above point, let’s talk about ambition.
Women of colour want to be offered leadership opportunities and are actively seeking them, and it’s on current leaders, both Male and Female, to provide the right sort of development plan to achieve it.
So how does recruitment tech help?
- Tech can again be a foundation for effective communication. Everything from performance management platforms to more inclusive remote onboarding not only opens up talent pools to a more diverse candidate base but creates accountability and visibility on career advancement, personal development and promotional opportunities.
- This consistently and objectively reduces biases and preconceptions of leadership credentials.
“Only one in four C-suite leaders is a woman, and only one in 20 is a woman of colour”.
A perennial problem at almost every company is a lack of Women at the top of the business pecking order.
We appreciate there are outlier companies doing the good work of righting that wrong (and reports show there is good progress being made), but the vast majority of women around the world simply never see a Woman leader at the top of their company or on the board.
So how does recruitment tech help?
- Step away from the hard work of managing a recruitment funnel or talent acquisition strategy and think about representation through the lens of employer branding.
- You have a fantastic array of marketing and communication platforms to use – consider free Social Media platforms, plus how many Social platforms are now integrated into ATS’ – to better communicate to your candidate base, user base and your industry at large.
- Tell your community about your Women-led stories of leadership, and give more Women a chance to see how you support senior leaders.
“For every 100 men who are promoted from entry-level roles to manager positions, only 87 women are promoted, and only 82 women of colour are promoted”.
Again, righting this historical wrong will go a long way to building a more sustainable and inclusive hiring culture. Ignoring the issue won’t help. We say meet it head-on.
So how does recruitment tech help?
- Metrics and measurements are all-important. Being able to measure applications and follow through into higher positions via promotions is essential if you are to improve DEI visibility and seniority placement.
- Utilising cross-company applicant tracking systems, ones that focus on DEI applications and sourcing gives you a better handle on applicant reach and diversity of applicants. It’s only one step to creating a culture of inclusive talent management, but it’s a powerful one.
“For every woman at the director level who gets promoted to the next level, two women directors are choosing to leave their company”.
Recruitment of women into senior roles is one thing, but retaining them is proving a challenge unto itself.
So how does recruitment tech help?
- Well placed recruitment tech provides a feedback and engagement foundation for leaders to share ideas, roundtable company progress and build inclusive frameworks of decision-making and performance measurement.
- Recruitment tech can provide real-time context to your leadership decisions, which only betters Women-centric business hiring outcomes, and encourages more equitable decision-making across leadership groups.
If you haven’t seen our ATS and recruitment CRM comparison service yet, what are you waiting for?
Rectec Compare is totally free to use, and you can input your requirements in under 20 minutes to see what ATS or recruitment CRM best fits your needs.