WOMEN HIRED ACROSS RANK AND FILE

Companies on Overdrive to Hire Women Across Rank and File

Diversity hiring intent among leading cos has gone up by almost 500% since last year: Study

Three or four times a year, a team from IBM hops from city to city on a recruitment binge with a difference — they screen and select only women employees. If there are talented women out there, IBM wants them in its fold. “We keep trying to find new ways of hiring women,” says Kalpana Veeraraghavan, diversity manager for India and South Asia at IBM. “This is not just about filling a talent crunch. There is a strong correlation between success in the marketplace and having a diverse workforce.” Conservative estimates suggest IBM has added well over 2,000 women in two years. Company officials declined to reveal absolute numbers, but spoke only percentages — proportion of female workers has increased from 24% of workforce to 26%. India Inc wants more women on its rolls …not because it’s a fashionable, but because it makes business sense. Diversity hiring intent among leading companies has gone up by almost 500% since last year, according to a recent study by the Chennai-based FLEXI Careers India, which sources only women executives. In 2010, FLEXI Careers was placing women in 88 positions; this year it’s gone up to 388. Last year, the annual salaries for these positions totalled up to . 2.9 crore; it is . 19.4 crore this year. “This is roughly the amount that a small segment of India Inc has budgeted to spend on the hiring of women via just one avenue — us,” says FLEXI Careers’ founder-director Saundarya Rajesh. A host of companies like HUL, Godrej Industries, Pepsico, Genpact, Kraft, P&G, Deutsche Bank and others, have all stepped-up gender diversity hiring recently. Executive search firms say companies are not only going all out to bring in more women, they are also engaging with — and trying to retain — them in new, more vigorous ways. Officials at Coca-Cola India point to a correlation between women’s empowerment and national GDP growth, business growth, environmental sustainability and improved human health. Women already are the most dynamic and fastestgrowing economic force in the world today, and now control over $20 trillion in spending worldwide. To put that into context — that’s an economic impact larger than the US, China and India economies combined. One in 11 working-age women is now involved in entrepreneurship. “The overall ratio of men to women in our company is 60:40,” says Indira Screymour, VP (HR) at Genpact. “Women not only make up half the talent pool, but also about 50% of our consumers and clients. So, ensuring diversity impacts our business in a positive manner.” At Kotak Mahindra Bank, two out of ten employees are women, says Subhro Bhaduri, head (human resources). “For the past two years, we have been focusing on hiring more women resources laterally. We would like this to increase to 30% by the end of this financial year.” For a company with an employee strength of over 20,000, the number of women employees in Godrej is a mere 8-10% at the senior level (with only 5-6% in functional-head roles) and 20% in junior management. That’s gnawing away at Sumit Mitra, executive VP, corporate HR at Godrej Industries. “We will go for more women hires, if not level it up at a 50:50 ratio. There is a preference for women employees, but not a quota.” There has been a conscious effort to recruit more women professionals during campus hires this year. “Of the 11 hires, seven are women recruited across functions, be it HR, sales and marketing and such,” he says. “This year’s diversity hiring also reflects many new roles for women,” says FLEXI Careers’ Rajesh. This is true even among equal-opportunity employers, as most companies in India Inc are today. “Positions which have traditionally been seen as ‘male-bastion roles’ are now becoming gender neutral,” she adds pointing to treasury and cash management, area channel managers, lab managers, relationship managers, and agri-business heads. Some companies have gone the other way and mandated that for some jobs (like senior research engineer, market development manager, legal counsel etc) they would prefer women. Kraft, for instance, has started hiring women for what was hitherto seen as ‘men-specific’ jobs: finance, legal and in frontline, modern trade roles. At IBM, more women are opting for positions in technology and product development. Twenty-four percent of Mahindra Satyam’s 31,000-strong work force is female. Chief people officer Hari Thalapalli wants to take this to 30% by the end of this financial year. So far, Mahindra Satyam has inducted seven women through Start Over — a return-to-work program for women who’ve taken a mid-career break for personal reasons — and intends to add over 100 in the next 12-18 months. “Diversity is a business imperative critical to enabling growth, and so intrinsic that our global CEO has tied managers’ bonuses to diversity goals throughout the company,” says Rajesh Ramanathan, HR director, Cadbury — Kraft Foods. At Cadbury-Kraft Foods, gender diversity has been a focus for some years, but it’s only in the last couple that the company put some specific initiatives in place. A KPMG spokesperson says it is hiring more women as its sector offerings have expanded. “We have made a progress of over 75% increase, compared to 2010 in our headcount for women staff,” a spokesperson said. Schneider Electric, which has 50% employees in the blue-collar category, has recorded impressive numbers. From 9% women in 2009, the company now has 20% women employees.
(LABONITA GHOSH, SAUMYA BHATTACHARYA & VIKAS KUMAR ET 22S911)