The Association of Professional Staffing Companies – APSCo – are now producing annual gender reports. This means that recruiters can measure their organisations against their peers. The latest report about Women In Recruitment is really interesting reading.
The vast majority (78%) of staffing companies indicated that over half of their support function was made up women. This marks an 8% increase from last year, however, the number of women in a sales or resourcing role appears to have fallen from two-fifths with more than 50% of women at this level, to one third this year.
At leadership and board levels, numbers are still low with just 28% reporting that women made up half of their board or are in senior leadership roles. This statistic remains static since last year.
It is also disappointing that there appears to be minimum investment in incentives to retain women. This is evident due to only 28% of respondents offering a mentoring scheme for female employees. Mentoring schemes are proven to drive learning and development, which APSCo fully support.
How has COVID impacted this?
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the furlough scheme has been well utilised by the recruitment industry. This has resulted in minimum redundancies, which suggests good business bounce-back now things have opened-up again.
Unsurprisingly, flexible working has been a staple for recruiters due to COVID-19 restrictions. With over 90% offering flexible working, let’s hope this continues in the months to come. We carried out our own survey about hybrid working. You can read the results of that here: https://utilitypeopleuk.com/working-from-home-survey-results/
In conclusion, this latest report shows that improvements still need to be made within the recruitment sector to level out gender representation. This is particularly noticeably at board level which is something equally reflected in the energy and utilities industry.
If you are keen to improve your own D&I rates, particularly at senior level, and would like to find out more about the Executive Search process, click on the link: https://utilitypeopleuk.com/executive-search/
