Recruiting Managers

Few employers discriminate openly and deliberately, but we are all influenced by subconscious structures and prejudices. We also tend to look for people who are similar to ourselves. The result is that many people who could do an excellent job as a manager are not even considered, because they were not in the pool of candidates.

So what can employers do to quality-assure the recruitment process? What are the pitfalls, and how do we ensure that professional skills, and not sex, determine who gets the job? We have gathered together some advice and tips for a more gender-aware recruitment process.

Structured processes
Job requirement profile
Advertising
The recruiting group
Recruitment consultants
Other recruitment channels
Interview techniques
Assessment and selection
Decision to employ, and positive discrimination

Structured processes
Many managers are recruited via informal networks, contacts and recommendations, or as a result of someone being asked to apply. The greater the reliance on informal networks, the higher the proportion of men in management positions. Organisations that use more transparent methods such as advertising, consultants or seniority-based promotion have a larger proportion of women in management.

A major study was published in the US in 2000 concerning recruitment to orchestras. Researchers studied 7,000 individuals and almost 600 auditions from the late 1950s until 1995. In the 1970s, many orchestras abandoned the method of hand-picking musicians and made the recruitment process more transparent by using advertising and auditions. The number of women in the orchestras increased dramatically after these changes. Some orchestras introduced ‘blind auditions’ in which the musicians were asked to play behind a large screen. For women, ‘blind auditions’ meant that the likelihood of being accepted increased by about 50 percent.

W2T recommends transparent and structured processes, each part of which has been quality-assured. Remember, too, that the recruitment process has a legal aspect. Make sure therefore that those working in the process are sufficiently familiar with anti-discrimination legislation. Save your notes from the recruitment process in case of legal consequences.

If you still choose to recruit through networks, remember to ask colleagues and networks if they know of any women who might be good potential management candidates. Women just under management level often have great leadership potential.

Job requirement profile
Prejudices and preconceptions are often in the equation when job requirement profiles are drawn up. Many jobs or positions are consciously or subconsciously viewed as male or female. Work descriptions based on what the job was like in the past are routinely copied, instead of being based on current or future leadership requirements.
- Use the management philosophy as a starting point and compile a clear and well
  thought -out description of the requirements and characteristics you are looking for.
- Review the requirements for training and experience. You are looking for people with   interest, ambitions and knowledge, not just people with a specific background. Ask the   question: Is the usual educational background really what is needed for this particular   management post, or might other skills be useful?
- New demands from customers and the world around us are continually putting new   demands on managers. Broaden the recruitment base by re-examining previous   requirements.
- Avoid characteristics that can be ascribed to one or other sex. Do not make unnecessary   or unmotivated demands that directly or indirectly discriminate against people of one sex.   For example, specifying a young age may exclude women who are starting a management   career after having children.

Advertising
Promoting equal opportunity can be a way of demonstrating that you are offering more than an interesting workplace and good products or services. Cite career development procedures and programmes for combining work and family when marketing the business in advertising material and job advertisements. In job ads, emphasise that you are looking for managers who are well-rounded individuals with a life outside the workplace. Make a balance between work and leisure part of the company’s/organisation’s profile!

Think about the language, the design of the ad and what message the choice of pictures puts across. In the advertisement, you could say that you want a less homogenous workplace, e.g. “We are working to achieve a more diverse workplace with an equal distribution of women and men of various ages, and a mix of ethnic backgrounds in our staff”.

The recruiting group
With both women and men in the recruiting group, there is a greater chance that the applicants’ skills will genuinely be evaluated on the basis of the job requirement profile. People who are involved in recruiting managers must be familiar with anti-discrimination legislation, the gender equality plan of the organisation, current management philosophy and the goal of securing more female managers. Talk with managers who are leaving. They have valuable information about the job conditions and know what needs to be improved for people to function properly as managers. Make sure the recruiting group has access to this knowledge.

Not everyone works in big organisations that have a recruiting group. If you are the only person responsible for recruitment, find someone to talk to who can help you with the job requirement profile and ask you critical questions about how you think and what you are doing.

Recruitment consultants
Search consultants primarily search for and select people who meet the requirements for strategic and executive positions. Other companies engaged in the recruitment of executives choose to advertise all managerial posts, or use a combination of targeted search, advertising and candidate pools from their own databases.

The consultancy business has experienced growing demand for female managers and board directors. There are already companies who specialise in this, and more are on the way. If you use outside help in recruiting managers, make knowledge of anti-discrimination legislation a requirement. Demand that both female and male consultants produce female candidates. Only use companies that have documented experience in working to recruit female managers. See also recommendations for recruitment consultants.

Other recruitment channels – are there other paths?
Some companies cannot find qualified women in their own recruiting base. Why not look to the public sector? There is an enormous potential pool of women with broad, in-depth management experience from operative positions in the public sector. These are managers who are used to working under pressure and managing both a big budget and large numbers of staff, and who make decisions that not only have significant financial consequences but also affect the health and quality of life of other people.

Try targeting women via advertisements or recruitment consultants! Think about what advertising medium you want to use. Your choice of newspaper or website determines how well you reach different groups.

Interview techniques
The selection process starts when interested candidates get in touch to find out more about the duties and demands of the job. The way they are treated may decide whether they subsequently choose to apply for the job. The employer should therefore ensure that everyone is treated correctly and that no irrelevant questions are asked.

Changing our own prejudices and values is difficult. We are often unaware of them, but they show in our communication with others. One way of helping recruiters to become more aware of what they are doing is to have them tape their interviews and analyse them, preferably together with another interviewer. Are the questions neutral? Does the interviewer express his/her own views or prejudices?

- Use both female and male interviewers with training in gender issues and
  antidiscrimination legislation.
- Ask both men and women to come for interviews, and ask the same questions regardless   of sex.
- Let the women talk! The applicant should be allowed to speak for half the time. A Danish   study shows that women only talk for 1/3 of the time and men half the time or more. Men   are therefore thought to have made more of an impression and to be more successful   than women.
- The Danish study also showed that women in job interviews talk about their children and   families more than men do, which is often understood to mean that women place a higher   priority on their personal life than men. It might instead be about different approaches to   describing one’s person. One tip is to wait until later in the conversation to ask about   family and leisure interests.
- If you want to ask about parenthood, nursery or other care responsibilities, ask those   questions of both male and female candidates. Remember that questions about religion,   family life, age and illness can be used as evidence should a discrimination dispute arise.

Assessment and selection
One way of reducing the impact of one's own prejudices is to make application documents anonymous during the first screening. Remove information about name, gender and age, and cover over other information that is not relevant for the post. Personal information affects your judgement more than you think!

- Discuss such concepts as social skills, initiative, focus on results and flexibility. Be specific   about what you mean by leadership qualities. Agree on gender-neutral interpretations so   that you can assess candidates more easily from the same criteria.
- Don’t abandon the original requirement profile by creating new requirements in the middle   of the selection process! An employer is bound by the qualification requirements stated in   an advertisement and there have to be special reasons for departing from these.
- Be critical about your own ability to judge applicants’ personal suitability and social   attributes such as networks, status and charisma.
- If tests and other selection instruments are used, find out how they were produced. In   what context were they developed? What kind of norms are they based on? Do they   reflect the experience and skills of both men and women? Are there documented results   that are gender specific? If in doubt, use a number of different methods to test the   suitability of candidates. In a new Swedish study of assessment centres, men had better   results than women in cognitive tests. But when other test results were brought into the   equation, the differences between the sexes turned out to be very small.
- Do you evaluate men's and women's responsibility for the home and family in the same   way? Remember that it is illegal to eliminate female applicants because of pregnancy or   parenthood, and that an employer risks becoming liable for damages.
- When taking references, remember to ask the same questions of women and men!
- Double-check all cases in which women have been eliminated!
- Two women and two men is a good model when selecting the final candidates.

Decision to employ and positive discrimination
– what do we want to do, what can we do, what should we do?

Decisions to employ are often made in a hurry, and the recruiting group often seeks a consensus, either openly or implicitly. This may mean that it is easiest to choose uncontroversial candidates, or those who are similar to the recruiting group or other managers. It might be a good idea to devote extra time to assessing the candidates you are not sure about. It would probably be to their advantage if differing opinions about them were brought out into the open rather than swept under the carpet. You might then end up with a candidate who will bring creativity and diversity to the management group.

Have you made up your mind that more women are needed in managerial positions and is there a female candidate who meets the requirements? Give her the job!

Is there a female candidate who is sufficiently well-qualified, although the male candidate has slightly better qualifications? In such cases you can apply affirmative action (preferential treatment). This is allowed where the intention to use affirmative action is documented in the gender equality plan and where the difference in qualifications is not too great. In reality, this is an unusual situation since two people are always quite different, however their qualifications are assessed.

Finally, it is all about deciding who will do the best job. If women are involved all the way to the final round, there is a greater chance that a woman will be selected.