Fostering Female Talent is Better than Recruiting

It goes without saying that women play a central role in the workforce. Companies that aren’t openly working towards re-addressing the balance are at risk of missing out on their own employees’ talent potential, marginalizing their customer-base and damaging their own reputation, as well as their ability to hire great talent. And research has made it increasingly clear that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially. 

Some organizations have chosen to address the balance by hiring new women from outside the company into senior positions, just as Alfresco Software did when hiring Marilyn Miller from Cisco. But new research from the Boston Consulting Group shows that retaining and promoting women already working within a company is the most effective way of improving the gender balance within the workforce. The study found that, while senior executives preferred to focus on recruiting more women, initiatives to support retaining and promoting women already at the company had a higher positive impact on business growth.

Read more…