Always a delicate subject of discussion, especially when writing from the male point of view and given the current topics hitting the headlines.
As part of our Recruiting Weekly series, Colin Smith, Technical Recruitment Consultant and Founding Director of AES, a company that has been providing permanent recruitment solutions for 30 years, asks Is There a Battle of The Sexes?
After 30 years in the recruitment sector, and many as a business owner, it has always intrigued me why males hold a disproportionate number of the senior roles in our industry and are responsible for many of the business start-ups, yet woman tend to outnumber men by around 2:1 in the sector. In fact, if you look at the 500,000 recruitment consultants who are on LinkedIn in the UK, it must be far more than 2:1 I would have thought. So why do so few get to the Senior jobs or have the courage to get involved in a start-up?
Potentially this could be due to the nature of the industry; the recruitment sector generates a huge amount of income for the economy but 93% of that income is in temporary and contract employment, leaving just 7% from permanent placements. Interestingly the gender of permanent recruitment consultant’s is the opposite to the industry standard i.e. men tend to outnumber women by 2:1. So why is this?
In my experience, running a temporary desk requires good account management skills when dealing with customers and excellent administrative and organisational skills. A key quality is the ability to multi-task and without being stereotypical, women tend to be more successful at this than men.
Permanent recruitment consultants tend to need a different set of skills possibly being more analytical and certainly more sales focused for winning new business. I don’t believe men have the monopoly of these qualities, but do they tend to be pushier and more sales focused? The women I have worked with certainly have the skills and abilities to succeed at these levels, so perhaps it’s just a case of confidence.
Everything I have mentioned above is subjective of course but at AES we do have other circumstantial evidence to support the above assumptions.
At AES we have an independent work from home scheme, where a recruitment consultant will keep most of what they earn and will work when it suits their lifestyle. It was developed to assist people who can’t get to an office for personal reasons to work flexible hours and earn an income based on their capability.
Originally, we targeted Mothers from the industry, because what we offered enabled them to manage their family commitments whilst doing something they were qualified to do. However, we quickly discovered that although we got lots of interest from women, when it came to take the plunge and set-up on their own (even with our “hand-holding” and support) it was something most were just not willing to do. Instead, we’ve found our home-based recruiters being mostly males and many haven’t even got knowledge of recruitment!
Is this because the idea of being your own boss or pushing for career promotions resonates more with a stereotypical pushy, sales focused male?
As a general observation I believe women are perfectly suited to do Temporary and Permanent Recruitment (that is not always the case with men) and it is a great loss to our industry that more women don’t use their undoubted talents and ability to take up management roles or set up on their own.
