A recent study, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that managers of both sexes are twice as likely to hire a man as a woman. The study, conducted by business-school professors from Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago, asked male and female managers to recruit people to handle simple mathematical tasks. The applicants had equal skills, but managers of both genders were more likely to hire men. The male candidates boasted about their abilities, while women downplayed their talents, but the managers didn’t compensate for the difference when making hiring decisions. When the managers were explicitly shown the women could perform the tasks just as well as the men, the result was still that men were 1.5 times more likely to be hired. Even worse, when managers hired a job applicant who performed worse on the test than a fellow candidate, two-thirds of the time the lesser candidate was a man.

Change your hiring systems
If gender bias runs deep in the corporate world, that means HR policies are often rife with bias too. Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of gender consulting firm 20-first, writes that many large companies consider « ambition » to be an important character trait for their leadership candidates. When candidates are seen as « ambitious, » they’re usually boasting, or overselling their talents–a trait studies have shown to be predominately male, she writes. Hiring managers typically believe erroneously that the most self-promotional candidates are objectively the best. « This does not make room to develop the majority of today’s talent for tomorrow’s world. Nor allow a variety of leadership styles to co-exist, » she adds.

Read more on this topic in « How to Remove Gender Bias From the Hiring Process » written by Will Yakowicz

« Autant dire qu’il est totalement out, même s’il perdure encore. C’est ce que je dis depuis maintenant près de six ans : on est encore à la frontière des deux outils, l’effet de masse va progressivement prendre le dessus sur la version papier. Et, franchement, je suis pour la disparition de ce dernier, où l’on raconte une histoire passée pour parler du futur… Alors que les outils du recrutement ont considérablement évolué via les réseaux sociaux : le CV, c’est la photo, pendant que le profil social retrace ce que j’ai été, ce que je veux être, à la manière d’un film. Le réseau social offre la possibilité de discuter plutôt que de « subir un interrogatoire ». Les entretiens vidéo sont également de plus en plus employés.

Des conseils pour utiliser au mieux ces outils ? 
Le plus important : dans tous les réseaux sociaux, en haut à droite sur l’écran, il y a un onglet « Paramètres » ou « confidentialité ». C’est la base. Moins d’un tiers des utilisateurs de réseaux, professionnels ou non, ont paramétré leur compte. Il faut être responsable de ses données, car ce sont des traces permanentes sur Internet. »

Propos recueillis par le Télégramme lors de l’intervention de Fabrice Landois, responsable service cadres de l’APEC. Lire l’article « Dépassé, le CV papier ! »

Tomorrow, Saturday March 8, the International Women Day will be celebrated across the world. The first International Women’s Day was held in 1911. Thousands of events occur to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women. Organisations, governments, charities, educational institutions, women’s groups, corporations and the media celebrate the day.

Do we still need an International Women Day?
We found two different articles we want to share with you. On the one hand the article « Why do we need an International Women’s Day? » on Guardian.com about four gender-equality campaigners who share their views on feminism and the backlash against women’s rights. On the other hand the article on Forbes.com « 10 Reasons for Optimism This International Women’s Day », applauding some of these staggering accomplishments, successes, and triumphs—a testament to the incredible progress women are making right now.

« I love LinkedIn. But I do not trust LinkedIn. For recruiters, it’s obviously a key tool, and clearly a brilliant invention that is part of a seismic shift in the way recruitment works. I wish I had invented it. But I believe, that for agency recruiters, LinkedIn is not your friend.

Don’t get me wrong, we need to use LinkedIn, and become better at scouring its database for the nuggets that reside therein. We also need to use it for developing client prospect lists, and be sophisticated in building our personal credibility, profile and brand, via status updates and group discussions. That much is a crystal clear, to even dumb old me.

But I do start to get uneasy when LinkedIn is accused of illegally accessing users’ personal email accounts without permission, and subsequently ‘harvesting’ email addresses, which it then uses to send multiple emails that appear to be endorsed by the LinkedIn member. In fact US members of the site have filed a class action complaint, now before the courts. (For the record, LinkedIn deny these claims vigorously.)

Sure, that makes me nervous. But what worries me much more even than this, is that it is obvious that LinkedIn does not care about staffing companies. And I do not trust LinkedIn to act in our best interest. In fact they are doing quite the opposite, right now. While LinkedIn sells its recruitment packages to agency recruiters aggressively on one hand, seducing us to partner with them and eschew other forms of sourcing, they quite blatantly sell the same service to corporates using (and I quote from their marketing literature) lines like… »

Want to read more about Greg Savage’s article « Can we trust LinkedIn? »

After a few decades of asking women to adapt to organizations, companies are starting to adapt their organizations to women. They are asking managers to learn new skills to manage a new more gender-balanced workforce and customer base. « We have spent decades thinking that the lack of balance in business was caused by women doing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing or even wearing the wrong thing. This led to an elaborate panoply of “fix-the-women” “empowerment” programs. But now that women represent 60% of the educated talent on the planet, and half the incoming recruits of many companies, this argument is wearing thin. Half the population can’t be “wrong”, says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-first, one of the world’s leading gender consulting firms. 

In one of the first major studies on the role of the CEO in driving change on diversity and inclusion, London King’s College with the support of KPMG UK did research analyses on how CEOs of global organisations explain the need for action on gender to themselves and to others, and the kinds of leadership behaviours they use to help make change happen.

The report outlines what CEOs see as the challenges for achieving gender parity in their organisations, and explores the reasons why CEOs believe that gender parity is a goal worth pursuing. It highlights six critical leadership behaviours through which CEOs can support gender parity and shows how talking about gender parity in more personal and emotional terms can help ensure leaders leave a legacy of gender parity in their organisations.

Read the full report « Winning Hearts and Minds – How CEOs talk about gender parity »