Channel and end user bosses unite to discuss top talent and retention
At the Women in Tech Festival UK this week, CRN and Westcoast brought together bosses from the channel and end user communities to discuss one of the biggest challenges for both: top talent
At the CRN and Computing Women in Tech Festival UK, sixteen channel and end-user tech leaders came together to discuss how to address the industry's gender deficit over a VIP lunch.
It cuts to the heart of one of the most glaring challenges facing bosses from companies of all types: the growing skills gap.
In particular, the effort to bring in a more diverse range of views, backgrounds and experiences is slow-moving.
Women account for just 15.8 per cent of the UK's current generation of technology and engineering undergraduates.
And in the Alison Rose government review of female entrepreneurship, published this year, the Treasury found that less than one in five SMB enterprises in the UK are led by women. On the VC-front - less than 1p of every £1 of VC funding in the UK goes to female founders.
Firms can only do so much at an individual level against such stark figures.
The line-up that met agreed that more needs to be done across company lines.
They included:
Alex Tatham MD of Westcoast; Lucy Weedon, marketing director at Westcoast; Fiona McKenzie, client services director at Revere; George Tunnicliffe, head of IT operations at the National Theatre; Diane Barlow, head of digital at the Food Standards Agency; Karin Huettl, alliances & operations director at SHI; Kate Wood, co-founder and director of culture at Chess; Gina Holloway, operations director at Insight; Stacey Cusack, enterprise client director at Insight; Lynda Hart, head of IT at Volvo Cars UK; Stacey Wills, Global IT PMO and transformation lead at Unilever; Bruna Pellicci, CTO at Linklaters; Karen Higgins, head of hotels and F&B IT Solutions Whitbread plc; Angelique Wu, software engineer and Co-Chair of FT Women UK; Kate Collins, global director strategic IT delivery at BAM ;and Katy Axtell, head of business Solutions at SGN.
One issue immediately flagged up was that recruiters, both internally as HR, and in external agencies, often respond with:
"Oh, there aren't the women for us to choose candidates from."
But there are other avenues to find talented women besides just the pool of girls and women taking STEM subjects.
"The conversation around women in technology tends to end up in a millennial conversation and about young women coming into it, and actually, what about returners?" said Westcoast's Weedon.
"And what about women that are in sectors that aren't technology based? There are future leaders that are in different sectors that we should be encouraging into doing what we do."
Insight's Holloway said that this potential solution was especially pertinent for the many roles in tech companies that don't require specific technical qualifications.
"In my view, there are two different conversations here. There's women in technology, and women in technical roles.
"I have no problem recruiting women into a technology environment, but not into technical roles. The problem we're having at the moment is when we're trying to recruit women into DevOps, into development and production…And I'm in two minds.
"Ultimately, I don't want to force anybody to do something they don't want to do. I don't want to get to positive discrimination. I just want someone who wants to do the role well.
"In some areas where they don't want to go, fine…But in areas where perhaps there has been discouragement, let's change that environment…And I love returners! They're my favourite demographic for helping with that because they've been overlooked potentially before, and have perhaps had a negative experience. So, they'll come in and they'll try really, really hard.
"They'll give you more in their three-and-a-half days than some others might be given in five days."
On a similar note, SGN's Axtell added that hunting for diverse talent will only be as successful as those who are tasked with the search.
"I'm the only female in the leadership team and we've just had a massive business transformation and huge recruitment drive. And so, we are having meetings talking about diversity and inclusion…And some of my team say ‘Where can we find them? We can't find women.'…Well, actually, I've had tonnes of women applying, but then I come from a recruitment background, where I worked with a lot of women…
"Whereas the men in my business have a different network."
Axtell added that once a potential candidate comes into interview, her priorities tend to differ from the men in her team who have little experience interviewing women.
"The challenge with some of the guys in my team, is that they want people to come in, hit the ground running, and be able to do the job from day one.
"So, I've worked with them at building up the right mentoring, networking, and coaching network, so that when they come in, even if they don't have the ability to do the job from day one, they have the mentality and the mind set to be able to do it.
"We need to recruit for mentality and mind set, with technology skills, because we can build up those skills in organisations."
As another solution to counter the lack of interaction between people of different experiences, which can lead to unconscious bias in recruitment, top law firm Linklaters encourages mentoring across skills sets and global location.
"If you're somebody from the service desk, you might be paired with a more senior manager; if you're female, you might be paired with a male; if you're working maybe in our Beijing office, you might be mentored by somebody in London," said CTO Bruna Pellicci.
"We're trying to really, really mix things up. And we've also got a group of about five or six people, again, some guys and some women, that are actually helping us to push the diversity agenda within our business…The impact on the environment that people come into, I think is really important."
During CRN and Westcoast's VIP Lunch Roundtable, tech leaders also discussed how to bring decision-makers on side who have perhaps not seen this issue as a tangible concern to themselves, and other examples of best practice from the channel and end user perspectives.
It comes a month ahead of CRN's Women in Channel Awards, which will be held on 17 October. Stay tuned for further announcements.