Balanced Shortlists - a View from the CEO at Liftstream

The Women’s Business Council’s ‘Men as Change Agents’ action group have produced a toolkit to help engage CEOs of leading listed and private businesses to help deliver gender balance in business leadership and close the gender pay gap. The WBC believe that an important next step to achieve gender balance is to actively engage CEOs and other senior business leaders as ‘change agents’ in championing and delivering the change required.

Karl Simpson, CEO at Liftstream and Chair of the REC’s Association of Executive Recruiters (AER) is a member of the action group and contributed to the guide. Here’s his take on balanced shortlists, a key issue highlighted in the toolkit.

What is the issue?

There are too few women in executive leadership or board positions to be able to generate a sustainable pool of women leaders ready to serve FTSE 100, 250, 350 companies, now or in the future.

Today, shortlists for senior positions are, too often, absent of women candidates with a fair chance of being selected for the post. In part, this is because the current identification, selection and appointment processes are inadequately addressing generations of gender bias.

The source of executive talent often comes from within companies, and so internal approaches to talent management are as important as external recruitment.

What can we do?

Business needs to undertake a re-evaluation of their appointment processes, with attention being paid equally to the internal and external recruitment approaches.

Promote the adoption of new and best practices to increase the level of women’s representation in candidate identification, interviewing and selection. We believe that at least 30 per cent of shortlisted candidates should be women, preferably more than one woman, to achieve a reasonable prospect that a woman will be selected for the role.

Businesses could record and review metrics that would determine the success of diversity hiring to each level as a result of shortlisting initiatives and interventions, thereby generating a knowledge base to assist decision making.

It would also be good practice to ensure that there is female representation on the interview panel and decision team for role selection.

For more details on the balanced shortlist recommendations and other case studies, as well as information on the work of the WBC and the ‘Men as Change Agents’ action groups, check out their toolkit. The REC has also produced research – Room at the Top – on women leaders and executive search and this year is partnering with the APPG for Women and Work to highlight and contribute to this debate.