An interesting pair of articles came my way this weekend. The first, was in Canada’s Vancouver Sun regarding the exiting of women from law firms.“Of 1,400 Canadian lawyers surveyed, 84 per cent of women and 66 per cent of men rated “an environment supportive of my family and personal commitments” as an important factor in choosing to work at another firm. Money and career advancement were well down the list. And nearly a third of the women and half the men said they expected to leave their current employer within five years.

Work-life balance may have become something of a cliche but the evidence is incontrovertible: Professionals — yes, even lawyers — want a life as well as a career.”

Back to corporate culture, where much of the management talk doesn’t match individual managers’ walk. If you’re struggling with the similar turnover, then the key words you should focus on aren’t what people want, but what it costs per hire to ignore it.

“Focus isn’t the problem. Every organization, public and private, should keep an eye on the bottom line. The question is whether a model that incurs a dropout rate of experienced, talented women that’s twice the rate of men makes any business sense. One estimate put the cost of an associate’s departure — taking into account recruitment, training and severance — at $315,000.”

Yours may not be that high, but considering the same items, you can rough your cost by figuring one to three times the annual salary of the position, whether it’s a receptionist or CEO.

And please don’t be tempted to snicker thinking it’s a Canadian problem, it’s a global problem, and it’s going to get worse.

The second article, in Boston.com, talks about the lengths some companies are going to to recruit moms—those women who took time out to have kids and the potential for flexibility that should be built into future careers.

“In just the past few years, spurred largely by a tight market for white-collar labor, firms such as the investment banks Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs have launched targeted recruiting programs. A new class of headhunters and human resources consultants has emerged to help smaller companies do the same. Other companies, including the accounting firm Ernst and Young and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton…. Elite business schools like Dartmouth’s Tuck School and the Harvard Business School have programs similar to Wharton’s, and the how-tos of finding and hiring women coming off a career break – women who are “onramping,” in the current human-resources parlance – are hot topics in business school classrooms.”

“And it shouldn’t just be women of child-bearing age who take advantage of them, according to many of the executives and academics working on these programs. The broader goal, they say, is for careers with periodic off- and onramps to become a mainstream option for men and women.”

“We’re starting to look at flexibility over the course of a career rather than just in the course of a year or week,” says Carolyn Buck Luce, a global managing partner at Ernst and Young and chair of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. “It’s just the beginning.”

It may be just beginning, but the shortage of people at all levels and in all fields, not just professionals, is now, so for the smartest CEOs, the future culture is now, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Business info, Culture, Hiring, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: recruitment cost, women, work-life balance
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