How to recruit more women in the workplace with just a few simple steps.

A gender diverse shortlist is something that every firm is looking for when recruiting, yet it’s harder than you might think to create one.  The challenge isn’t that women aren’t as well suited to the roles, it’s simply that women are less likely to apply.

Businesses are very much embracing the benefits of a more diverse way of thinking and approach to project management, we’ve moved away from the days when women were overlooked for a role simply because they are women, but there’s a challenge. They are wanting to attract women into project and transformation roles but there don’t seem to be as many opportunities out there for women.

The real disconnect is around how women approach looking for work and how they perceive job adverts. There are hundreds of jobs adverts out there for project managers in a range of different industries but they’re not necessarily written in a way to attract the market that they’re looking to target.

A job advert is a sales document. It should speak to the target audience.

 Traditionally a job advert has been a copy and paste of a job description.  It’s easy, it gets it out there quickly and you can hope for the best. Often they have a long list of bullet points of the criteria somebody needs to meet, that’s quite an old-fashioned way of attracting people to businesses, it’s almost designed to put people off.

Essentially, a job advert is a sales document. It should be speaking to the target audience and be trying to attract people to apply for the role, rather than listing a certain number of years’ experience, a specific technology or industry background. Women especially tend to feel that they need to have achieved everything on the list to be able to apply.

If companies look at this as a sales document to start with, that’s automatically going to speak to the people that they want to attract.

Everyone wants to feel that they can do the job but women approach that in a slightly different way to men. Most of the women I speak to like to think that they could go in on day one, be competent and capable of doing everything on that criteria list.  Whereas, the male applicants are happy to say “I’ll give it a go and I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

All of these things can add up to a very quick, “That role is not for me,” but it could be a really good opportunity. Rather than trying to put off individuals from applying for the role so you just get people that tick your perfect criteria list, imagine you’re talking to somebody over a glass of wine or a coffee and describing the opportunity to them.

Tell people why it’s such a great company to work for, what they will get out of coming to work there and what opportunities are available for career progression.

You’re talking to people who will then get excited about that opportunity and be more likely to apply. It could be the difference you need to attract the right person for the role.