The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘I’ve never seen demand like it is now’
Shortage of female executives in the workforce is keeping recruiters busy
The difficulty finding workers in Connecticut is not limited to rank-and-file employees: Corporate recruiters say business is booming as the pandemic approaches the two-year mark.
“I’ve been doing this for 23 years and this has been one of the best years,” said Duane Sauer, who is vice president and practice director for permanent placement in the accounting and finance unit for Robert Half Recruiters’ Connecticut and Western Massachusetts service territory. “I’ve never seen demand like it is now.”
The demand for female workers, particularly executives, is especially acute. About 350,000 women 20 and older left the workforce in September and August of this year, the U.S. Labor Department reported in October, while 321,000 men in the same age group came on board.
As a result, the labor force for women aged 20 and older was down by roughly 2 million from February of 2020, about twice the deficit for non-teenaged men.
That has created a shortage of female workers at all levels, particularly in the executive suite, according to Jasmine Silver and Runa Knapp, co-founders of Connectalent, a Westport recruiting firm that specializes in placing female executives.
Knapp said with the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020, many women left the workforce, not because they wanted to, but because they were needed to care for elderly parents or to supervise the at-home learning of their children when schools closed.
Silver said the companies looking to hire the female executives Connectalent represents are businesses
that have been successful meeting the challenges associated with the pandemic.
“These companies are doing well, making money and as a result, haven’t got enough people to meet their needs,” she said. “The candidates we work with are ready to go because they were at the top of their game, in senior level positions when they left the workforce.”
Silver said she and Knapp work with eight to 10 executives at a time in an effort to find each of them positions. The two women say they have worked with between 35 and 40 companies since they launched the firm in May 2019.
Knapp said she and Silver have “a more hands on, white glove approach” when it comes to recruiting.
“We don’t just match buzz words online,” Knapp said.
‘We met a lot of mothers like us’
Connectalent’s services have really taken off during the pandemic with the revenue of the business having tripled in 2020 and 2021. Knapp said client companies pay Connectalent as much as a third of the first year compensation for any candidate who is placed.
Silver and Knapp decided to team up after meeting when their children were playing together. Knapp had been in corporate accounting with KPMG and Silver was a divorce attorney.
“We met a lot of mothers like us, women who were ambitious and wanted to get back into the workforce,” Silver and. “And at the same time, we found companies are seeking talented, efficient and skilled women to come to work for them.”
Candidates for executive positions are benefiting from a tight labor market and any skills they may have developed while working
remotely, according to Maurice “Mo” Carver, a University of New Haven faculty member in the school’s psychology and management departments. The former General Electric executive said “client companies are looking for people who have a track record of engaging remotely with people who work for them because not everyone can do that.”
“The ability to be innovative and translate your work across a variety of digitized platforms is more important than ever,” Carver said.
Seeking diversity
Part of the reason for that female executives are more in demand may nothing to do with workplace conditions brought about or exacerbated because of the pandemic.
Russell Reynolds, chairman of RSR Partners, a Greenwich firm that specializes in finding highranking executives and corporate board members, said the biggest change his firm has seen since the start of the pandemic is that client companies are more eager to diversify their leadership teams.
“Over 60 percent of our recruitments during that time have been diverse hires,” he said.
The drive toward more diversity among corporate America’s executive workforce is being driven to some extent by members of Generation Z and its reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, according to Jennifer Openshaw, chief executive officer of the Stamfordbased group, Girls With Impact. Generation Z covers people born from the late 1990s to the early 2010s.
“Gen Z has kept it alive and going,” Openshaw said of the Black Lives Matter movement. “This generation that corporate America is looking to hire is focused on inclusion and diversity. They want a corporation that don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk.”
Openshaw said Girls With
Impact runs a 10-week miniMBA program that is open to young women from 14-to-24 years old. She 70 percent of the program’s graduates are women of color.
“We need to train the next generation to lead and there’s lots of studies that show a young woman’s confidence drops by as much as 30 percent by age 13,” she said. “The outcomes we see from the program are off the charts: 85 percent of our graduates feel an increase in confidence. And they come out of the program with a real business plan for a start-up or non-profit.”
That sets the program’s graduates apart from the competition when it comes time for them to go to college, Openshaw said.
“We just had two young women who got full-ride offers, from Howard and Babson,” she said.
Openshaw said a study her organization following a University of Connecticut venture competition is an indication that the state is a hotbed for female executive talent.
“Of the 1,000 students who participated during that period, 17 percent were women,” she said. “But of the student teams that finished in first, second or third place, 51 percent of them had a female founder. And of the first place teams, 35 percent were run by a female; women may have been few in number in the competition, but their success far out paced their numbers.”
‘Well rounded, good people’
Whether fresh out of college or a mid-career executive, Sauer said that once a recruiter has identified candidates to present to clients, those companies must react quickly or risk losing a candidate to another employer, according to Sauer.
“Good candidates are going fast in certain cases as quickly as two or three days,” he said. “In other cases, it’s two or three weeks max. CPA companies like to compare candidates, but we tell the if they find somebody who checks all of he boxes their looking for, hire them.”
Sauer said while compensation levels are still important to job seekers once an employment offer has been made, that subject has been taking a back seat to other considerations.
“They first thing they want is a hybrid work schedule,” he said. “And if they can’t have that, they want some flexibility with how they use their times. I’ve never seen a time when candidates are making more counter offers to employers.”
Carver said that while companies “are more willing than ever to accommodate location preferences” where candidates want to work from, there are no guarantees they will get what they want.
“In Connecticut, a lot of companies will be flexible,” he said. “But companies like Chase and Google, they want their people to come back to the office.”
Any company insisting a full-time return to working in the office or may have a difficult time recruiting women in Connecticut, if the results of a study released in early December by Girls With Impact is any indication.
One of the findings of the study, “Post-Covid Economic Recovery for Women of Connecticut,” found that 93 percent of those surveyed identified policy reform for childcare assistance as the top priority in bringing more women into the workforce.
While Reynolds acknowledged candidates have the upper hand in a tight labor market, he advised potential employment candidates against taking advantage of the situation.
“We look to work with people who want to be helpful, not those who just want to be helped,” Reynolds said. “If somebody asks for too much, we tell them to look for someplace else. We look for candidates who are well-rounded, good people, not those who are just good professionally.”