Women in tech struggle to find jobs. She has a solution
Hiring has been pretty cutthroat in tech-related fields, lately. So sometimes the pitches come from odd places.
Like when an Indian agency that Tracy Saunders had never heard of sent a two-sentence message to her little-used LinkedIn inbox, alluding to the “world’s top search engine” company and indicating she might be a fit.
“So I got online. I research them. I was like, ‘This is 50/50 a scam.’ I’m going to respond anyway.”
Ms. Saunders ended up with a contract job as a technical recruiter at Google back in 2013.
It was an ironic moment — Ms. Saunders had worked in tech recruiting for two decades and found herself needing the same kind of help she routinely gave potential hires at places like Amazon and Cisco.
“I’ve been every archetype of female job-seeker. I’ve been a returner. I’ve been a working mom. I’ve been looking for work while pregnant,” she said. “It was interesting because as a
recruiter, I still struggled with the job search.”
And as Pittsburgh’s budding tech economy continues to blossom, Ms. Saunders doesn’t want women in tech, or in any industry for that matter, left behind.
Aptiv, a self-driving car startup currently based in the RIDC Industrial Park in O’Hara, will be part of the Mill 19 project at the 178-acre Hazelwood Green site, and the company has also begun work on a second 66,000square-foot building at RIDC that it will occupy.
In August 2017, Aptiv — a spinoff from Delphi — said it wanted to nearly triple its technology team to at least 150 engineers and administrators. It has done that, and this development means the possibility of still more hires.
Amazon, which nixed plans for one of its HQ2 locations in Long Island City, N.Y., in February, said that it “will continue to hire and grow across our corporate offices and tech hubs in the U.S. and Canada.”
That could be good news for Pittsburgh because Amazon has a tech hub at SouthSide Works that employs more than 80 engineers who work on the company’s popular Alexa voice technology and machine learning.
To help women land these kinds of lucrative jobs, Ms. Saunders hatched the idea of starting an online crash course for job hunting and a portal for career coaching, tailored specifically to people like herself. She calls it Women’s Job Search Network.
“I realized there was no support, no central place for women to go when looking for work,” she said.
Starting at $49, with higher-tier packages for jobseekers with specific needs, women can enroll in a 12week course. It comes complete with a checklist of actionable things women can do to secure a job offer, as well as a remote staff of five career coaches who can answer members’ questions in real time.
Ms. Saunders hopes Women’s Job Search Network — a company based out of AlphaLab’s East Liberty accelerator — can help connect women with jobs in these sorts of firms.
And she has helped women find such careers already.
Ms. Saunders recalls collaborating with an accountant who was working for SAP, a global software company based in Germany.
“She was doing so much more than her job description, and she was a new mom,” Ms. Saunders explained. “And when she had to be home with the baby, she had to take a day off and then still call and run meetings.”
She advised that client to look for a different job. That woman eventually landed a position as a controller for Microsoft.
But without mentors or job coaches, women often undersell themselves, Ms. Saunders said.
“You probably heard this statistic, right, that [women] won’t apply unless we feel 100 percent qualified for sure,” she said. “So if we can help more women understand how job search works and help them feel more confident, then we can essentially bring more women into the workforce to close the gap.”
According to a September 2018 report by SmartAsset, a financial services company based in New York City, only about 25 percent of tech jobs in Pittsburgh are filled by women.
And Post-Gazette readers are wondering what the job market looks like in the tech field, at large.
Mark Stevens asked us: “How is the entry level IT market? I’ll be graduating in the summer from [Community College of Allegheny County] with a degree in cybersecurity.”
Another reader asked: “I’m a senior programmer analyst. Is there an expected increase in high tech jobs in the Pittsburgh region?”
Ms. Saunders says that every job search is different, but if your market is “hot” — and she notes that software engineers and programmers are in high demand — you’ll probably land a gig quickly.
Between 2016 and 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor projects that the national demand for software developer jobs will grow by 24 percent. That represents a shift from 1.3 million total developer jobs in 2016 to about 1.6 million.
The SmartAsset report noted that over the next four years Pittsburgh is expected to see an 18 percent increase in tech employment overall.
If your job is not in a fastgrowing market, though, you should have tempered expectations, Ms. Saunders said. Especially as a woman.
“Women would say to me, ‘Oh, will I be judged if I’m a mom?’ And the answer is yes, you absolutely will,’” she said.
“But on the flip side, everyone wants to hire for diversity. So I really want to say, ‘Look, I’m a recruiter, I’ve seen it all. I know what’s happening behind the scenes, and I really want to get that information to you.’”
Women invest money into the job search process far less often than men, Ms. Saunders said. And that can be make-or-break while on the career hunt.
“I think that job search is this really underestimated thing that can really transform a woman’s life,” she said. “Because if you can find the job that helps you earn more or have more flexibility or feel more rewarded every day when you go to work, that’s a success.”