Anita Borg Institute Releases New Report on Hiring Practices to Help Companies Compete in the Global War for Technical Talent – MarketWatch

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology today released a new report that outlines four key areas where companies should focus their recruitment efforts to increase access to a range of technical talent available in a highly competitive environment. Solutions to Recruit Technical Women is the first in a series of reports offering solutions companies can employ to improve the recruitment, retention, and advancement of technical women.

When it comes to technical talent, industry recruitment and hiring practices have become highly complex over the past decades as the labor market for scientists and engineers has shifted from individual national economies to a truly global labor market. Multinational companies face significant challenges and competition to fill technical positions, and renewed talk of a “global war for tech talent” emerged shortly after the recent global economic downturn.

The Anita Borg Institute report points out that for both large and small organizations who invest in a recruiting infrastructure as well as outsourced recruiters and head hunters, there continue to be consistent blind spots in recruiting and hiring practices that prevent companies from tapping into the wide spectrum of technical talent available — men, women or underrepresented minorities.

Extensive organizational research indicates that these blind spots are concentrated in four areas that, if ignored, can negatively impact equity, productivity and innovation:

— Concentrating recruitment at a small number of sites;

— Narrow recruitment criteria;

— Hiring processes that are implicitly biased; and

— Lack of organizational infrastructure to support recruitment and

hiring efforts that yield high returns to both talent and diversity…

via Anita Borg Institute Releases New Report on Hiring Practices to Help Companies Compete in the Global War for Technical Talent – MarketWatch.