Corporate India's big push for diversity: Companies intensify efforts to recruit women from entry level

As corporate India makes a stronger business case to put diversity front and centre, companies including RPG Group, Deloitte, Tata Steel, Amazon and Zinnov are accelerating efforts to drive up the number of women right from the entry level.

Measures being taken by organisations include boosting diversity hiring at the campus level; incentivising recruitment agencies to provide high-potential female candidates; networking platforms to connect potential women hires to organisational leaders; building communities around industry sectors and exploring innovative talent acquisition models like hire-train-deploy or train-hire-deploy frameworks.

“The more the fresher talent; the stronger is the pipeline of women for the future as we try to shore up diversity across levels,” said Supratik Bhattacharyya, chief talent officer, RPG Group. “It’s easier to nurture and retain talent from entry levels than attracting them from outside later.”

Campus hiring is one of the primary ways to build a fresher pipeline at the conglomerate, which ensures that around 40% of the B-school intake are diversity hires. The focus overall is on a flexible work environment; equal pay policies, diverse interview panels and regular reviews to map progress in terms of gender diversity.

“The agenda is being driven from the top. At every leadership committee meeting, there is a discussion on how we can build diversity,” said Bhattacharyya.
Campus hiring is also high on Deloitte’s agenda and its talent acquisition strategy prioritises recruiting from women's colleges.

“This targeted approach directly contributes to a more balanced gender representation at the entry-level,” said Saraswathi Kasturirangan, chief happiness officer, Deloitte India. The company has 40% women at the entry-level, which it aims to scale up to 50%.

“When engaging recruitment agencies, our fee structure incentivizes the submission of high-calibre female candidates. This performance-based compensation system ensures alignment with our diversity goals,” she added.

At Tata Steel, more than 40-45% of entry-level hires are women and the company is continuously working towards achieving 20% diverse workforce by 2025.

The steel maker has introduced various initiatives to attract more women through targeted recruitment efforts and outreach programmes. These include Women of Mettle, a scholarship programme for women engineering students; focused interventions like Women@Mines, and Tejaswini 2.0 through which technical training is provided to unskilled women workers to enable them to work in core jobs at mines.

Driving up numbers; creating a support system

Madhura DasGupta Sinha, CEO of Aspire For Her (AFH), an organisation that works with leading companies to motivate women to enter and stay in the workforce, says hiring diverse talent at the entry level is crucial to changing the diversity equation of the country as these professionals grow up to be tomorrow’s leaders.

“They help build and transform male-dominated culture constructs, bringing in diverse perspectives,” she said.

Organisations acknowledge that while recent years have seen changes, there is still a lot of work to be done.

At management consulting firm Zinnov, for instance, the aim is to achieve 50% gender diversity by 2030, up from current 40% levels.

“We've achieved a strong gender balance at the entry level and aim to sustain this progress,” said Shweta Rani, chief people & culture officer, Zinnov. “Our focus now is on retaining women in consulting during years 1-2, a critical period where attrition can occur.”

Entry-level candidates often find the workloads in the consulting space to be highly rigorous and challenging, prompting Zinnov to initiate an apprenticeship model, helping them navigate these challenges with the guidance of seasoned mentors.

“Women in our company impact not just the topline and bottomline of our business but serve as culture keepers and community builders. This is why we will continue to invest in women,” Rani added.

Deepti Varma, VP, HR/People eXperience and Technology, Amazon Stores India, Japan, and Emerging Markets, said that to reduce the gap in women's representation in tech roles in the industry, it focuses on increasing the volume of industry-ready early career women tech talent with AmazonWoW, a networking platform for all women engineering students in India that connects them to Amazon leaders, recruiters, and the broader Amazon community, and AmazeWIT, which is a networking platform for women to grow talent collectively.