Women in Financial Services
Make sure your ‘specialist’ is a specialist
Mark.Freed / 18 Feb 2020
Make sure your ‘specialist’ is a specialist
The Guardian recently reported on the lack of diversity in applicants for the top role at the Bank of England even though a specialist headhunting firm, Sapphire Partners, was paid £90,000 for the search. Apparently, 21 of the 23 candidates were men.
Sapphire Partners are a great firm with a great leader in Kate Grussing and, to be frank, I am not sure we could have done any better for this particular role.
However, the article got me thinking about the term “specialist firm”. As diversity is rising up the priority list, and with the barriers to entry particularly low, many firms or divisions of existing firms are cropping up claiming to be specialists.
For me, what makes a specialist firm is a unique level of access to the pool of talent they claim to specialise in. Without that, they are just a recruitment firm that may (or may not) work a bit harder to find diverse candidates.
At E2W, we are a specialist. All our candidates are female, because 100% of our community are female. Our differentiator, and the investment we continue to make, is that we have privileged access to a community of more than 10,000 women working in senior positions in corporate and investment banking and asset management.
These are women who we will support and represent through their careers. This means that when a firm retains us to support their talent acquisition programme, we can find female candidates for roles from Vice President to CEO, who will prove to be the person for the job, team and firm.
If you like to discuss E2W's recruitment services, please get in touch with me on mark.freed@e2w.co
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