Three or four times a year, a team from IBM hops from city to city on a recruitment binge with a difference – they screen and select only women employees. If there are talented women out there, IBM wants them in its fold. "We keep trying to find new ways of hiring women," says Kalpana Veeraraghavan, diversity manager for India and South Asia at IBM. "This is not just about filling a talent crunch. There is a strong correlation between success in the marketplace and having a diverse workforce." Conservative estimates suggest IBM has added well over 2,000 women in two years. Company officials declined to reveal absolute numbers, but spoke only percentages — proportion of female workers has increased from 24% of workforce to 26%.
India Inc wants more women on its rolls, not because it's a fashionable, but because it makes business sense. Diversity hiring intent among leading companies has gone up by almost 500% since last year, according to a recent study by the Chennai-based FLEXI Careers India, which sources only women executives. In 2010, FLEXI Careers was placing women in 88 positions; this year it's gone up to 388. Last year, the annual salaries for these positions totalled up to Rs 2.9 crore; it is Rs 19.4 crore this year. "This is roughly the amount that a small segment of India Inc has budgeted to spend on the hiring of women via just one avenue – us" says FLEXI Careers' founder-director Saundarya Rajesh. A host of companies, like HUL, Godrej Industries, Pepsico, Genpact, Kraft, P&G, Deutsche Bank and others, have all stepped-up gender diversity hiring recently. Executive search firms say companies are not only going all out to bring in more women, they are also engaging with – and trying to retain — them in new, more vigorous ways.