Closing gender gap in workforce with employee referrals

The technology industry does face a gender gap in the work force. The gap between male to female employees among developers is even higher. As a software company, rtCamp is also reflecting on the gender gap its own workforce represents.

Issues with correcting the gender gap in a work force

Some might ask how a start-up could address gender gap in a workforce. After all there are limited resources to pour into HR and also sometimes limited infrastructure. We also do not hire 3rd party HR agencies to get us new employees. So how does a company address and encourage more women to join it’s workforce? More importantly how does rtCamp go about addressing this issue?

Why is rtCamp interested in correcting the gender gap?

It is good karma! Discrimination and stereotyping of women as non-developers, non-techies has influenced hiring practices over the years across the industry but more worryingly have also influenced vocational choices made by women. This culture needs to be changed and challenged. That is still a long journey of social change. We think it is important to be part of this change in small yet actionable ways. rtCamp is not exactly a software giant with massive resources but we do have an established business model, we have been around for 5 years now and have over 40 employees now. So it was time to pour in some more thought and actions into social responsibilities of the company.

Doubling the Employee Referral on female candidates

rtCamp has never bothered about degrees or gender of an job applicant. But the overwhelming number of people who apply to work with us are male, hence that also reflects in our workforce. Currently we have decided to add more people to our workforce and even have introduce the option of working remotely.

While hiring more people, we wanted to actively encourage more women to apply to work with rtCamp. We have a employee referral program to help us recruit more people. Currently we are doubling the referral amount for successful female employee who is hired through the referral program. The referral bonus is as follows:

1. 10000 INR for each successful referral (male candidate).
2. 20000 INR for each successful referral (female candidate).

Do read up more on our employee referral program for more details. We would love to hear more innovative ideas on how to close gender gaps in a workforce. Do drop in them your comments.