The gender pay gap in UK startups & scale-ups is 25%, way above the national average of 15%. In the past, it was not uncommon that men and women would be paid different salaries despite holding the same role. Now the gender pay gap is driven by two main drivers.
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Not enough women in leadership positions
The first of these drivers is a skew in seniority levels; men tend to be in more senior positions than women. In a salary and benchmarking dataset provided by our partner business Payspective, we see that across UK start-ups and scale-ups, the gender distribution across all employees is nearly equal (48% women vs. 52% men). However, once we look at the gender distribution in leadership positions (Director and C-level), the representation of women drops down to 33%.
When only looking at the very top (Founders and C-level), the representation of women drops further down to 19%. A key driver for this is that C-level positions within start-ups are commonly taken up by the founding team, and 80% of start-ups in the UK are founded by men.
A positive trend in the start-up space that’s currently unfolding is that the number of female founders is on the rise, having doubled over the last decade – while 21% of funded UK startups had female founders in 2018, this figure was only 11% in 2011.
Not enough women in tech roles
The second primary driver of the gender pay gap is a skew in terms of role by function that men and women work in, with men more frequently holding highly-paid technical roles such as engineering, software development and data science positions.
This driver holds even more weight in the start-up economy than the wider UK market as a whole as start-ups tend to have a higher proportion of technical roles than traditional businesses and so the gender skew within these roles has a larger impact on the gender pay gap.
What startups and scale-ups can do
So what can you do to close their gender pay gap? There are 4 main levers:
(1) Create transparency
Companies with less than 250 employees aren’t required to report their gender pay gap in the UK, but internal transparency around gender and pay within your business is a positive step to take nonetheless. It’s critical to understand how your businesses pay gap compares to similar companies and what the drivers of this gap are.
Transparency also helps in the recruitment process – including a salary range in job advertisements is not just a good practice in equal recruitment but also increases the number of applications you can expect.
(2) Support equitable progression of men and women into senior roles
Ensure that your culture and processes support women being hired or progressed into senior roles. For instance, think about whether a senior role you’re hiring for could be part-time. Flexibility to work from home and flexibility around working hours help ensure that work commitments can be combined with other duties, and allows candidates from a wider background to apply and be considered.
(3) Hire women into tech roles
Hiring women into tech roles is a challenge that many companies struggle with – and it’s an especially important one for the tech-dominated startup and scaleup scene. What can you do?
Make a conscious effort to recruit female tech talent. Go to women in tech events, focus on diversity and inclusivity on your blog and recruitment pages, and highlight success stories of women in tech roles within your organisation. The effort you put into hiring women into tech roles early on will pay off tenfold in the long run – hiring your 10th woman into a 20 person developer team will prove much easier than hiring your 1st woman into a 20 person developer team.
(4) Ensure you have the right processes for recruiting, salary negotiations and pay rises
Finally, make sure there are no structural or cultural issues with pay differences in your organisation. Men tend to be more comfortable asking for a pay rise than women so you’ll have to make sure that you have robust processes around salary reviews and pay raises in place (don’t just give pay raises to the people who ask the loudest).
Men also have a tendency to apply for a job even if they’re not a perfect fit with the requirements whereas women tend to only send off that application if they’re sure the job is a great fit and they meet all the expectations listed in a job description. So while a man who wants a part-time job may simply apply to a full-time position and try to negotiate it down to 80%, a woman would be less likely to do so. If there’s a potential for a role to be part-time – make sure to include it on the job spec.
Working for a UK startup or scaleup and looking to hire? Get in touch!
Do you have overburdened teams spread across too many projects? Do you see ad-hoc and internal work piling up and frustrated clients who wanted something yesterday? On the flip-side, perhaps you have too many people on the bench? Or are your team’s utilisation rates are low?
If either of these scenarios sounds familiar then you might want to think about capacity planning. In this article, we’ll help you find out whether everyone on your team is near a saturation point, and if you need to look further into integrating some tools and software to help your organisation build some capacity for team members. We also share some of our favourite tools to help your company and your team assess your hiring needs in real-time.
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Assessing the situation
Before investing in a new tool, you need to draw a clear picture of your current situation. This will help you assess your needs and that of your team. Take some time to see whether you can easily answer the key questions below, if you can’t then you will definitely need to look further into capacity planning tools.
Do you have the bandwidth to take on new projects?
What skills/ capabilities do you need to deliver – and what is missing from your current resource pool?
Is every resource assigned to the right kind of work?
Can existing resources be upskilled in these areas, or do you need to hire new people?
What are capacity planning tools?
Capacity planning software can help you here. There are various tools on the market that help companies evaluate their resource capacity needs to keep up with varying levels of supply & demand in the market – critical in a world getting used to various levels of lockdown.
This Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution is specially built for Google Workspace, which allows all your teams to be connected in one place. It works as an integration and so is easy to put in place within an organisation as it works like any other everyday tool.
Their resource management tool is especially useful for our concerns as you can track people’s availability and skills and assign tasks to the relevant team members in just a couple of clicks. All thanks to intelligent resource suggestions and automatic skill matching in your required time frame. This is as useful for next week’s tasks as for long-term forecasts as you can view people’s availability months in advance.
Vogsy also allows you to create placeholders for future hires so you know what skills to hire and for how long. It’s a valuable resource if you use a lot of freelancers and contractors so that you can plan their projects as efficiently as possible.
This all-in-one app allows you to integrate all your tools into one place for more effective project management. It helps employees track their time worked on projects and update progress in real-time.
This polyvalent tool helps you in every single aspect of your business, from HR to IT with helpful employee performance tracking and Agile workflow dashboards.
On their website, you can find a variety of examples of how you can use their tools, whether you lead a Sales team or are scaling your Startup. Especially in the latter case, this is an essential tool to have your team communicate effectively cross-functionally, even when working remotely while allowing the leadership to keep track of everyone’s work.
This minimalistic software has dedicated tools to support professional services, creative industries, marketers and product specialists. It allows you to ensure perfect collaboration with all teams within your organisation and is easily customisable for early adoption from everyone.
You can take a thorough look at how long projects take from ideation to completion, and react accordingly. Equally important, you can quickly visualise everyone’s availability and efforts. You can also assign tasks to the right people thanks to precise activity tracking and the possibility for employees to request time off on the platform, for instance.
This software will make your life easier by providing your team and you with automatic workflows, and fully customisable dashboards and charts. That way, everyone can have crystal-clear visibility of team-wide efforts and spot capacity gaps in an instant.
Conclusion
With a clear picture in mind and the precious help of any of the tools above, you’ll be able to plan any hiring needs well ahead of time. Team members won’t need to run over their capacity for extended periods of time and new joiners will have time to their marks to understand your business. These tools are precious help when it comes to looking after your employees’ wellbeing and running your business as efficiently as possible.
Did you find out that you need new hires? Movemeon can help you with hiring high-calibre talent from top-tier strategy and management firms across a diverse range of functional and sector expertise. We specialise in partnering with organisations of all nature, from FTSE100 and PE/VC funds to early-stage startups, across a range of industries. We’re also global, with offices serving the UK, DACH, France and APAC. Click below to get in touch with us now to learn more about our offering and platform.
A signal of exciting and busy times for any business is developing large-scale projects and/or expanding the current team. Naturally, this is when smart, well-thought-out and strategic decision-making is crucial in supporting this change.
Identifying the gaps in your Hiring Plan centres more than ever not just on securing the right skills, but also finding a suitable fit for the team, the firm, and the role/project. This leaves you with two options – stability of a permanent employee or alternatively, a specialised and flexible interim consultant.
Recognising which type of employment type is the best fit could be the difference between success and failure.
In a market where in-demand candidates are not in the market for long, it’s critical to avoid missing out on the best talent for the role, project, or need. Summarised below is a helpful guide to understand the core differences between permanent and interim consultancy engagements, and how firms make the most of each.
Cost Effectiveness; the flexibility that an interim consultant enables you is excellent in relation to scaling up or down depending on the nature of your project and its deliverables. Historically, the route has been to engage with consultancy firms who often provide cumbersome and rigid frameworks that don’t allow for targeted solution-based services. It’s more often a broad stroke type of application to tackle defined challenges of the company. This translates into expensive and costly engagements with outsourced consulting firms that don’t always result in your desired outcome. When considering an interim consultant, you secure expertise you would otherwise receive from a firm but at a far more affordable price.
Access to specialist skills and backgrounds; this is particularly key as businesses undertake more project-based work, for example, leading value creation initiatives for portfolio company’s sales function. Tapping into the interim market allows companies to bring in specific skills that aren’t available in-house for a specific duration.
Rapid and quick accessibility; the nature of interim hiring means that you have immediate and transient workforce. The time sensitive and business critical nature of a project you’re seeking a new hire for can be quickly addressed given their short notice periods and short project durations these interim hires commonly work on. In summary, if you’re seeking an immediate, cost efficient and specific skill-set then an interim consultant will be best placed to support you.
Permanent Hiring
Those working as permanent employees are ones that occupy a full-time position within the organisation. These hires are long-term investments and form the building blocks of success for an organisation.
Why do firms hire permanent employees:
Stability: when organisations begin to build a level of predictable growth, permanent employees contribute to the scalability and in turn, stability of the organisation. Stepping in to form more embedded processes, functions and consistency across all domains of the business.
Building Culture: those entering on a full-time basis add to the company culture as interim consultants simply won’t. This is what many consider to be the social investments that are made when building permanent teams – they’re crucial decisions and form a major part of your planning on hiring and what you’re seeking to build and deliver against.
Requirements Understanding: every role in an organisation has its own deliverable and associated expectations. Those operating on a permanent basis will be better placed in knowing their role and expectations attached to the role. This compliments the consideration of Stability and how the permanent employee will be committed to the meeting of these expectations that cover internal processes, mission and vision of the organisation and target for the teams.
What To Do From Here:
Often the best and most suitable approach to adopt is one that combines both forms of workforces into your organisation. This enables a dynamic mix of permanent and specialist interim consultants to tackle all your business needs and objectives. This approach and model can be utilised by all sizes and taking a holistic approach to your hiring plans is far more beneficial to the business.
From the above and now knowing the core differences between interim consultants and permanent hiring and how each plays a role in your workforce planning, take the time to review your long-term hiring plans and decide which perhaps is the right fit for you.
At Movemeon we specialise in partnering with organisations in order to facilitate and introduce highly-skilled professionals across a diverse range of functional and sector expertise. Complete the Enquiry Form below to submit and share your potential job vacancy with us to learn more about whether we can assist further. Alternatively, contact us directly to learn more about our offering and platform.
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