Canadian HR Reporter

N E W S 10 www.hrreporter.com Female CHROs on the rise while internal recruitment drops Women continue to enjoy greater representation in the top HR job, finds John Dujay. But internal recruitment is down, as employers look externally for potential candidates But because of post-secondar y school populations, the level of women occupying C-suite jobs will rise in the years to come, he says. "As we all know, in the last 10, 15 years, a lot of those females have a far greater number of postgraduate degrees than men have, which has given them the ability to now be at the table to have a choice of getting the job. Before, they didn't have the degree to complement that." External recruitment rises The report also found fewer internal candidates are replacing the departing executives: 53 per cent of new CHROs were hired internally, which continues a downward trend from past reports (61 per cent in 2018 and 70 per cent in 2017). optimal female representation and executive teams across these Fortune 200 companies." Welcome change in ranks For one CHRO in British Columbia, the numbers represent a welcome change. "What resonated for me is probably about five or six years ago, I remember going to a CHRO event. And literally I walked in and it was all men in suits. My first thought was 'Where did all the women go?'" says Leslie Mitton, CHRO at the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) in Vancouver "HR is primarily female. But, all of a sudden, when you get up to senior roles, it was all men." More recently, she's seen a change. "I've seen the visible shift year after year going back to the same event and now you're starting to see some of those CHROs retire and I think now there's a different generation of CHRO and it's visible, the difference in the number of females going into those roles." Some biases remain in some organizations' hiring practices, according to one Toronto recruiter. "There are certainly some clients — whether they say it or whether they look at you [a certain way] — that would prefer a woman over a man in that role when push comes to shove. Whether they're right or wrong, it just happens to be and it is natural that more women, generally speaking, have always tended to have softer, more interpersonal skills when it comes to people," says Randy Quarin, a senior partner at IQ Partners. However, the pathway for a first-time CHRO role still predominantly flows through internal succession, finds the Talent Strategy Group, as 85 per cent of first-time CHROs come to the role through internal succession. And, for these successors, tenure within their organization is still important: Two-thirds of internal successors had 15 or more years of tenure within their company before their promotion to the top role. "We've likely made progress, perhaps in CEO roles, but as we're looking at our own ability to succession plan, for whatever reason, we're seeing that decline in that internal CHRO succession and a desire or aspiration, perhaps, to go more externally within that space," says Upchurch. "I would hope that we are looking internally to ourselves and saying, 'How are we developing our own folks in the HR space and are we setting up people one level or two levels down in the organization to be successful?'" This trend is not new, says Quarin. "That's what I've seen before, where you've got a depth of people with experience that you can look at and go, 'OK, we've got to pick from three of them here because they've all been INTERNAL RECRUITMENT DECLINES "You have to have people who are curious and are interested in the business, not just the business of HR." Leslie Mitton, ICBC 53% Number of new CHROs hired internally in 2019 61% Number of new CHROs hired internally in 2018 70% Number of new CHROs hired internally in 2018 83% Number of new CHROs with HR experience WHILE men easily make up the m a j o r i t y o f e x e c u t i v e positions in the corporate world, a recent report finds more women are taking up the role of CHRO at Fortune 200 companies. Seventy-eight per cent of new CHROs in 2019 were women, found the Talent Strategy Group. That's up from 65 per cent in 2018 and 67 per cent in 2017. And from 2018 to 2019, female representation increased by 12 per cent, to 67.3 per cent from 60 per cent overall. "The CHRO role continues to be what I would call a beacon for female representation on executive teams: The majority of the CHROs are female," says Zac Upchurch, COO at the Talent Strategy Group in New York and author of the study. " The pronouncement of female representation is a really fantastic one, especially in light of perhaps less-than- Source: Talent Strategy Group

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