Help shortlist women for senior technology roles

We want to launch a new initiative, which is to seek women for senior technology positions. Our research shows that that the software technology industry is dominated by men 3 to 1. Critically, though, the senior management ratios are 6 to 1 against women. Baroness Lane Fox (co-founder of Lastminute.com) said on radio in April last year that only 2-3% of funding for new business goes to women. We want to redress the balance in all areas of software technology.

First, we are addressing the games industry and our new initiative is therefore called Games People. If it takes off in games, we will expand into other areas of software development, eg AI People.

Support will come from Datascope Recruitment which is a dominant force in talent acquisition for software technologies, particularly in the games industry. We are seeking money to finance full time work in Games People for four people – two from Datascope plus one part time HR specialist and one more marketing professional, yet to be recruited.

Activities

This new service will be a headhunting service to present clients with women shortlists as part of their own diversity efforts.

For the first three months (starting as soon as practicable), Games People will be staffed by a director, an HR specialist, a senior search consultant and a marketing professional.

During these three months, the main mission will be to establish and market the brand. We will also aim to able to gauge demand and time scales. It is not anticipated that revenue will be earned during the initial period.

After three months, it is envisaged that the brand will become established and we will know which assignments will be live and when and will plan accordingly.

Longer term plans include establishing a similar service in other areas such as Technology People, AI People, Startup People and Life Sciences People.

Support from Datascope

Datascope has pledged the following support free of charge for Games People:

The following resources will also be available but on a chargeable basis for incremental costs:

Fundraising

To get up and running the new company now wishes to raise £30k to £100k in two ways:

Season Tickets explained

Our aim is to find a small number of technology developers willing to pay a flat fee each in return for a three year “season ticket” entitling them to 15% for a head-hunting service (or 12.5% contingency recruitment fees) over a period of three years. Fees for the head-hunting service would normally be 30%, so a season ticket is good value for a company serious about promoting women to executive and managerial roles.

Unlocking the hidden value

The reason it is financially viable for Games People to make this offer is because we propose unlocking hidden value – ie cutting out the waste of resources suffered with the traditional multi-agency contingency recruitment model. If, for example, three agencies all compete to fill three vacancies, they will all cover a lot of the same ground. However, on average, they end up achieving success in just one assignment each. They will have wasted their time on the other two. If, however, each agency works on an exclusive basis for just one vacancy, this wastage will be eliminated. We have data which shows that our efficiency in exclusive assignments is 260% of that for multi-agency assignments.

We will split this saving two ways: