Mom, the next corporate titan

Hungry for talent, big companies have started to pursue women who have dropped out of the workforce. How this could redefine the whole notion of a career.
The Boston Globe
By Drake Bennett, Globe Staff September 2, 2007

ROBIN GUGICK MAYER had the qualifications, but couldn't find the job she wanted. She had been a corporate bond analyst at Prudential Securities for 10 years, then had worked at a smaller firm for five more. But Mayer had stopped working in January 2005 when her third child was born, and when she wanted back in, the headhunters she spoke to were reluctant : A woman who takes time off is a tough sell.
Mayer managed to get a handful of interviews using her own connections, but even companies that were interested weren't willing to allow her to work from home one day a week to be with her kids.
``It was hard, very hard," she recalls. ``I didn't know anyone in my area of specialty who had taken time off and come back."
In March of this year she was part of the inaugural class of a new program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, designed to recruit and retrain women like her. Over three days, Mayer and her classmates took classes on finance, strategic communication, marketing theory, and decision-making. They met in small groups with career coaches. Each was assigned a mentor at the investment bank UBS, the program's sponsor, and each spent a day with recruiters at the bank's New York City headquarters. And afterward, Mayer was one of three women hired to work there - except for Fridays, when she works from home.
The collaboration between UBS and Wharton is part of a burgeoning movement among some of the nation's top banks, accounting firms, and management consultancies to recruit talent in a new way. Instead of chasing the recent graduates of top business schools, or raiding the competition, the idea is to woo highly skilled women who have left the workforce, usually to have children.
In just the past few years, spurred largely by a tight market for white-collar labor, firms such as the investment banks Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs have launched targeted recruiting programs. A new class of headhunters and human resources consultants has emerged to help smaller companies do the same. Other companies, including the accounting firm Ernst and Young and management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, have programs that allow women taking time off to keep in touch with the firm and even do occasional work until they're ready to return. Elite business schools like Dartmouth's Tuck School and the Harvard Business School have programs similar to Wharton's, and the how-tos of finding and hiring women coming off a career break - women who are ``onramping," in the current human-resources parlance - are hot topics in business school classrooms.
So far, these efforts are still new, and small: Wharton's Career Comeback program had 60 graduates this fall, and Lehman Brothers, a company with 28,000 employees, has hired 31 women and three men through its Encore program. Nonetheless, the idea of creating a systematic recruiting process for women looking to get back into the workforce, rather than something more ad hoc - or rather than ignoring them completely - marks an important shift. And the fact that the companies instituting these programs are hard-charging financial services firms with reputations for making few concessions to their employees' lifestyles could be a sign, some believe, of much broader changes to come in the corporate world.

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