by Fronetics | Mar 6, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
Increasingly, women are pursuing careers in the supply chain. But they continue to face a salary gap — and the higher they climb, the wider it gets.
Highlights:
- Men in the supply chain industry earned an average of 29% more than women in 2017.
- Women perform at the same levels as men with the same job titles and expectations but may not be given the same opportunities to advance their careers.
It’s no secret that the supply chain and logistics sector is largely male-dominated. Over the past decade, women have increasingly pursued supply chain careers and assumed leadership roles. But according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, women in the industry continue to face a pay gap, and that pay gap widens as they rise through the ranks.
[bctt tweet=”According to a recent study by the Institute for Supply Management, which surveyed 3,000 supply chain professionals, men in the industry earned an average of 29% more than women in 2017.” username=”Fronetics”]
According to a recent study by the Institute for Supply Management, which surveyed 3,000 supply chain professionals, men in the industry earned an average of 29% more than women in 2017. Interestingly, in higher level positions, where there are still relatively few women, the pay gap was even wider — and it was wider still between workers with the highest levels of experience. Among those who had been in the supply chain for 15 to 19 years, the study found that men earned 48% more than women with identical experience levels.
Progress?
In her article, Wall Street Journal supply chain and logistics reporter Jennifer Smith points out that there has been some progress. “The gap has narrowed slightly since 2016,” she writes, “when the disparity in salaries was 31 percentage points.” But she goes on to detail the ways in which the industry lags behind when it comes to pay equity.
Smith quotes Cory Ann Holst, senior director of data and performance management for the global business services division of snack-food giant Mondelez International Inc. “Women haven’t made near the progress that the industry wants us to think we have,” says Holst. “We all know there is a glass ceiling.”
Echoing this sobering reality-check, a compensation survey by supply chain organization APICS found an overall pay disparity, albeit smaller, with women earning an average of 16% less than their male counterparts. Abe Eshkenazi, chief executive of APICS, told Smith that “women perform at the same levels as men with the same job titles and expectations but may not be given the same opportunities to advance their careers.”
Why the gap?
While the pay disparity in the supply chain is generally in-line with that of the broader U.S. labor force, it’s still striking. So, what causes the pay gap to persist? And why does it go from a gap to a gulf at higher-level positions and greater experience levels? “Experts say a range of factors play into the gender pay gap,” writes Smith, “including discrimination and different career choices. White-collar jobs often reward people who work long hours or change positions frequently, for instance, steps some women with families may be less likely to take.”
Smith points to the career trajectory of Sana Raheem, now head of operations at the Farmer’s Dog, a subscription-based healthy pet food company in New York City. Raheem worked her way up in logistics at Kraft Heinz Co and was a senior manager of logistics and supply chain at Mondelez International. It wasn’t an easy road. “Getting there meant taking jobs in remote manufacturing facilities with a mostly-male labor force and few female role models,” writes Smith.
“I had many moments early in my career where I was told to slow down, be less aggressive, and pay my dues,” said Raheem. “I saw a lot of women around me accept similar feedback and spend years making less than their male counterparts.”
According to Robert Handfield, professor of supply chain management and executive director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management, “the industry is increasingly well suited for women. It involves identifying opportunities, thinking strategically, and working collaboratively.”
By every measure, the supply chain needs more women at all levels. It’s time to compensate them fairly.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Sep 26, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain, Talent
In today’s job market, candidates are in such high demand, companies are posting positions with little or no experience requirements.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
On the Argentus blog, we’ve spent the past few months charting the strong job market and its effects on hiring. My, how things have changed. A few short years ago, publications were writing about how employers weren’t bothering to hire for their open positions. Now, candidates are in such high demand, companies are more and more doing something that would be considered radical in the previous economy: posting positions with no experience requirements.
[bctt tweet=”Companies like Microsoft, Bank of America and Github, are in particular relaxing education requirements and looking at candidates who don’t have degrees for positions that would have required a degree during the recession.” username=”Fronetics”]
Kelsey Gee at the Wall Street Journal gave some frontline reporting about the talent picture in the U.S. economy, which is beginning to see strong wage growth follow historically low unemployment rates. She charts how more companies are becoming flexible in their hiring process, to the point of doing away with experience requirements for some positions completely. We’ve written before to argue that companies should hire people for their potential – especially junior employees – and in this market it seems that more companies are putting this into practice. Companies like Microsoft, Bank of America and Github, are in particular relaxing education requirements and looking at candidates who don’t have degrees for positions that would have required a degree during the recession.
Alicia Modestino, an economist at Northeastern University, has argued that in times of recession companies tend to raise job requirements, like in 2008. In times of expansion – like we’re seeing now – companies become more flexible in their requirements to compete for talent, a practice Modestino calls “Down-skilling.”
At first, it might be easy to assume that companies are only doing this for transactional or administrative positions, but the Wall Street Journal interviewed the President of SCM talent group – a Supply Chain Recruitment firm in the U.S. – who said that companies are re-evaluating their requirements for Supply Chain Managers and other strategic positions. He said that his recruitment firm has been turning away clients who want to fish for underpaid or unaware applicants instead of bolstering education, experience and compensation levels in order to compete.
At Argentus, we’re working in the same vertical in Canada. Candidates in our market are in such high demand that we’ve been doing the same.
Anecdotally, we’ve seen a small uptick in roles for high-potential entry level grads in Supply Chain Management – (though still not as many as we’d like to see, with the high number of new grads that come to us!) Companies are becoming slightly more willing to relax requirements on the junior end to hire quickly; in a hiring market as strong as this one, “entry level” can actually mean entry level instead of, paradoxically, requiring at least 3 years of experience. But companies should be more flexible, at least if they want to actually hire instead of kicking tires.
In strong job markets, companies can’t afford to hire the same way they did during a recession. More employees in Procurement and Supply Chain are waking up to their own value, and the strong job market is compounding an already-considerable talent crunch. Hiring managers can’t afford to practice magical thinking in their hiring in this economy – the type of thinking that says, “if we post it, they will come,” or that treats employees like they have no leverage in the process.
The WSJ outlined three options that companies have to keep down hiring costs and secure talent in this market:
- Offer more money up front
- Retrain current staff to upskill them for changing requirements, or:
- Become more flexible in their job requirements.
All three are valuable options, but for some reason the third one has always been a bit of a third rail. Hiring is a risk, and companies don’t want to hire someone who can’t do the job. But just because someone hasn’t done the exact same thing before, or just because they don’t have a degree, or just because they’ve done it before, but in another country, doesn’t mean they can’t do it.
There will always be lots of positions with considerable requirements that can’t be flexed away: a Director of Vendor management who’s conducting a business transformation obviously needs to have done that in the past. A Senior Manager tasked with setting up a totally new Supply Chain needs the deep base of knowledge and connections that certain experience provides. The necessity of strong experience and education requirements makes sense for some positions.
But for a Supply Chain Analyst, or a Buyer role, companies are well-served to relax hard-and-fast requirements and treat applicants on a case by case basis. Assess skills, assess technical and analytical capability, without requiring that candidates fit a specific experiential profile.
In our interviews with senior Supply Chain and Procurement leadership, one thing we hear again and again is that strong business acumen and soft skills – in other words, potential – is more important for junior employees than specific education requirements. So if the Wall Street Journal report is accurate, and more companies are waking up to this line of thinking, you know what?
Bring it on.
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by Fronetics | Jun 28, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in social media news June 2018: Instagram released ranking criteria for its algorithm, Apple expands advertising businesses with a new network for apps, and Facebook is cracking down on new requirements for custom target audiences.
Summer is in full swing, and so are the most popular social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and even Apple are rolling out updates to make their platforms more user- and, more importantly, business-friendly. After a rocky spring with the Facebook scandal, social media apps are working overtime to make their relationships with businesses more transparent and overall user experiences more personalized.
[bctt tweet=”After a rocky spring with the Facebook scandal, social media apps are working overtime to make their relationships with businesses more transparent and overall user experiences more personalized.” username=”Fronetics”]
With transparency on the forefront, this month’s social media news is heavy with social media apps making updates that increase user privacy and subsequently, increase user engagement. Here’s what’s happening with your favorite platforms this month.
Here’s your social media news for June 2018.
Facebook enforces new requirements for custom target audiences
Facebook has released new requirements for advertisers creating custom audiences from user files. Advertisers will now have to identify where their audience’s information was obtained when they create new customer files. “Starting July 2, we will require advertisers to specify the origin of the audience’s information when a business uploads a new audience. When uploading a customer file, advertisers will need to indicate whether the information was collected directly from people, provided by partners, or a combination of the two,” writes Facebook. These new updates will help advertisers provide more transparency for users and increase advertising efficiency.
Google increases transparency over Google Ads
Google rolled out new settings to its ad features, making it clearer to users how Google Ads are customized specifically to them. Google is also sharing why users see certain ads by introducing “Why this ad?”, a new link that appears on ads. “The new Ad Settings and updates to Why this ad? provide you with more transparency and control over your Google ad experience than ever before. With these improvements, you can browse the web confidently knowing that you have the information and control to make Google work better for you.”
Instagram announces criteria for its algorithm
Instagram revealed the three most important factors that feed into its algorithm to determine which posts appear in a user’s feed. According to TechCrunch these factors include: interest, recency, and relationship. After ditching its ranking system in 2016 for an advanced algorithm, Instagram now says the new system has contributed to the platform’s soaring popularity, allowing users to see 90% of their friends’ posts.
Apple expands advertising business with new network for apps
Apple is looking to grow its advertising business by working with social media apps to distribute ads across their collective platforms. “Apple would share revenue with the apps displaying the ads, with the split varying from app to app,” MarketWatch shares on its website. Apple is hoping these partnerships will increase its advertising business by selling promotional ads in its App Store.
Facebook is expanding ads to include Marketplace
Facebook’s Marketplace is a part of Facebook that allows users to buy and sell products and recent updates allowed businesses to get in on the action. Facebook’s newest update allows businesses to purchase product ads that will appear in the Marketplace along with similar products and services. The ads have been tested among specific brands in the past few months and the results show increased purchases and year-over-year returns on ad spending. “Thread Wallets, an accessories company, generated more than 300 purchases while increasing its year-over-year return on ad spend by 41% after adding Marketplace as a placement for its conversions campaigns,” writes Facebook on its business site. In the coming weeks, advertisers targeting audiences in the U.S. and Canada can start using Marketplace ads.
Instagram introduces long-form video
Until now, all Instagram videos were limited to one minute, and Stories were limited to 15 seconds. But the Wall Street Journal reports that Instagram is looking to expand into long-form video, up to one hour in length. Though this hasn’t been confirmed by Instagram or Facebook, the WSJ writes the expansion will initially only be available in vertical video, meaning a video shot by a phone camera or on a computer, but eventually the app could include production videos and even programming.
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