A retail client seeks to increase female representation in its executive suite from 25% to include four additional women. The case requires candidates to evaluate metrics, analyze organizational bottlenecks in the career funnel, calculate hiring needs through the promotion pipeline, and propose comprehensive strategies beyond simple external hiring.
Key Insights:
- The career progression funnel reveals major attrition and bottleneck issues at entry level (50% attrition) that limit female executive pipeline development
- Simple arithmetic shows that hiring 5,000 entry-level women to produce 4 additional female executives is impractical given the company only has 1,000 total employees and naturally hires ~250 FTEs annually
- Multi-pronged approach necessary: external executive hiring, retention improvements, promotion bias reduction, and cultural changes must work in concert to achieve diversity goals efficiently
- The case demonstrates that diversity initiatives require systems-level thinking about recruitment, retention, promotion, and culture rather than single-lever solutions