Skills-first hiring to increase the percentage of women in sales, says LinkedIn

By: WE Staff | Thursday, 2 March 2023

Organizations can employ a skills-first hiring strategy to increase the proportion of women working in the sales function. This strategy not only makes sales teams and talent hiring pipelines more inclusive for women, giving them an equal opportunity to pursue a career in sales but also benefits the company as a whole.

South India emerges as the land of opportunities for Women in Sales:

While there remains a gender disparity in the sales industry, women are making significant progress in several cities. Most female sales professionals can be found in Tier 1 cities like Hyderabad (26%), Bengaluru (25%), and Chennai (22%), according to LinkedIn statistics. 

As opposed to this, sales businesses in Tier 2 cities like Ahmedabad (14%), Lucknow (13%), and Jaipur (13%), provide a tremendous opportunity to increase the number of women in their workforces.

IT and Retail sectors employ most saleswomen in India:

The data also demonstrates that although certain sectors of India Inc. are improving the diversity of their sales team, others still need to do so. With 27% and 23% of women working in sales jobs, respectively, the IT services and retail industries have been demonstrated to be the most inclusive for women. 

Contrarily, the manufacturing (14%), pharmaceutical (10%), and automotive (14%) sectors have the chance to be more proactive in their efforts to close the gender gap and build a more inclusive and varied sales team.

There is still a troubling gender imbalance in sales professions throughout the nation, but there is the promise on the horizon as businesses aggressively tackle unconscious prejudice by embracing skills-first recruiting, according to Ruchee Anand, Senior Director, Talent and Learning Solutions, LinkedIn India. 

This strategy gives more weight to a professional's skill and contribution than to their gender. Diversity is vital in all job roles, but it's especially crucial in sales because it fosters innovation, fosters a skills-first culture, and enhances creativity—all of which are essential for today's successful growth of businesses. 

Implementing this "skills first" philosophy would eventually establish the groundwork for increasing boardroom diversity, introducing a plethora of new viewpoints and concepts to India's corporate community.

3 in 5 women in sales come from non-sales roles; a skills-first hiring is key to inclusion:

Women who work in non-sales roles like marketing and business development make up the majority (62%) of those recruited in sales today. This pattern raises two crucial points. First of all, it emphasizes the importance of having the appropriate transferrable abilities, giving women greater chances to move into sales careers. 

Second, research shows that many firms are already working to address unconscious prejudice by putting less emphasis on qualifications, gender, or prior sales experience and more emphasis on hiring people whose talents are a good fit for the position.

Here are the top 10 skills that sales professionals in India are acquiring on LinkedIn Learning for those individuals who are eager to transition into sales-related professions:

Female Sales Professionals Male Sales Professionals

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel

Career Management Career Management

Project Management Business Analysis

Business Analysis Project Management

Public Speaking Public Speaking

Interpersonal Communication Leadership

Leadership Sales Effectiveness

Presentation Skills Presentation Skills

Time Management Time Management

Social Media Marketing Interpersonal Communication

About Women in Sales Data:

We looked at more than 3 million LinkedIn profiles from salespeople in India.

This piece of work, which was compiled using the anonymized and aggregated profile data of LinkedIn's 900+ million users worldwide, portrays the world as viewed through LinkedIn data. 

As a result, it is impacted by the platform's use by members, which might differ depending on professional, social, and regional culture as well as the availability and accessibility of the site as a whole.

We aim to deliver accurate data while protecting the privacy of our users while presenting these insights from LinkedIn's Economic Graph. 

As a result, all data adhere to stringent data quality requirements that prohibit releasing any information about identifiable persons and instead present aggregated information for the relevant time.

We acknowledge that some LinkedIn members identify in ways other than the standard gender conceptions of "man" and "woman" and that gender identity is not binary. 

If a member was not expressly self-identifying, we were able to determine their gender based on their first name or the pronouns they used on their LinkedIn accounts. The analysis did not include members whose gender could not be determined as either male or woman.