Intel doubles recruitment bonus for female employees

Life at an Israeli tech company is hectic – and often doesn’t leave much time for a social life. But for men who work at Intel, having a wife or girlfriend can pay off big. As part of its commitment to increase the number of women in Israeli high-tech – and in Intel – the company is doubling the bonus it usually hands out to those who bring in new recruits, if that recruit is a female.

In personnel-challenged Israel, recruitment bonuses are an important tool for large companies like Intel to attract top talent. For skilled engineers and programmers – who are in short supply in Israel – multinationals competing to hire them are willing to pay top salaries and bonuses.

But in the Start-Up Nation, salaries and benefits don’t always do the job. While many prefer to work at companies like Intel, Microsoft, and other multinationals – with their ostensibly greater job security and better class of benefits – the siren song of start-ups is constantly calling, promising, in lieu of salary and vacation days, stock options that could turn into a fortune.

To keep talented personnel from going the start-up route – and to keep them out of the hands of larger tech rivals – companies rely on the relationships their workers have with friends who are looking for a job. As an incentive for the workers to push their friends to join them at their firm, companies give out cash bonuses, plane tickets, hotel reservations, and other goodies.

If the competition is stiff for male workers, who constitute some 80% of the tech staff in Israel, the competition for females is even greater. To its credit, said Intel Israel CEO Maxine Fassberg, Intel has gone out of its way to recruit females.

“We need more good workers, and especially more good female workers,” said Fassberg. “The ability of a firm to grow is based on its ability to diversify, and even though we have done a lot to diversify our workforce, we need to do more.”

Currently, Intel boasts an overall female staff of about 21%. An analysis of the numbers shows that 30% of the company’s management is female, as are 40% of the staff at Intel’s Kiryat Gat fabrication plant.

But Fassberg wants more women – and diversifying is not just an Intel Israel project, but an effort Intel is undertaking at all its facilities. To accomplish that, the company has set aside $300 million to hire more women and minorities as part of its Diversity in Technology initiative, “to foster hiring and inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities at Intel, and to fund programs to support a more positive representation of women and underrepresented minorities in technology and gaming,” according to the company.

With that kind of money at its disposal, Intel can afford to be generous with workers who help advance its agenda. Thus it is offering workers double the money in recruitment benefits that it pays out, which were already among the highest at Israeli tech firms.

“We believe that diversity in employment is an important engine for creativity,” said Intel vice president for human resources Yehudit Yamplosky. “As a global firm, we see diversity as an important value in the company. We thrive on being different, and we believe that being different is a key to the growth of the company.”