Women@Work has generated top-quality candidates for positions that range from $50,000 to $1 million in compensation. Positions range from administrative to executive levels in all industries. Our administrative candidate pool is atypical—including many current professionals who are looking to get off the fast track and many returning professionals who are interested in rebuilding former careers. At the high end of the scale are many current professionals who are willing to make some compromises with regard to title and compensation in favor of more work-life balance.

No. Although all the women in our network are striving to achieve a greater degree of work-life balance, many are used to working within very traditional full-time structures and expect to continue to do so. Women@Work places women into permanent full-time and part-time positions—as well as “1099” consulting engagements and temporary assignments.

We are working with industry giants such as JP Morgan, McGraw-Hill, Pepperidge Farm and Pitney Bowes, as well as many smaller companies in a very wide range of industries. We have generated candidates for positions in sales, marketing, accounting, technical writing, financial planning, corporate training, IT, investment banking, communications, finance, public relations, travel, consumer products research, law and much more.

During their absence from the work force, these women have not been idle. Some women have pursued occasional project work. Many others have been high-level volunteers. The former founder and director of the Stepping Stones Children's Museum, a vice president of the National Charity League, a president of the AAUW, the founder of a national health advocacy association and many very able PTA presidents are just a few examples of women in our network who have applied and continued to develop management and organizational skills in volunteer settings.

As with any new hire at any level, some on the job training is required. With the caliber of Women@Work Network candidates, however, only a brief "ramp up" period is necessary. The majority of women are graduates of top-tier colleges and universities and many have advanced degrees. Their resumes often include officer-level Fortune 500 and Wall Street experience.

Employers want to control their work environments—and rightfully so. There’s lots of work to get done, and work does mean work! But productivity levels do not need to suffer at the hand of flexibility. And flexibility does not require a major overhaul of your workplace. At Women@Work we offer employers some basic wisdom on the matter of flexibility: Don’t think outside the box, just redesign it.

Some relatively minor changes to your workplace structure can have a powerful impact on your overall recruiting and retention. Even something as simple as allowing employees to arrive later than 9am so that they can take their children to school can motivate a very qualified prospective employee to accept your offer for a more than full-time position. The key is to institutionalize flexibility just like every other employee benefit so that there are very visible guidelines for employees to follow. Rather than creating a Pandora’s Box of one-off deals with individual employees, employers must establish company-wide flexibility policies.

Women@Work helps companies explore reasonable and practical flexibility strategies that have a minimum of workplace disruption.

Top-quality candidates typically do not look for employment opportunities in newspaper classifieds or mass market online job postings. Experts estimate that 60 to 80% of job seekers land positions through networking—and this is especially true of top-quality candidates.

The best candidates move in the same circles and look to each other for significant job leads. Women@Work, first and foremost, is a networking organization—more than 5,000 smart women helping other smart women nationwide.

All job postings are sent to every woman in our core network—regardless of their areas of interest—and a very powerful networking engine very quickly generates an amazingly targeted and qualified group of candidates.

Work force flexibility is a major issue for today's employees—especially for women who find that inflexible work environments do not allow a balance between work and family. Many major companies have a dearth of women at the senior level and with a shrinking workforce they cannot afford to continually deplete their leadership pipeline.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that there will be a 4% shrinkage in the working age population between 2000 and 2050. The U.S. economy will have 6 million more jobs than people to fill them due to Baby Boomer retirement. And the problem isn’t just looming in the future, it’s here. In 2008 the first big wave of Baby Boomers began to retire, forcing the first huge gap in the overall workforce population. As this “demographic destiny” continues to unfold, employers will have to think creatively about identifying and attracting talent. One way that your company can prepare for this talent shortage is to begin to work toward new workforce structures that will attract and retain valuable employees.