In over 23 years in senior executive and board search with Spencer Stuart, I have had the privilege and pleasure of working with top international companies on their senior talent requirements. I take great pride in all the brilliant people we have placed, and especially in the women who are making a big difference in the organisations they joined. A lot has changed for the better in the past two decades and our clients are quite rightly challenging us every day to search more broadly for undiscovered talent.
What I have learned is that the pipeline of talented women progressing through top international organisations and succeeding in senior positions remains frustratingly thin. There are many well-acknowledged reasons for this. I do, however, believe that whilst the talent acquisition and talent management strategies of major organisations are significantly more sophisticated than they were, there is still a wealth of talent which remains undiscovered.
To address this gap, I founded OLLMOO – an innovative, mission-driven company. The OLLMOO team is dedicated to bringing this next generation of undiscovered talent to light. We focus on early to mid-career women who are intellectually at the top of their respective peer groups, and we have a particular focus on STEM. Our OLLMOO community is global, with 132 nationalities and 78 languages spoken. They include cyber security specialists, data scientists, software engineers, financial experts, actuaries, mining engineers, pharma scientists, HR professionals, digital marketers, and operations engineers – to name a few.
Last week, I was blown away and smiling when I met a young woman from Indonesia who is a machine learning specialist. She scored in the 97th percentile of our OLLMOO assessment – both her intellect and leadership potential are outstanding. When meeting these exceptional women, the revelation for me is always that they have had little guidance in their careers to date and want to learn more about opportunities open to them. Around 90% of them are globally mobile.
This is where OLLMOO comes in, supporting and guiding these outstanding women on their career paths. We act as an ambassador for our client partners in promoting their organisations to our OLLMOO community, thereby broadening our clients’ talent acquisition networks.
At OLLMOO, we are dedicated to advancing the next generation of women leaders. Guided by our mission, we create more opportunities for women to succeed as leaders and we seek to connect with companies, organisations, and thought leaders who share our ambition.
