Sourcing Desperate Housewives

What do you think about real-life housewives? Think they have it made? I found this article online "Myth vs. Reality: What Are At-home Moms Really Like?" and thought it would prove quite a revelation to some so I thought I would share it. Here is a snippet...

---

At-home mothers, as portrayed on television, are stuck in the 1950s mold of small-minded housewives. They may not wear aprons and pearls anymore, but they are usually presented as women who are more concerned with lavishing attention on their houses then on caring for their children. Modern mothers who have left successful, established careers to nurture their children find it very hard to see anything of themselves in this picture. What are at-home mothers really like? Results from our survey of 300 women across the country reveal that they are neither idle and pampered nor perfect Betty Crockers of the home front. They do work hard -- 42.2 percent said that they care for children fourteen hours or more per day -- and they're on call twenty four hours a day. Almost one-fifth said that they don't get time off during the work week. Things are only a little better on the weekend, as more than 36 percent of the respondents reported that they don't get any time off then, either. The image of the decorative country club wife is also very far from the truth. While the economic profile of these families is solidly middle class, they definitely are not rich: half of them are supporting three, four or five people on less than $40,000 a year and are constantly searching for new ways to economize. Most mothers at home are neither youngsters, inexperienced, nor unskilled. They are not at home because they have failed to make a go of it in the business world and have no other career options. Half of them have undergraduate degrees, and nearly 40 percent have advanced graduate, professional or technical educations. More than two-thirds fall into the thirty-to four-year-old age bracket. Click here to read the full article Why do I share this information? Well, besides being interesting to me, I think it speaks to an untapped resource for sourcers. Somewhere out there are hard-working, diligent and resourceful women with undergraduate and advanced college degrees. Now ask yourself? What effort is your company making to attract these types of candidates? (And when I say these types of candidates, I am referring to housewives looking to rejoin the workforce.) If you are charged with sourcing diversity candidates, or if you just want an additional resource to turn to, you might want to add the following strategy to your bag of tricks.

Trot over to the butler (Ask Jeeves) and ask him to bring you the resumes of houswives that are (potentially) looking to re-enter the workforce. To insure that you get the same results I did, input the following searchstring:

resume "domestic engineer" -jobs

And before you can say, "Your candidate is served," Jeeves plops down 141 resumes (more or less) matching your request. Pretty nifty huh?

Until next time, happy hunting...

###