One of Asia’s Leading Virtual Career Fair for Women ‘Ignite 2021’ by WiT-ACE Draws Over 29000 Participants, holds Over 800 Job Interviews in a Day

Mumbai: WiT-ACE (Women in Technology – Accelerated Career Experiences) today said that Ignite, its annual virtual career fair for women finally concluded last week with more than 1000 job openings for women professionals by over 20+ leading employers. This year’s Ignite drew participation from over 29000 women and saw highly coveted employers like Google, Aditya Birla Group, Firstsource, Fiserv, CitiusTech, IBM, Meta, PWC, TransUnion, AkzoNobel, Brillio, HDFC Bank, S&P Global, TCS, Walmart Global Tech India, Crisil, Fullerton India, Kotak, Nasdaq and PayU, with some of them continuing their participation from last year, reaffirming their commitment towards creating more gender balanced workplaces by offering jobs for women at the fair.

These jobs were offered in diverse domains like technology, marketing, HR, Supply Chain, finance, and HR, and covered a wide range of industries including IT, ITeS, BFSI, FinTech, Finance and HealthCare.

“In just two years, Ignite has emerged as the year’s most sought after event for women professionals and job seekers in India. We are immensely grateful to our partners and industry participants for their support in making this year’s fair a huge success once again and we remain confident that as stakeholders in India’s progress, we can all come together through initiatives like these to bring a stable change in our workplaces with much better representation of women,” said Anuranjita Kumar, Founder and CEO of WiT-ACE.

The fair is a one-of-its-kind career enablement event with specially curated experiences for both candidates as well as employers. For job seekers, Ignite offers a fun and engaging way for to explore thousands of job openings, directly interact with recruiters on the spot and have access to India’s top employers at the same time. Employers are offered a cohort of niche and pre-assessed and ranked candidates, thereby assuring quality and reduced turnarounds that led to smoother and speedier placements.

According to Anuradha Arora, Talent Engagement Lead at Google India, “Avenues and forums like WiT-ACE Ignite 2021 are the need of the hour where employers get an opportunity to engage with diverse talent, specifically women in Tech. The virtual experience couldn’t have been more seamless, and we look forward to such future events!”

Usha Srikanth, VP & Senior Partner, Sectors – CIC India at IBM Consulting, added, “We are excited to partner with WiT-ACE for the Ignite Career Fair. Our journey so far has been wonderful from a perspective of receiving profiles of women in technology, for a myriad of roles that we are looking to hire – Data, Cloud, Customer Transformation, Automation, SAP. The virtual career fair has come as a very innovative solution in the pandemic era and we are looking forward to some successful outcomes from this fair.”

Speaking about the career fair, Jacob George, Director & Head HR, TransUnion Global Capability Center (GCC) in India said, “The WiT-ACE Ignite 2021 Career Fair gave us a platform to connect virtually with a lot of women professionals. This career fair provided a realistic event experience, an easy-to-host virtual booth, good candidate traffic, measurable results and aligns well with our DEI focus.

“Ignite is enabling women to get access to a host of opportunities on a common platform, and connecting them to organisations that are committed to providing equal and ample opportunity to women. This symbiosis is at the core of the success of this platform and plays a significant role in influencing the gender diversity of corporate India,” shares Shuchika Sahay, Chief Human Resources Officer, Firstsource.

This year, Ignite opened on October 22nd 2021 for job applications and concluded with over 2700 job applications received through the virtual platform with a significantly diverse representation of professionals from different backgrounds. Over 30% of the job seekers at this year’s event were from Tier-2 and smaller cities. 83% had prior work experience, while 17% were freshers. 75% candidates were Junior to Mid-level professionals with 2-8 years of experience. The participation from senior professional women with 9+ years of experience was close to 9%. The fair also saw 10% returnee women attend and explore job opportunities.

Apart from applying for jobs and engaging directly with hiring managers, the participating candidates also had the opportunity to attend specially curated webinars and masterclasses to help them understand career trends and jobs of the future on the day of the event. A total of 800 one-on-one interviews were conducted during the daylong virtual fair. The hiring process through Ignite 2021 will continue for another month with the employers, along with WiT-ACE’s recruiting team, to carefully shortlist and select candidates for different roles in their organisation.

The COVID-19 crisis has hugely impacted the employment rate especially for women, as estimates show that female job losses due to the pandemic are about 1.8 times higher than male job loss rates globally, at 5.7 percent versus 3.1 percent respectively. Even though women make up 39 percent of global employment, they account for 54 percent of overall job losses. Further, only 27.1% women currently account for managerial positions. WIT-ACE is working towards reducing this gender gap in India through various innovative initiatives like IGNITE, SPARK (Annual Thought Leadership Conference), WOCADEMY (Online capacity building academy) and through their JOB BOARD that features hiring partnerships with various organisations and communities.