Amazon India helps over 200 women return after break

Bengaluru: Over 200 mid-level women executives have rejoined Amazon India in the last one year. These are women who took a break in their careers, and decided to start over. Amazon calls it the Rekindle programme, one which provides a launchpad to mid- to senior-level women executives to professionally re-integrate themselves.Amazon India provides structured interventions including focused mentoring, flexible work options, onboarding and on-the-job learning to grow the pool of women technologists. “We have few women in mid to senior levels. Research reports showed that around 38% of women leave the tech sector and move into non-tech roles within two years. We are helping them have a level playing field. There’s a marked improvement in not just getting the right kind of people at different levels, but also in the mindset,” said Deepti Varma, VP of people experience and technology for India and emerging markets in Amazon. Amazon in India has over 1 lakh employees.Amazon recently hosted AmazeWIT (Amazon Women in Technology), a conference on diversity and inclusion that aims to promote female representation in the technical industry.Amazon India has also launched a programme called the Power of 10, where women are grouped in batches of 10 and are mentored by seniors (assigned based on their expertise and interest in the selected topics). Once women graduate from this programme, the mentees become mentors the next time the programme is held. For assisting new mothers’ transition back to work, Amazon’s Ramp Back programme has managers working closely with women employees to set realistic workloads. They are also offered reduced hours of working.Asked about deferring campus placements in India, she said the company is delaying the start dates for some of college hires by up to six months because of the challenging economic conditions. “We’re offering assistance to help address any financial impact. This decision does not involve revoking or rescinding any offer letters that have been extended to students. Amazon remains committed to university recruiting and developing the next generation of leaders and builders,” she said.Asked about media reports of Amazon partly abandoning its Bar Raiser programme, Varma said Amazon has thousands of bar raisers globally and it’s an integral part of fresher and lateral hiring. Bar raisers are skilled Amazon interviewers who are brought into the hiring process as an objective third party. The are trained to ‘bar-raise’ the interview process as they shadow and reverse shadow an individual part of the process and assess candidates for relevant roles.