What are you doing to ensure your contingent labor is as diverse as your employee base?
Source | www.horizontaltalent.com | Jeremy Langevin
Companies today know the importance of having a strong Diversity and Inclusion program. Having a diverse workforce is a key driver for success, innovation, retention, and attracting top talent.
Most organizations are already well on their way to tracking diversity in their full-time population. If they don’t have a strategy for recruiting, managing, engaging, and tracking diverse talent within their contingent labor population, they’re missing out on big benefits. This is especially true when you consider that by 2023, more than half (52%) of the US workforce will be gig economy workers.
Diverse contingent labor: The missing puzzle piece
The desire to bring diversity to contingent labor has been on the radar for some time. For over a decade, organizations have been partnering with diverse suppliers as a way to invest in diversity. Supplier diversity is important, but companies are missing a big piece of the puzzle if they don’t also extend this to the labor they provide. If diversity suppliers (or any supplier for that matter) don’t hire within the community they represent or actively recruit diverse talent, it does little to help organizations capitalize on the benefits of a diverse workforce.
MSP partnerships and incentive programs
If you’re a company at the beginning of this journey and have an MSP in place to manage your contingent labor, partner with them on communicating your D&I messaging to their supplier network. You can also create SLAs with your MSP partner around increasing diversity among the candidates they submit. Have them track and report on it quarterly.