The Paradox of Diversity and Contingent

Including a Diversity Strategy into your Contingent Workforce recruitment takes lots of planning and consideration, perhaps much more planning and consideration than your perm workforce. Why? The ad hoc nature of contingent work. together with the need for speed and resources who hit the ground running can negate a proactive approach.
If the skill recruited can be readily talent pooled or you have a dedicated online market for your contingent workforce, you can make contingent recruitment inclusive of diversity.  Obviously the benefit of this must be worthwhile, as you cannot take a proactive approach for all recruitment.
It may be as simple as going to the various communities or groups of indigenous or special needs organisations and placing proactive or reactive advertisements. Alternatively you could use your referral scheme to target diversity groups.  All this takes time and thought, and may not be possible if you have to mobilise resources for a project, fast.
This would also be more difficult if the time to productivity of the project is a major consideration.  If it is essential that the contingent workforce hit the ground running, then this would override recruiting diverse skills that require training.  This is more possible for perm recruitment.
It would be interesting to know whether the contingent workforce is actually included in the overall diversity reporting. Generally it is only the permanent head count.  Including contingent numbers could lead to significant swings in your statistics from period to period, with projects commencing and completing.
So three questions to conclude:

  1. Do you include diversity stats in your reporting?
  2. Is the effort worthwhile?
  3. Do managers or organisations really care if the contingent workforce is part of the diversity initiatives?

I would love to hear your thoughts on the above.
Please let mes know your thinking or practices, both existing or planned.
Trevor will be facilitating the World Cafe at #CWF2014. This session provides an open forum for delegates to have their say, share their ideas and gain a practical understanding of the subject matter via a series of intimate roundtable discussions.  You can find out more about this year’s agenda, here. If you wish to participate in a discussion on diversity and contingent, please let us know.

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