When it comes to choosing which suppliers to partner with for your Total Talent Program, it’s essential to consider partners that will reflect today’s global marketplace. Committing to partnering with innovative and competitive diverse suppliers will strengthen not only your program but the diverse communities and markets that we serve. Incorporating diversity into your Total Talent Program should be something that is an ongoing goal. Partnering with diverse suppliers to deliver solutions and meet your unique needs is an important action to take to increase diversity, including spend, within your program.
Adding Diverse Suppliers to Your Total Talent Program
When adding suppliers to your program, you should foster a diverse supplier network within your workforce management engagements, and strive to enhance and build upon your supplier base by identifying additional diverse suppliers. There are multiple way to engage diverse suppliers, such as offering a diverse supplier of the year award as well as a supplier diversity champion employee award. You should also be participating in supplier diversity targeted trade fairs, networking events and conferences as well. There are additional avenues you can take internally such as promoting diverse supplier events through your company Intranet and creating a supplier registration portal on your website. These are just steps to get you started.
It isn’t just enough to engage with diverse suppliers, you should also be ensuring that a fair percentage of your supplier spend is coming from the diverse suppliers that you’re partnering with. Track your metrics on a quarterly basis, at least, to ensure that you’re reaching your established diversity spend goal and discuss them in your quarterly reviews to hold your program accountable and track progress. By tracking supplier diversity metrics, DZConneX (DZX) was able to take one of our client’s diversity spend from 16% to 60% within just a few years.
To achieve a goal like this, there are a lot of things that need to be evaluated within the program and its design. You’ll need to make sure that your program has a well established model that can vet new diverse suppliers that will meet your client’s needs and requirements. In order to focus on increasing diversity spend, you’ll also want to ensure that you have a consistency within your program such as within your job requisition and onboarding processes. An evaluation of the supply chain for performance, coverage and pricing will also be essential.
