A large media & entertainment firm established aggressive goals around both Tier 1 and Tier 2 diversity spend across its enterprise. Historically, the percentage of Tier 2 diverse spend within contingent labor had consistently tracked in the upper teens. The goal was to accelerate Tier 2 diverse spend without adversely impacting supplier or candidate quality.

The customer’s contingent workforce program was mature and consistently high performing across a number of key metrics – making “status quo” an attractive option. Large legacy suppliers had an excellent understanding of the customer’s needs, and the program’s size, scale, and complexity made it challenging for any new supplier to ramp up quickly - particularly many of the smaller, diverse suppliers that were being sought.

Pinnacle began with rigorous data analytics to determine each supplier’s core capabilities and performance strengths. From there, we created multiple job families within each labor category, along with a group of preferred suppliers for each. Job categories were narrowly tailored to ensure maximum focus and performance.

Each job req was distributed to only 5-7 preferred suppliers, which were a combination of historical high performers, named manager selections, and qualified diverse suppliers. Importantly, every job req had at least one diverse supplier – often two or more – to ensure maximum diversity opportunity.

Pinnacle and the client executives also engaged in direct, formal mentoring of many smaller diverse suppliers to optimize their performance, scalability, and contract compliance. A number of diverse suppliers embraced this mentorship and significantly grew their investment in the program as well as their performance.

In addition to the customers 100% Tier 1 diverse spend with Pinnacle (dual woman/minority), Tier 2 diverse spend was able to ramp from the high teens to over 50% in the course of only three years. The customer is now consistently achieving 50%+ diversity spend annually with no impact to supplier quality. In addition, the customers has been able to document and promote a number of important diverse supplier success stories.