Gabrielle Durand, manager, external workforce management at John Deere, is helping the agricultural, turf, construction and forestry equipment giant expand its reach into more diverse hiring areas and greater innovation in the external workforce space. She has been in her current role for almost three years.

In that timeframe, Durand, her supply management counterpart Kelley King, and Deere’s MSP have nearly doubled their supplier diversity results. “Each year, we look at gaps we can fill and then seek out the best new partners,” she explains. The program works with suppliers owned by people who are disabled, veterans, LGBTQ+, African American, Asian American, women and other diverse categories.

Durand has also started a separate program for neurodivergent contingent workers, working with a disability-owned supplier that provides training for hiring managers while sourcing neurodivergent candidates. “We’re making sure that everyone involved has a working understanding of how to support these workers so that they can be highly productive team members.”

Additionally, Durand has implemented direct sourcing to nurture talent that is added to specialized talent pools. “On a quarterly basis, we focus on an underutilized resource category, such as women in engineering. Our expanded search to include a more diverse audience is already proving beneficial,” she explains. “This is an opportunity to cultivate diverse talent who have a deep interest in opportunities at Deere.”

Through Deere’s MSP, Durand has supported the implementation of a platform for UCAN managers to leverage a chatbot, live chat, training videos and policy documents, markedly improving the EWM experience and efficiency for end users. Additional platform innovations in 2023 will include an RPA bot to process simple data transactions.