A growing number of talent leaders think so, and the decision they have in mind is who assembles, kits, or packages the product. Contract manufacturing partners used to sit quietly on an operations spreadsheet. Now they show up in conversations about workforce composition, apprenticeship pipelines, and the inclusive-hiring commitments HR is expected to deliver on.
The reason is uncomfortable but simple. Internal hiring alone is not keeping pace with either the headcount targets or the representation targets many manufacturers have signed up for. External partners are one of the few levers that move both numbers at once.
Here is where HR teams are pulling that lever.
The Headcount Math No Internal Recruiter Can Solve Alone
The industry is staring at a hiring problem it cannot out-recruit. A joint study from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute projected as many as 3.8 million manufacturing jobs opening up between 2024 and 2033, with roughly 1.9 million potentially going unfilled. The same release pointed to partnerships, apprenticeships, and a more diverse and inclusive workforce as the way through.
That framing matters for HR. If the internal req board can only be filled halfway, the other half of the work still has to happen somewhere. Routing certain assembly, kitting, or fulfillment scopes to a partner that already employs the workforce you were trying to reach is no longer a fallback; it’s part of the plan.
Partners That Are Built Around Employing People With Disabilities
One category of contract manufacturer exists specifically to employ people with disabilities. These are typically non-profit production operations running ISO-registered assembly, sewing, packaging, and fulfillment lines, with an employment model specifically designed to create opportunities for people with disabilities.
Peoria Production Solutions is an example of this model – a contract manufacturer whose founding mission is to employ individuals with disabilities across a full range of custom production services.
For an HR team with an inclusion mandate, that changes the math. The hours performed on that partner's floor are hours of real, paid, skilled work being done by people the internal pipeline has struggled to reach. That is a workforce outcome, not a CSR line item, and you can report on it with specifics rather than aspirations.
Supplier Diversity Programs Now Reach Into Production
Supplier diversity used to live in procurement, measured in spend with businesses owned by women, veterans, minorities, LGBTQ+ founders, or people with disabilities. It is bleeding into workforce strategy, because the suppliers themselves employ the communities the parent company is trying to hire into. When HR and procurement compare notes, the overlap is often larger than either team assumed.
Federal Contractors Have a Second Set of Reasons
Companies holding federal contracts have their own overlay of rules that make the partner question sharper. Buying from designated non-profit producers under the AbilityOne framework, for example, is a well-established route for federal buyers to meet supply needs while directing work to a workforce that is largely blind or significantly disabled. HR does not run those contracts. HR increasingly gets asked to describe them, though, because they land in the same disclosures where workforce composition does.
The regulatory picture around contractor disability hiring has also shifted, and not toward more prescription. Requirements that federal contractors invite self-identification and measure against a set utilization goal have been rolled back.
That does not remove the underlying business case; it removes the compliance floor. Companies that want a demonstrably inclusive workforce now have to build it on purpose, and a contract-manufacturing relationship is one of the more concrete ways to show the work.
The Case Lands With the CFO, Not Just the CHRO
The DEI argument for these partnerships has, at times, been made in soft terms. The talent argument is harder. Deloitte's own analysis of the sector has said plainly that manufacturers cannot have a serious talent strategy without a robust inclusion strategy. The demographics of the available workforce simply do not allow it.
For HR leaders, that is the sentence to bring into the operations meeting. A contract manufacturing partner is not a substitute for internal hiring, and it is not window dressing on a diversity report. It is a way to get real production done, at quality, using labor pools the company has said publicly it wants to reach.
When the alternative is a line that runs short-staffed and a pledge that goes unmet, the partner conversation stops being optional.
