Company News · June 2026
Here’s what it means and why the work is far from finished.
On Thursday evening at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, in a room full of some of the most respected leaders in the staffing and talent solutions industry, Instant Teams was named the winner of the 2026 TIARA Inclusive Recruitment Award.
We’re proud. We’re grateful. And we’re clear about what this award represents: not an endpoint, but a marker on a longer road.
“This isn’t about us. It’s about the community that trusted us with their careers and the clients who trusted us with their brands.”
Why this award matters to us:
The TIARA Awards are recognized across the industry as a genuine benchmark for excellence not a participation trophy. The Inclusive Recruitment category, specifically, recognizes companies that demonstrate clear and measurable impact in expanding access to a more diverse workforce. That’s not a box we check. It’s the architecture of our entire business.
Instant Teams was built on a premise that the industry had largely ignored: military spouses are one of the most educated, adaptable, and professionally capable talent pools in the country and they face a 21% unemployment rate anyway. Not because of skill. Because of a system that was never built with them in mind.
We built something different. And this award is, in part, the industry saying it’s working.
- Over $83 Million in Economic impact
- 91% of employees identify as female
- 66% of employees identify as non-white
- 12.4% attrition vs. industry average of 30–42%
- Q1 2026 Employee NPS 83/100
What “inclusive recruitment” actually looks like:
Inclusive recruitment, done right, isn’t a program. It’s not a diversity initiative that lives in an HR deck. It’s operational infrastructure in the systems, policies, and people practices that remove barriers so that talent can actually show up and do the work. It also means rethinking the resume. When someone’s career looks “non-linear” on paper, that’s not a red flag. That’s evidence of adaptability under pressure exactly the capability that high-stakes customer & employee experience roles demand.
The community behind the award
Awards like this are easy to accept and hard to earn. The real credit belongs to the military spouse professionals who have brought and continue to bring their full capability to Instant Teams while managing a move, a deployment, a family transition, or all three at once. Their reliability, emotional intelligence, and commitment to the clients they serve is the reason our turnover numbers look nothing like the industry average.
It also belongs to the enterprise partners who believed the model would work and who have since seen what it produces firsthand.
And it belongs to every member of the Instant Teams team who builds this community from the inside: the recruiters who see talent where other systems see gaps, the operators who design for continuity, and the leaders who hold the line on mission when growth could have made compromise easy.
What comes next
We’re deepening our roots as the Total Experience Marketplace, a field that has proven uniquely inclusive and welcoming to professionals from diverse backgrounds. We’re expanding the educational & career pathways that allow military spouses to move up through the CX ranks, not just enter them. And we’re continuing to build the proprietary data and community infrastructure that makes our talent pool more valuable — and more defensible — with every passing quarter.
The TIARA Inclusive Recruitment Award joins a shelf that already includes recognition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Inc. 5000, RemoteTech Breakthrough Awards, and Outsource Accelerator. We’re grateful for every one of them. None of them change the work in front of us.
Interested in building a more inclusive, high-performing CX team? Learn how Instant Teams can help →