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We recently heard of a difficulty facing a CPO within the financial services field when he, newly placed in charge of creating a procurement team, found he couldnt recruit. The business had been spun off as an entity in its own right, and while the CPO had taken some of the leadership team with him, his challenge was to populate all the other roles across various locations. The difficulty lay in that despite this being a well-paid sector and an exciting opportunity for procurement professionals, he couldnt find the candidates to fill the roles.
In the age of the great resignation one would assume a huge talent pool out there ripe for the picking apparently not.
In actual fact, for the category managers, strategic sourcing professionals, digital procurement experts and so on, the recruitment industry is experiencing limited success and thats symptomatic of the whole market right now, says Andrew Daley of Edbury Daley international procurement and supply chain technology recruitment consultants.
To answer that question Daley goes back to 2020.
There was an enormous amount of uncertainty in all industries, he explains. On the procurement solutions side, hiring slowed as vendors couldnt foresee what would happen with revenues, and that impacted headcount decisions. For the consultancy world, that situation alleviated towards the end of that year, but the corporate world of procurement and supply teams continued to face unprecedented circumstances requiring all hands on deck to cope with the challenges of the employers. So hiring except when essential dropped off the agenda for quite some time.
While continuing to adapt to a situation of market ups and downs, the tri-part ecosystem of procurement tech, consulting and practitioner talent also experienced highs and lows. Then optimism set in about the impact the pandemic was having on digital procurement and towards the end of 2021 the hiring market boomed.
The need to address concerns across supply chains, the demand placed on procurement departments, the need to find better ways of doing things and the leap in the requirement for better visibility and data all put pressure on the skills market. It led organizations to require of practitioners skills they just didnt have, but had to acquire quickly. So the end of last year saw a remarkable spike in hiring, particularly from the tech vendors and early indications are that this will continue in 2022. However, the skills shortage will continue because the market cannot keep pace with the demand from every part of the procurement ecosystem.
This demand for new talent is born partly out of the growing power of technology, the importance of the supply chain to corporate agendas and the visibility that organizations require. This is exacerbated of course by the reduced mobility of labor owing to travel restrictions and greater risk awareness.
If you are trying to grow a procurement team in a highly competitive and sparsely populated market, according to Daley there are a few things you can do to improve your chances:
If you are a substantially sized organization, you probably already have an internal talent-attraction team. However, they too are stretched and typically they are generalist recruiters, not procurement recruitment specialists. Specialist recruiters will know everything there is to know about a narrowly defined sector, and they will know the best places to look for a digital procurement specialist.
Spend Matters new series analyzes the procurement service provider market and offers a Buyers Directory.
The traditional procurement priorities of stakeholder engagement, consultative sourcing and price are being superseded by many other factors, explains Daley. As organizations consider supplier relationships more, all the skills the CPO has long been talking about like risk, quality, innovation and collaboration are becoming a real demand.
On the vendor side, whether selling, implementing or account managing, they want people who are credible in front of a CPO. They want people with previous knowledge of working in that area, who understand the challenges, the opportunities and know the language.
The harsh reality of this market is that employers are being forced to be more flexible, because if theyve had an unfilled vacancy for six months they need a plan B. They need to think about what they are prepared to compromise on. That might be someone of lesser experience, or someone from a neighboring market like sales or finance, and train them to understand procurement.
So theres a general recognition that we need to think more laterally.
Daley sums up: In my opinion, for our sector the great resignation is a myth Ive seen no evidence of it at all, in fact, quite the opposite. We have never had to work harder to get procurement talent this is the most difficult candidate market Ive ever witnessed.
For more insight into what leaders can expect for their hiring plans for 2022, download the Edbury Daley Insider report for free:Procurement and Spend Management Insider
If you are tasked with creating a new procurement organization, Spend Matters 5-step TechMatch tool can help you identify needs and quickly generate a technology shortlist.
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Procurement recruitment Why is the tech talent pool so shallow? - Spend Matters
