When it comes to procurement recruitment,
think strategic (5 tips to better procurement recruitment)

Recruiting people should be a long-term investment and should be treated accordingly. So why is it that recruiting procurement professionals, is sometimes treated as an acquisition purchase at best, or a totally unmanaged off-contract maverick expenditure at worst?

The upside of investing in your procurement resources is clear. Better people deliver better performance, greater business engagement, broader strategic involvement and improved savings delivery. The recruitment process can therefore be approached like a strategic supplier selection process.

Here are 5 tips on how to achieve that approach.

1) Take the time to define what you want.
Consider your organisation as it is today and how it needs to be in one, three and five years. Spend time building job descriptions that are fit for purpose for the future organisation as well as the present. Your team is a long-term purchase.

Whoever fills it needs to be able to support the future demands of the business.

2) Work with suppliers who understand your business and the market
Many organisations’ will push strongly to use their current preferred supplier, which can make sense from a corporate perspective to reduce the lines of communication. However beware, this list may well be populated by the larger generalist multi-functional agencies with very little real procurement expertise, or understanding of what you really need. It’s a strategic purchase so work with a supplier who really understands procurement and the market.  It’s about relationships not numbers.

Those ‘hard to fill’ roles are usually better managed by specialists.

3) Be Proactive and Search
It is tempting to simply ask for some CVs and sit back and select from what you are given. But in a different category, would you select a long term supplier this way? Or would you research the market segment, condition the market, understand who your competition use and look for the best suppliers?

Use recruiters who can do this market analysis for you and get the added value. Our experience shows that a combination of confidential market advertising, market research & direct search and a strategic development of a client focused talent pool yields stronger shortlists.

Thoroughness at this stage means you select from a shortlist of high-quality candidates.

4) Take the time to truly ‘assess’ your options
In traditional supplier selection, simple gut-feeling decisions are unusual. A typical structured selection process will filter out unsuitable suppliers through comparison, validation, assessment and measurement against benchmarks.

The use of procurement competency profiling is common internally for personal development plans, but should also be used in the benchmarking external candidates as part of the recruitment process.

Our experience shows that better matching of current procurement competencies, improves the interview and onboarding process, ensuring your candidates are fit for purpose, not just good interviewers. There are a wide range of procurement competency profiles to support the process, use them to build an external candidate pool and take more risk out of the recruitment process.

Procurement competency testing is just as important as behavioural personality profiling.

5) Control the process
If you need to recruit numbers of people and you don’t have the capability or the technology in place to do this, outsource it to a professional. Unplanned, the recruitment process can be overpowering, causing gridlock and put off good candidates.

The recruitment process is increasingly using technology to streamline the process of communication and candidate management. There are strong trends driving efficiencies in the process as recruitment becomes an internet and database numbers game based purely on volumes of CVs. This has the potential to broaden the range of potential candidates but also to lose the fundamental principle: recruitment is all about people.

In procurement we have driven the same trend with our acquisition purchases - cataloguing high-volume, low-value purchases, driving low prices and simplifying the process. This is fine for acquisition, but doesn’t necessarily work for a strategic purchase.

Work with suppliers that balance the right use of technology with the human touch, it will pay dividends in the long run.

For more information about professional procurement & supply chain recruitment, call Sean Ogilvie or Tony Goldsby at Procurement People on +44 1926 405201, or email sean.ogilvie@procurement-people.com