It’s not surprising that last week’s SupplyNow podcast featuring Arizona State University Professor Joseph Carter’s take on the supply management talent crunch has generated tremendous feedback. In a spate of recent studies, supply executives rank recruiting and maintaining talent among their most pressing challenges.

I’m happy to invite Charles Dominick, Charles Dominick, president and founder of Next Level Purchasing and author of the Purchasing Certification Blog, back to Supply Excellence to share his take on the talent crunch and provide strategies for hiring, training, and retaining great talent.

I enjoyed the recent installment of SupplyNow, discussing the “Talent Crunch” in the purchasing and supply management field.  Like most crises, the Talent Crunch was caused by poor planning of those involved - both employers and practitioners alike.  I’d like to dedicate this blog post to exploring why there is a Talent Crunch and who is to blame.

The first group to blame is the employers who are suffering from the Talent Crunch.  In the aforementioned installment of SupplyNow, the panel discussed three factors involved in having an optimized team:  recruitment, development, and retention.  Employers who are losing talent as well as the employers who have to resort to poaching entire purchasing departments from other companies (and sometimes firing most of their existing staff) have failed in one – if not all three – of these areas.

To have long-term success, employers need to start with a strategy for retention and then work backward to a strategy for development and then a strategy for recruitment.  They need to ask, “Once we have the right people on the team, how are we going to keep them?”  The response to this question inevitably has to include promotion opportunities.  Ambitious professionals do not want to stay in the same position for 15 years.  They want to feel that they are moving forward.  So, if you want the continuity of having talented people for the long haul, you absolutely have to structure your department in a way that offers upward mobility.

But getting promoted isn’t something that should happen just because an employee has been on board for the requisite amount of time.  That person needs to qualify for the position and have the skills necessary to succeed in it.  That is where development comes in. 

Employees should be trained not just to be able to achieve excellence in their current job, but to be prepared for the next step up.  If the existing staff is not qualified for an open, more senior, internal purchasing position, it is the management team’s fault for failing to develop them.  After all, if you have employees who have been with the organization; know the processes, products, and services; and are in-tune with the organizational culture, finding an appropriate candidate in-house should be easy.

Having opportunities for professional development and upward mobility then makes the recruiting process easier.  You’ve created an environment that will appeal to the movers-and-shakers.  At that point, you need to get your message in the right place and have the right processes to identify the differences between the best candidates and all other applicants.

The second group to blame is certain individuals who work in the profession.  Despite what the term “Talent Crunch” may connote, there is actually not a shortage of individuals with purchasing experience who are interested in getting new purchasing positions.  With procurement outsourcing, automation, and decentralization of transactions, there have been many purchasing practitioners who have been displaced in recent years.  But they are not skilled in the areas that today’s employers are most interested in.
Why aren’t they skilled?  Because they haven’t been trained in the latest practices.  They may tell you that it is their previous employers’ fault because those employers didn’t pay for training.  But that’s wrongly displacing the blame.

Employers not paying for training is not an excuse to fail to keep your skills up to speed.  After all, they are your skills.  You will still have them whether or not you are employed by that employer.  Your better skills will translate into larger paychecks for you over your career.  So why allow your skill set and your earning potential to be at the mercy of your employer with tight purse strings?

At the end of the day, you are responsible for your skills.  So this means continually keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the profession and investing in yourself so that you are keeping up.

Looking at these reasons for the Talent Crunch, you should notice that, unless the approaches of both employers and practitioners change, the Talent Crunch will continue as long as economic conditions support current employment levels.  For example, poaching may have been effective at recruiting, but without development and retention, that infusion of talent is likely to be a short-term solution.  But what I hope that this blog post accomplishes is that it gets employers and practitioners to think about what has to change so that employers don’t have to struggle to have a talented team and practitioners don’t have to be frustrated with menial jobs and meager paychecks.

Great insight and recommendations, Charles. One of the great fallacies of supply management automation is that it will free up category managers and buyers to focus on more strategic tasks. While the productivity improvements enabled by technology have given supply managers more time, the assumption that employees once focused on processing POs would have the skills to manage strategic tasks — such as supplier collaboration, risk management, or design-for-supply issues — was optimistic at best.

The demographics and requirements for the supply management function require a major retraining of our ranks. I’m certain this is an issue we’ll be grappling with for quite some time. I hope you’ll come back soon to share new strategies for recruiting and keeping top talent.

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