Smarter Procurement Recruitment: Gone Missing?

By: Ankur Rishi

The perks of digitalization are many. With digital procurement, CPOs have more visibility of the nitty-gritties of the supply chain (those individual components, sub-assemblies, and the like). This makes it easy to repulse or dodge various business risks before they can cause financial and reputational distress to the enterprise. Studies indicate digital natives (aka Generation Z) are more attuned to take digitalization in their stride, compared to previous generations that came of age in an analog era. We need some reality check here. The average age of an American procurement professional is 46 years, compared with an average of 43.4 years for the US services sector as a whole! Nearly half of all procurement staff are 50 years or older, which is not bad in itself. Since battle-hardened employees bring oodles of knowledge and a focus on restoring business stability to the table. However, younger procurement talent brings loads of ideas that can breathe new life into rigid and fixated procurement organizations. As experienced hands exit the system in some time, procurement organizations risk a serious erosion of their expertise, skillsets, techniques, practical knowledge, and first-hand experiences, not all of which are or can be documented. While some loss of institutional knowledge is unavoidable in an age of high staff churn, bidirectional knowledge sharing involving older and younger procurement talent will certainly help soften the blow. Hence, there is an imminent need for smarter procurement recruitment, which alone will ensure the next generation of procurement talent is onboarded the soonest.

Digitalization and procurement recruitment: The connection is so obvious

CPOs are increasingly under the gun to deliver cost efficiencies while curbing risks and meeting various compliance obligations. Digitalizing the procurement organization is the only way they can realize all these in the near-to-midterm. Using digital formats for supplier vetting and onboarding as well as managing requests for goods and services will help businesses save thousands of dollars. Automating tasks and making them simpler and more efficient also translates into significant human hours saved. And time is money, after all. Procurement heads and procurement recruitment teams can channel their scarce resources, thus conserved, into activities that fetch more returns on investment (ROI). Besides rejuvenating the procurement workforce and creating a more age-inclusive workplace, the arrival of younger procurement talent in the workforce will serve to turbo-charge the cause of digitalization. Procurement recruitment is indeed an important idea whose time is overdue.

Next-gens digital adaptiveness can be a huge dividend for businesses

Gen Z, born 1981 or after, came into being in an age of technology-led upheavals. Hence, the demographic has grown cozy with the erratic, disruptive, and fast-paced, often bordering on chaos, advances in digital technologies. So, its important that procurement talent, now and in the future, includes a fair share of digital natives who take to changing workflows and rapidly evolving processes much like ducks to water. Can procurement recruitment wait any longer?

Younger employees will help cross-pollinate ideas across the enterprise

Digital natives should be able to bring older colleagues to speed on new digital trends and platforms. The time spent upskilling older generations in the workforce is totally worth it. Because institutional knowledge sharing is a two-way street with benefits flowing both ways. Younger procurement talent, for its part, can profit from older workers wealth of lived experience and skills like empathy, purposeful thinking, time management, and conflict handling, and this might come handy in the longer term as they move up the organizational ladder. Procurement recruitment is an agenda crying for attention at many enterprises. That shouldnt be.

How SpendEdge can help you

Get more headroom in supplier negotiations

The procurement talent at SpendEdge is more than two decades old, and we draw on this rich store of expertise in negotiation advisory services to help businesses identify cost saving opportunities and reach more favorable deals with the supply side. The core focus of our negotiation advisory solutions is boosting clients confidence in the negotiation room and maximizing their bargaining power, especially in relation to influential suppliers. With time-proven approaches and techniques, our procurement talent helps businesses orchestrate win-win deals with suppliers, while saving the client time, effort, and money. Moreover, with smarter procurement recruitment, we continue to drive up our skillsets.

Rein in spend and improve risk-return profile

With deep and accurate data from across various segments and components of the supply chain, SpendEdges procurement talent enables businesses across industries to stay clear of threats and uncertainties. Our clients in sourcing and procurement receive alerts the very instant their inventory exceeds or drops below predefined levels. Besides, the procurement talent at diverse enterprises considers our razor-sharp analysis of costs and price points as a basis for working out fair prices for suppliers. On a continuous basis, we invest in procurement recruitment to ensure talent-wise we remain at the leading edge.

Take control of rogue spend

Our spend analysis tools are helping procurement talent across sectors sift out purchases from unauthorized suppliers, thus bringing a great deal of transparency, like never before, to business spends. This not only results in improved oversight of organization-wide spend but also reduces the likelihood of fraud and risks. SpendEdge has the procurement talent that really works, and clients vouch for that. Of course, we are a forward-looking organization, and procurement recruitment and talent augmentation are at the heart of all we do.

Contact us now to solve your procurement problems!

Author’s Details

Ankur Rishi

Vice President, Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence

With more than 12 years of advisory experience, Ankur manages platform content and services within the sourcing and procurement vertical. Over the years, Ankur has provided consulting services to category leaders from chemicals, energy, and packaging industry, on varied topics, such as category strategy, spend analysis, commodity pricing, and clean-sheet analysis.