How top procurement teams are tackling skills shortages

Talented people can build great careers in procurement and supply, yet the profession is struggling with an ongoing skills shortage. Read on for some recommended ways to find and keep your best people

The latest CIPS Procurement & Supply Salary Guide 2024, in partnership with Hays, shows 58% of those responsible for hiring procurement and supply professionals globally have struggled to find and retain talent in the past 12 months.

What’s going on – and what can you do to find and keep great people? 

Acknowledge the difficulty

The best procurement teams are looking for people with a combination of qualities and qualifications. They want professionals with technical capabilities and soft skills. And, it seems, they value the MCIPS designation. Among our respondents, 54% of employers globally request MCIPS (or those studying towards it) as a preference when recruiting.

Alongside this, employers face the additional difficulty of digitally transforming their procurement functions to stay relevant. That requires people with digital and AI skills.

How employers are tackling their skills shortages

According to our survey, employers of procurement professionals have taken a number of steps in the past 12 months to tackle the problem. In the UK – where the skills challenge is particularly apparent – some 88% of employers have acted to solve the issue.

What’s working? Steps have included:

• Increased use of recruitment agencies (32% of respondents)
• Hiring temporary or contract workers (29%)
• Recruiting more widely geographically (24%)
• Recruiting from other industries or professions (23%)

As Scott Dance, senior procurement engagement director for Hays highlights: “Many skills can be taught and learnt while on the job and having an open mind to what skills or experiences are truly essential could be a game-changer for hiring managers. If you cast the net a little wider, you could bring a highly engaged, dynamic individual on board who can pick up skills very quickly – something we’ve seen many companies do successfully in recent months.” 

Among employers that have recruited from other industries or professions, roughly half have successfully recruited into a procurement role from another function in the company. There’s a key lesson here: look at adjacent teams or functions to identify people with transferable skills.

The most in-demand skills

According to the latest salary guide, the most in-demand skills are negotiation, supplier relationship management, communication, internal stakeholder management, and sourcing. In other words, a combination of technical and soft skills. Given that MCIPS brings with it a solid grounding in all these, it looks increasingly like a good starting point for finding the best people.

Finding and keeping your best people

Employers of procurement professionals must work on their attraction and retention strategies to acquire and retain the right skills. Here are some effective ways to achieve that:

• Use workforce planning to assess your skills needs. Workforce planning can help you zero in on the skills and talent you need, in line with the labour market. Work with your HR team to establish a workforce plan that translates your key business problems and workforce implications into tailored solutions.
   
• Upskill your team. Upskilling costs less than hiring externally and can go a long way to helping you retain talented procurement professionals with the right skills. By upskilling your staff, you’ll be able to take stock of the skills that you have and develop new ones, all the while building an environment of mentorship and development.
   
• Encourage mentorship and development. Creating a culture of mentorship in your procurement team, where knowledge is shared and growth encouraged, will help you attract and retain ambitious people who want to learn and develop.
   
• Recruit people from adjacent functions. Those working in adjacent functions, such as logistics and operations management, have transferable skills that suit many procurement positions. Hiring more widely in this way will help you diversify your team and unlock new ways of working.
   
• Outsource aspects of your procurement function to third parties. For those skills that are proving particularly hard to acquire or retain, consider outsourcing to tackle the problem. Outsourcing is a cost-effective way to add specialist skills to your procurement team and can help you recruit from a more extensive network.
   
• Work with education institutions to attract people early. Procurement’s role is changing and moving more towards a focus on sustainability and ethics. Young people care deeply about these issues, and, with the right training, can help drive forward this focus. Working with education institutions will help you to attract more young people to your procurement team and develop the procurement professionals of tomorrow.

Looking to secure skilled procurement and supply professionals capable of navigating your organisation through an increasingly volatile world? Contact Scott Dance, Senior Procurement Engagement Director at Hays.