Over at Procurement Leaders, the staff reports that in the UK the “flood of jobless procurement pros creates ‘challenging’ environment” for those looking to staff up their procurement functions. Not only is there a bigger talent pool that needs to be navigated, but in many cases there are great retention risks involved as many companies hire over-qualified staff to fill the vacancies.
Last year I edited a book called “Purchasing Tranformation” and in it Björn Stenecker provided a solid skill mapping model which he had used to great effect when dealing with hiring, rentention, development and coaching issues of purchasing functions.
Simply put the model spreads 20 or so criteria across four dimensions which are graded on a scale of 1-5 for both the individual hire/employee and the role.
Education
- Level of education
General competence
- IS/IT
- IS/IT – ERP knowledge
- Project management
- Budget
- Business development
- Strategy development
Specific competence
- Purchasing skills
- Negotiations
- Contracting
- Supplier development
- Category expertise
- Logistics
Personal skills
- Leadership
- Analysis
- Communication
- Cooperation
- Stress handling
- Initiative
- Accuracy
- Flexibility
This model can be used as self assessment in the recruiting process for new hires to quickly see which candidates fit the proposed role. It is also a brilliant tool for seeing in which direction one could develop over-qualified staff in order to retain the competence in the company.
