Hélène:
Welcome to the Procurement Game Changers, the podcast for leaders that make a difference.
Today we’ll be talking about how HR and procurement can team up to attract the right talent.
And to discuss this topic, I have the pleasure to receive Nina Bomberg, Global Indirect procurement Director at Dormakaba, a global leader in the Access Solutions market.
Nina has more than 16 years of working experience, mostly in Indirect procurement on goods and services. She has an extensive industrial experience ranging from Chemical to Equipments. Welcome to the show, Nina.
Nina:
Thank you very much, Hélène. Great to be here.
Hélène:
So Nina, could you tell us what led you to procurement?
Nina:
Like with so many of my colleagues, I have to say it was pure coincidence. At university, this was nothing that you could study. I think the very closest, when I studied, you could get to procurement was probably supply chain and logistics.
And that maybe touched a very little bit on the fringes of procurement. But by and large, you could go into Finance and you could go into Marketing, in HR, and those were all very known and very prestigious places to go if you study business studies. But procurement wasn’t.
So I ended up by chance, my first employment was by a Randstad. So it was a temp labor agency. And I ended up with Mars who needed support in their purchasing organization.
And that’s how I got there. And then I think like with most of them. You hate it or you love it. And I loved it and I stayed. And that’s how 17 years went by.
Hélène:
Yeah, I can get that. So today we’re going to talk about procurement talent. And we know that it is in short supply in todays’ market. And HR departments are an important partner for procurement leaders when recruiting new employees.
So they provide a way to identify and access potential candidates and find the best match for your needs. However, they have not always adapted their recruiting tools to the recent changes in the labor market.
So this can lead to several problems, including a lack of qualified candidates, a difficulty in attracting top talents and an inability to keep up with the changing demand and lengthy processes.
So as the labor market continues to evolve, it’s essential that HR departments adapt their recruiting tools accordingly, otherwise they will continue to fail to meet the needs of their internal clients, including the procurement group. So let’s hear their perspective of a procurement leader on this challenge.
So Nina, what have changed in the competition to attract the right talent, for procurement, or for indirect procurement?
Nina:
Well, I really think that the competition for talent was always big in that space. We always have those discussions. Does procurement have an image problem? I actually don’t think procurement has an image problem.
Procurement has an awareness problem. I think if you go back to many universities today and look at the business study courses, they will still not include procurement as one of the potential fields that you can go into.
So that is actually, for me, the hardest part. And then adding the war for talent on top, where now we see less potential candidates out there in the market, we get hit even harder and the problem gets even bigger because then people are drawn to the big things that are out there and that are known and it’s hard to adjust to them.
And I think that not every HR department has really adapted and embraced the fact that at the moment it’s an employee’s market. They have the absolute choice of where they want to work, as long as they have decent capabilities, which are definitely the people we’re looking for.
So we have not really adjusted our processes to the fact that employees probably have five, six different employers that they can choose from if they’re looking for a new job. So if we take three months to get back to them, odds are somebody else only took two.
And if they don’t really, really, really want to work with us, then they will have taken someone else’s opportunity. And that’s why we need to just be a lot faster in date. I mean, we also need to be, you know, we need to be more aware and we need to make people more aware of the profession, and we try to work on that continuously.
You know, we go to universities, we present our jobs, we show people what we do and really actually think procurement is a perfect, um, example of a good job, especially in these crisis times.
Because I’ve never seen people letting organizations, letting procurement go in times of crisis because that’s when you need them the most. In times of no crisis, you’re not going to let people go. So it’s actually a quite stable job compared to other things within.
Hélène:
It’s not going away. Right. So, have you seen though the role of HR evolve over the last few years?
Nina:
I think to a certain degree, yes. I think there is a bigger understanding that we will need to recruit in a different way. We will need to head hunt a lot earlier.
We don’t tend to wait as long anymore. I mean, when I started to work, Job ads, they were still in a newspaper on Saturdays and Sundays, that even big jobs.
Hélène:
And that I can relate to that. Yeah.
Nina:
And that has definitely changed. That doesn’t exist anymore. And, now we’re talking about, you know, is it worthwhile to put a job in StepStone?
Is that something we still wanna do? Is that something people still look? Personally I say I don’t. I haven’t been to the StepStone website probably in a decade, to be honest.
Which is why we’re becoming more active. Internal recruiting organizations within your own company, they become more active and they start searching out.
So, even if I look at who’s contacting me, you know, you get suddenly get contacted by LinkedIn, by recruiters of certain companies, because that’s the path they follow.
Hélène:
Yeah, absolutely. So,
what tactics do you use to attract the right talents for your procurement group?
Nina:
I think the most important thing is to actually just overall be an attractive employer. You know, to have interesting tasks. That’s what people care about most, together with, I would say, a likable company culture. And likable is a very relative term because it depends a lot on the type of personality you are.
You know, if you work in an American or a French or a German company, they come with certain company cultures, some more than others.
And some might have changed over time, but I also think that the company culture is extremely important. So you know, what’s the best company for me might not be the best company for you.
I think it’s very, very important to talk to candidates upfront about finding that right match between you and the company versus yeah, we always talk about, you know, finding the perfect company which is just not going to cut the deal anymore.
Hélène:
We discussed during the preparation about purpose and how talents now on the market are looking for purpose in their jobs.
But I was thinking about what you just said and remember when you had your interviews and people were asking you, what can you bring to our company. Maybe we’re on the other side, what your company can bring me as a candidate. We kind of reversed the [situation].
Nina:
Definitely, definitely. That is something people talk about. And it’s not just, I mean, home office being one of them, which is not even a point that’s negotiable anymore, but it’s a given. I mean, you would have to have very good reasons as a company to deny it if you are looking for good candidates.
But the same goes for having, you know, having whatever is important to the candidate. One discussion I recently had was with a consulting agency who said that they really struggled because what used to be their very strong selling point, you know, of your career progression and you earn lots of money is a lot harder to sell to the generations to come.
Because their Saturday is not for sale, no matter what price. It just isn’t. Nor is there 3:00 AM in the morning.
It just isn’t, period. Which means that industries like those will struggle a lot and I hope that is something where we can then pull some of the talent out of those industries and pull them towards our end.
Hélène:
Yeah, and I think you’re right. I think they have to rethink their business models that are based on staffing, you know and how much occupied they are to something different because that’s not gonna cut it anymore. You’re right.
So going back to procurement leaders, how do they need to evolve? Do you think they need to evolve in their role in order to attract those top talents?
Nina:
I do agree. Definitely, because you just, in my opinion, you need to really work with each and every person as an individual.
And I really think that as a leader you have to adapt to the people you’re working with, in a hybrid model even more. Because we’ve had lots of discussions about, you know, how much leadership do people need, how much connection do people need? And that varies a lot from person to person.
So I have people in my team who I speak to at least four days a week and I have people in my team who after two months I call them up to see if they’re still alive. I know their job is running fine because I haven’t heard from them. So it’s running fine.
But just to reconnect and say, hey, I’m still here, you are still here. How is life? What’s going on? But to have this level of balance and to then also be able to have this level of trust in your people to say, okay, there are people who don’t need this very close connection because they don’t, that’s not what they’re here for. To then be able to trust them and just let them go and let them do their job.
Hélène:
Yes. I agree with you. And I think that the pandemics has forced us to work remotely and to let go a little bit of that control that we might have on our teams.
That the fact of being so close sometimes was easier, even though for international companies, the remote part was already there.
You were not in the same building or in the same country even. But I think that it forced us to be a little more adaptive in the way we work with them. And that’s true for procurement leaders and that’s true for leaders anywhere. I can tell, even in my very small company.
So indeed, you have to change your ways, you have to adapt to whoever you work with. You have to build the trust and then make sure that the way you connect with your teams is the most effective for them, for you and for the organization.
But then you have to work with HR at some point. Before that so,
How do you see the future of HR and procurement working together?
Nina:
So I have to say having moved to a new company four weeks ago; I have experienced something that seems, that seems pretty close already to be honest. And it was a big, big step forward for me when I experienced it.
But the HR business partner for example, takes part in strategic meetings. They take part in leadership workshops. They are part of all of this happening. So they really understand the department, they understand where the department’s going, what the needs in the future are and what kind of people we will need to support this.
They actually know who the people are who work in that department. You know, they have faces to names and capabilities to names and faces, which is something that really, really is a valuable point. Because if you then have a topic that you need to discuss with them, you don’t have to start at square one and you know, explain them the entire background, the entire story and everything that’s been going on.
But they have been very close during the entire process. So they are very much aligned with the needs that we have.
And they also understand, they understand the market, you know, despite the fact that they are not buyers, they have a basic understanding of buying and of the skills you need to be successful in that profession.
So they know that what we are looking for. If I say I need a global category manager they actually have a picture in mind. The next question is not okay then send me the requirements of that person. But they actually have an idea of what kind of person is I’m looking for.
Hélène:
That’s funny. I had a discussion with a procurement leader who is building from scratch an indirect procurement group and he was telling me that the first step was to connect with different decision makers in the company in order to explain what they do and understand what are the pain points.
And so it seems like, you know, the work of HR in that particular angle and the work of an indirect procurement leader is quite similar.
Like get to know your internal stakeholders, connect with them, know what they do, know what their challenge are and when they need you, be there and be useful. And that’s how you can really build successful relationships.
Nina:
I couldn’t agree more. I mean purchasing, just like HR, we are internal service departments.
So it’s our job to make sure that the rest of the company functions and like we have internal stakeholders, HR has internal stakeholders, holders, and indeed how the way that we try to help our internal stakeholders while at the same time, you know, maintaining our cost leadership and compliance and so on.
HR does the same thing. They provide an internal service to the rest of the company while at the same time following their processes, compliance, same thing, cost, et cetera. But the concept is exactly the same. Yes.
Hélène:
Now it’s time to the takeaway. Let’s imagine that we have a few of our listeners that want to improve the way they recruit talent. What advice would you give them, you know, really to get started, What is the thing that they should look for?
Nina:
So to me, if you really want to attract the right people, the first question I would always ask myself is, if my best friend was looking for a job, would I recommend this job to them? That to me is a really important question because if your answer is no, then you have to change something in your department before you can attract the right talent. Because if you don’t feel comfortable offering this job to your friends, really it’s probably not attractive to many people out there.
Hélène:
Absolutely. And then you mentioned before that there are ways to increase the awareness, even internally, of what is procurement and how they contribute to the company. Because it goes both ways.
I mean, you need a good culture, but you also need your internal stakeholders to recognize your group. And if you are not, then to be on the way to do it mean work towards them being aware of you. So that’s kind of the idea.
Nina:
Definitely. I mean they need to see the value. And it’s usually when you’ve handled the first claim for some department, when they really start understanding the value of procurement, when they don’t have to deal with the small print in the contract and don’t have to figure out why this went wrong and how this could be fixed.
That’s usually when you can win their hearts to then gain the trust that next time you would be included in an RFQ earlier. Or they would ask for your advice upfront before they do something where they know they should have involved you, but they thought it was faster if they didn’t.
Hélène:
Well, wonderful. Thank you Nina for sharing your perspective on how to attract talents in the procurement space. Thank you a lot.
Nina:
Thanks Hélène. It was great being here.
Hélène:
So now it’s your turn to tell us about your experience and your challenges when working with HR to recruit the right people for the procurement group in the common section. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want to be notified when a new episode is out.
Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy this episode. And if that’s the case, don’t forget to give us a thumbs up.
So, happy sourcing to you all and au revoir.
P.S:- Listen to our previous PGC podcast Here.
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