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Writer's pictureTom Lewers

Talent in the Making | PSquared


Invest in your existing capability and realise talent potential, reduce significant recruitment and time costs in a procurement market where talent is scarce, and costs are high.


Procurement organisations continue to face a high level of competition for adequate talent. Demand for top talent continues to outstrip supply, and the demands and expectations from organisations continues to grow. Procurement leaders are challenged to develop strategies that map more closely to business priorities.


CPO’s invest significant time, cost and effort to find the required levels of technical and analytical competences externally, as well as leadership and professional competencies required for executing high-priority strategies. Mastering talent management comes down to the challenge of addressing the complex features of the procurement talent market: its shortage of well-suited applicants, the cost of hiring to replace lost talent potential, the gap of current employees’ skills against the capabilities to execute, and the increasing importance of digital procurement. Demand for soft skills, coupled with analytical insight, is where capabilities need to be enhanced further. As technology evolves, the automation of processing and transactional activities will increase, and the size of procurement teams will reduce. Time will be freed, to concentrate on the more strategic challenges, with procurement leaders and their teams requiring a broader range of commercial and business partnering/collaborative skills.


Think about the challenges your organisation faces and what’s important to long-term success. You will then have a better appreciation of the challenges ahead and the resources required to meet the challenges. A recent DHL survey found that companies excelling in talent management increased their revenues 2.2 times as fast and their profits 1.5 times as fast as ‘talent laggards’. A recent Deloitte’s survey found that 72% of respondents said that they spent less than 2% of their operating budgets on developing their existing teams. In contrast, high performers spent 4% or more on training and development. In the 2019 Deloitte’s CPO report, 55% of companies had found it more difficult to recruit talent. If polled again, the percentage will be higher.


As the demand for talent continues to outstrip supply, organisations that do not invest in their existing capability lose their best talent first and incur significant cost to hire replacements, if they are able to recruit the new skills required. Investing in your existing capability is a lower cost solution, one which your internal stakeholders and existing team will embrace, and one which will release significant leadership time to focus on high-priority strategies.


Solving your business problem. Procurement Potential and Procurement Heads are working in collaboration with the introduction of our talent management offering, PSquared. There is a huge opportunity to improve retention and positively impact the bottom line. This is why we have created PSquared, which combines the hands-on, practical experience of CPO-level leadership, with recruitment market and client knowledge, insight and expertise. PSquared is all about the talent management and retention of procurement and supply chain professionals. At a time when organisations are losing their best employees, investing in your existing capability has never been more important!


We offer a personalised talent management programme, with our rapid capability assessment, talent management framework and coaching experience. Our service offering is tailored around people, profit, and the planet. Procurement and supply chain leaders who place equal importance on all three enjoy stronger teams, improved retention levels and enhanced company-wide collaboration.


We provide a capability assessment where people, not process comes first. Our approach is forward-looking, focusing on competencies that matter now and in the future. It’s a rapid assessment and includes the development of a competency blueprint for individuals, based around simplicity and business value. When we talk about the competencies we assess being built around the skills of the future, we’re particularly talking about digital, agility, customer centricity and collaborative working.


We’ve developed a talent management framework, an approach that is inclusive and relevant to leaders and their teams who embrace learning and development. An approach that will help CPOs to see how even more of their team can become confidently engaged in developing strategies, than focus on transactional procurement matters.


You can read more about PSquared here.


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