Unpacking the Complexity of Supply Chain Hiring

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Rodney Apple: Welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast. This is the Career Catalyst series, and today’s episode we’re gonna focus on why supply chain hiring is so difficult. Why is it harder than it looks?

And if you think about it, you know myself, I’ve got over 25 years of being specialized in supply chain recruitment and hiring and across all industries for Fortune 500. So I’ve seen a lot, and I’ve been living it. That’s my full-time job. And we wanted to take a, the opportunity to talk about this.

I’ve recruited across a lot of different other functions too across the business, and I feel like supply chain is by far, even compared to IT is which is full of jargons and acronyms it’s very challenging. And we’re gonna get into some of the reasons why and how employers as well as how, candidates and professionals and job seekers should be…

Some things they should think about to position themselves for success and to cut through the noise and the ambiguity. But when you look from the outside in it… hiring [00:01:00] can look fairly straightforward. We define the job, we identify the objectives, the deliverables. We’re starting to focus on titles and searching for companies and candidates with the right experience, right?

That, that’s boiling the recruitment process down into its simplest form, but it just doesn’t work that way in supply chain. A- again, there’s a ton of ambiguity. There’s not a whole lot of black and white. Titles alone can vary, and we’re gonna get into that, some examples of how they can vary.

There’s some jobs where I can probably think of at least 20, 25 titles for that one job. The scope can vary tremendously as well. Industries there’s some transferable experience from industry to industry. Other jobs you absolutely will need that industry experience. Operating models can vary dramatically.

Throw in the culture differences, throw in global supply chains, and you just… That’s what feeds that am- that ambiguity. So today we’re gonna unpack why supply chain hiring is harder than it looks and where companies [00:02:00] tend to get stuck, and again, what employers, HR, TA professionals and supply chain professionals can do differently to make this easier and to stand out.

So why do organizations, including experienced HR talent acquisition professionals, and supply chain executives, why do they underestimate how difficult it can be to identify the right supply chain talent? I’m gonna turn it over to Chris to go through that question.

Chris Gaffney: Yeah and I, we talked in our prep, this is, there’s a lot of meat and potatoes in here. So I think the first things that I would highlight there reflecting my own experience is, y- in many cases the job is open. So there is a sense of urgency, and in many of these senior supply chain roles, they have an operating element to them.

We need to get somebody in the seat, right away. You’re working maybe with an interim, you’ve got a gap. And so you have that anxiety and concern, [00:03:00] and you want a candidate who is literally day one ready, which in, in many cases may not be realistic, but that’s the emotional need that’s there.

You may be uncomfortable with your own ability at a more senior level to give somebody time. Whereas in a more junior role you may say, “Oh, this person’s gonna flow into the role over the next 90 days,” and it’s great. So I think those kind of emotions force you to say, “We need the candidate who is like the Johnny Bravo.

They fit the suit. They can walk right in,” and that may be unrealistic. And I think the other thing is, in many cases you may overestimate the uniqueness of y- your operation. So to me, that’s not the totality of the list, but those are the kind of things I think that can create that underestimation of how difficult it can be.

Rodney Apple: Absolutely, Chris. And then, maybe we could start out with just the [00:04:00] variance in titles. I personally wish we could get to some level of standardization across all industries and companies with what we call certain jobs. But the fact of the matter is, y- you could give the plant manager example, right?

We’ve got a, a few of those searches right now for plant managers and, what they’re called could range from a, a site leader, a factory manager, director of manufacturing, director of operations. Sometimes just they use general manager. I’ve seen VPs, VP of manufacturing that, that’s over a single site, right?

So the titles can vary, but then maybe you could speak towards the complexity of the scope and how things can drastically differ from one industry or one site to another.

Chris Gaffney: Yep. And I think this is gonna be a challenge on both sides, both for the company hiring and the candidate who has to steward their own experience.

If you work at a very simple, smaller size footprint, I’ve seen plants that have less than 100 people in them. They may have three or four production [00:05:00] lines with a very simple conversion process, very stable demand, very narrow mix of products robust industrial equipment that runs well.

And someone in that role can look like a hero. And they may have a lot of on-site resources, so they’ve got a full leadership team sitting there. And that person, looks fantastic on paper. But when, when you translate that into what a new, a new employer may look for is that m- that person may walk into an operation that they’re totally unequipped to, to deal with.

Because on the other end of the extreme, you may have a 500-employee facility, twenty-four/seven operations, vertical integration, manufacturing, and distribution on site, and it’s like running a small city. And the level of leadership that’s required, it’s almost like multi-site leadership requirement for a single site just because of the scale of the operation.

And I think that kind of disparity both [00:06:00] in, what the job requires and what someone’s experience has, I think I think that creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of potential mismatching. And then to the point that we’ve talked about is good talent may get underestimated. Someone may be operating in a very small but complex setting and not get credit for it, and you may miss someone who was ready to take on that, that bigger role.

Rodney Apple: Exactly. Yeah, and Mike I know you’ve got another example you wanted to highlight just on the distribution side. The– I think giving these two examples is can paint the perspectives of why this is difficult just from a, a size, scope complexity perspective.

Mike Ogle: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You can look at those titles, and there’s quite a range of titles even for the same type of position and that you may find in different in-industries, depending on what they’re just used to calling it. But it could be the same title and maybe just a, turns out to be a very different job.

So even when you [00:07:00] find that, you just don’t know whether the, it’s at the right level of scale or complexity or other kinds of characteristics we really wanna cover. So I think as, as Chris was starting out saying a little bit, you may have a distribution center manager, for instance. One runs, let’s say, a 50,000 square foot facility that has 40 employees, but maybe another one runs also a traditionally mechanized but not highly automated network of facilities.

And so they’ve got a greater level of responsibility and decisions that had to be made across a variety of facilities. And then you may have another one that is running a highly automated two million square foot fulfillment operation with 1,500 employees out there trying to do really high volume work.

These are gonna be different environments that you have to think about, even though it may say distribution center manager. So some of the characteristics that you [00:08:00] should probably be asking about is trying to understand what are those facility sizes? What were the headcounts? How many shifts did they manage?

How big is their network of facilities that are out there? How many SKUs do they have to manage? So those stock keeping units, you better get those counts and complexity. Does it turn out that they’re just pallet in, pallet out experience? Or are there cases or cartons flowing through?

Are there eaches? Are they individual kinds of items that get picked and have to get packed and sent out, that day or within hours? What is their experience? Are they convey- conveyables or non-conveyables? Instead of Amazon packages maybe in, in boxes that show up at your door, maybe it’s somebody trying to ship couches or steel that’s in various lengths.

What kind of throughput, order volume the kinds of equipment that they’re used to dealing with. Have they ever been in a union [00:09:00] shop? Regulatory kinds of issues that they’ve dealt with or that your company needs. Have they had that kind of experience? Can they be taught that kind of experience?

Are they used to doing budgeting? Do they understand the P&Ls and what the company wants to do? Do they understand, have they worked under your strategy? I usually tell the students cheap, fast, good is probably the easiest way to end up remembering things, where you’re trying to say, are you the low-cost leader?

Are you trying to be the best in quality or service time or whatever the, those different characteristics are. It may be that they just have always been under the same kind of mindset. So if you don’t understand that about the person, you really have to be able to get that, those kind of characteristics understood.

So that scope and complexity, I’d say, are the key takeaway. They often matter more than that title will.

Rodney Apple: Absolutely. Yeah so we’re basically layer… I like to look at this episode, we’re just gonna [00:10:00] continuously layer the ambiguity, and it’s gonna get really thick. But now let’s talk about the environment or maybe that operating model that’s behind the job.

And I think manufacturing is a perfect example where the disparity from one site to another can vary thinking about the, just the business strategy with, make to stock versus make to order. You’ve got engineer to order. Working on a VP of supply chain role now, and the company is premium products in the industry, to your point, Mike and that’s what differentiates them, but it’s all make to order.

The lead times are not that great. Customers are complaining. They’re working with data centers and they want things now as they rapidly build and hyperscale. And so they’re shifting their operating model to where it’s make to stock and make to order. And so that’s a really big transition across their manufacturing network and standing up, S&OP and demand planning and trying to forecast how much of these widgets or SKUs do we need to make to satisfy the demand.

And, that’s a new team to [00:11:00] build out, right? You’ve got the high volume, low mix, low volume, high mix environment. When you think about your bill of materials that goes into your manufacturing, you’ve got different processing and continuous batch processing. You got chemicals as an example, and then you’ve got discrete manufacturing where a lot of that is is assembly and bolting on components and parts to get to that finished good.

Assembly, fabrication, process manufacturing, and then you’ve got environments, automotive’s a great example, that are highly automated. A lot of machinery, a lot of robotics are building the vehicles, and then you’ve got sometimes the opposite that’s very, labor intensive, where still a lot of manual labor that’s out there doing that assembly.

And a lot of companies on that latter side are investing because hard to be competitive these days if you don’t have some form of machinery or equipment that’s doing some of the heavy lifting. We talked about single site versus multi-site greenfield, brand new. You’re gonna dig dirt and build a brand new site from scratch, and [00:12:00] sometimes you’re moving into a brownfield where there’s an existing infrastructure, existing building you’re gonna convert into a new type of site.

We’ve seen operations that are very mature. Oftentimes we’re called in to find that turnaround leader working on a search now a micromanager and a plant manager. It’s driving people out. We need to find somebody that’s a cultural transformation, integrator can develop the people and really have that bottom-up leadership style or servant leadership style.

Layer in the regulatory requirements, food and beverage. Chris and I worked at Coca-Cola for a number of years and you’ve got the FDA that’s coming in and, making sure that we’re producing safe products that meet quality standards before they go out to consumers, and there can be a lot of risk involved if you put out some bad product, and I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories in that regard.

You think about the maturity of the environment. Lean continuous improvement. Are they very efficient? Are they getting the ideal throughput? And then there’s the, we’re trying to make these [00:13:00] improvements the CapEx budgets that come into play. I’ve gotta upgrade my equipment.

I’ve gotta add new lines. I need to expand my footprint. Throw in the shifts union, non-union and again, that’s… You can see that all plant managers are not equal from one site to another, and so to be successful on the hiring and recruiting front you gotta understand all these perspectives.

Chris, you wanna talk about like how industries matter, To get into those, those nuances

Chris Gaffney: Yeah I have a pretty strong opinion about this and, over my lifetime in, in industry, and the majority of that, as we talked about, was at Coke I watched people biased towards, “Let me make sure th- they’ve virtually done this job before,” as their rubric.

And in fact, on average, that didn’t necessarily prove to be successful, right? [00:14:00] And so I will say controversial and my big reveal for this is that I bet much more now on demonstrated agility and the soft skills. If you really want to make bigger bets in getting the right people in your organization I look for a candidate that has been successful in multiple settings.

And familiarity with the space, right? I don’t want somebody who’s been a great IT person and I think he could, he or she can be a great plant manager. Let’s be clear. If they’re in the, if they’re in the functional space, but they’ve done it in multiple industries and they- they’ve progressed in that space, so their degree of difficulty has gone up in terms of scope and responsibility, and they’ve worked across.

M- that demonstrated agility, to me, is something that is an underlying trait that suggests this person can readjust and be effective in multiple spaces. So I bias towards that. I think the other reality is if you talk to most of the people, [00:15:00] and we’ve interviewed between us in the Core Careers podcast, hundreds of people.

If you listen, almost all of them were not fully qualified for a new job when they walked into the door. So you have to be objective around that practical reality and y- say what are my must-haves in that?” So in, in my space, I actually think a lot of things transfer well, particularly on the hows, right?

On how you deal with people and how you lead and how you delegate authority. I think those are pretty enduring. I think we talk about some of the things that are unique to the pace and volume and velocity and mix of the facility and customer and service expectations. I think I’d like someone to have been exposed to that.

I don’t wanna have somebody go from completely low mix to super high mix. I don’t want somebody in a highly automated facility to have been in a completely manual [00:16:00] facility. But if somebody’s one degree off in almost all of my capabilities, plus has demonstrated agility- I’m gonna really get to a very small list of must-haves before somebody comes in.

So that’s a philosophy that may be somewhat controversial. But I, I think that’s important, and I give you two, two examples, right? When Tesla started building the big mega plants and they realized that their plants were not similar to other automotive necessarily, they scoured the country for the best and the brightest.

And I saw this with some of our Georgia Tech grads. And they threw them into the pot over there, and many of them were highly successful. And say what you want about Tesla, but they throw a lot of vehicles off the line. Same thing’s true for SpaceX, right? We had a much smaller space industry and we brought a bunch of new people into it, and they launched those rockets every few weeks.

Now I heard another story about a company that was going into the [00:17:00] battery business in the US, and you can say what you want about where that is, but they were building a precursor raw material i- to go into battery production, and they, the facility I think is up in Tennessee. And they basically said, “There’s nobody in the country who does this.”

So we couldn’t go find all the Johnny Bravo candidates who fit the suit. We had to say w- what were the most adjacent industries where people had enough of what we were dealing with, and they looked at chemical processing and other things that were there, and they said, “We then found the best people.”

So I I, I’ll cut to the chase. I think there are actually very few, must-haves in terms of what somebody has done, as long as they’re one peg away in, I would say more than 70% of what you’re looking for in the job

Rodney Apple: Yeah. Thank you for that perspective as I sometimes have to deal with very, very stubborn clients who are just insistent they have to come from my industry.

And quick example is we’re working on a, a [00:18:00] VP of enterprise planning search. This in their industry segment they’re already pretty mature. They just wanna continuously advance the planning function, like a lot of companies are doing, especially with AI and and machine learning.

And let’s go out and look in our industry. And they even told us, “You’re probably not gonna find companies of our size that are as advanced as we are,” but they need to have this industry experience. And that conversation, that, that might have gone a week or two as we went down the very very short list of target companies, and we quickly came to the realization this role, this level of experience you’re looking for does not exist.

Now, where else are we gonna find short shelf life, high degree of complexity? And we con- convinced them, let’s go look in some adjacent industries that have that, like pharmaceutical distribution, where there might be a, a expiration tag on some of those products. And looking for vo- volume and complexity that was something just relevant ’cause at the end of the [00:19:00] day you’re planning widgets, and I think y- what’s that curve to learn?

The short shelf life. And so we got everybody to say kumbaya and aligned, and that really helped us significantly expand the candidate pool and sped up that process of generating some candidates. So there’s a- another good example. Let’s continue to layer on the ambiguity. Mike, I’m gonna turn it over to you.

We’re gonna get into just the operating models. I know you’re gonna touch on things like companies that outsource everything versus they do it all themselves and related attributes.

Mike Ogle: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess with apologies to some of the younger listeners who may not get this l- this example but in the days of when we used transparencies to deliver lectures and then moved on to PowerPoint, death by PowerPoint but the old phrase was, they just end up using the same transparencies, from class to class.

And so we’d say blow the dust off the transparencies and just deliver the same stuff again. I think the– in this particular [00:20:00] situation, you need to really be aware of not just the fact of whether you end up having those two different models a- as a company, and that it’s always been that way. But if you end up having a situation where you used to do everything yourself, but slowly but surely you found partners, you started outsourcing things the title and the things that you look for that used to be in the old request for what was required or what was, we would prefer that you have these kinds of characteristics.

If it turns out that the business has changed because you’ve gone through– you’ve radically changed your supply chain, you better understand that. And if you’re on the HR side of things, not just dig out the old version that you had, blow the dust off it, off of it is my example, and then you just put it out there again as if you were searching for the same person.

Do you have in-house versus outsourced manufacturing, as Rodney was saying? Are you still [00:21:00] using a private fleet or have you outsourced the transportation as well and dealt with that complexity? Company-operated DCs versus going to 3PLs. Have you insourced versus outsourced different kinds of functions?

Maybe somebody comes in and drops your inventory off at the line, that they’re doing ven-vendor managed kind of inventory could be another thing that you have to think about. Is there a hybrid of all this stuff that you’re dealing with? Domestic versus global net-networks, centralized versus decentralized organizations.

Just understand and ask the questions of the people that are on the supply chain side, what’s changed since the last time we went out and found one of these kinds of people in this type of role? And, how do we need to change our approach? Are there different places we need to try to place these kinds of jobs to do so that we’re fishing in the right pond in the first place as well?

So what does that candidate actually need to have [00:22:00] operated themselves versus just simply managed through partners and service providers?

Rodney Apple: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, a great perspective. And as we recruit just even examples from current searches, we’re working on roles where everything is outsourced to, manufacturers in China and other places, right? And then there’s plenty of companies that do everything internally with their own company-owned manufacturing plants.

We’ve got one that outsources to China, but they own the factory in China. You’re gonna see a myriad of examples and cases. And the key is, leading, managing external suppliers is very different than managing your internal assets. And that– I’m gonna always gravitate towards candidates that have operated in one environment or the other and ideally they’ve done a little bit of both.

I’m gonna get into some other attributes that can build onto this complexity ladder. Thinking about company size, thinking about the ownership and then the culture of the [00:23:00] company, the values. They can vary drastically. And we hear this a lot. I grew up, recruiting in four Fortune 500s.

They tend to recruit from one another. They want that scale. It’s, it can be very enormous. People tend to be very specialized. You get into the other extreme, a startup or a small little mom-and-pop company, you’re gonna wear a lot more hats. You’re gonna be in a very hands-on environment.

You’re gonna have to get your hands dirty and do a lot of the work yourself without having those layers of resources and fancy systems at your fingertips. So there’s, there are the two extremes, and then in the middle, you got mid-size or mid-cap companies where, yeah, a little bit of both, right? It takes a lot more time to make decisions in larger companies than it does smaller companies.

But public corporations, right? They are beholden to their shareholders, and so they’re managing by the quarter and, trying to hit their financial targets. Smaller companies, you may not even unders- understand their financials and their profitability. Sometimes they keep those things close to the vest.

But the cultures can vary quite differently. [00:24:00] We do a lot of work with with, in private equity-owned companies. And they’re gonna try to cram a lot of objectives. A lot of these are building onto the platform with acquisitions, acquisition integrations oftentimes on a five-year horizon.

And they’re trying to get back the the growth and the profitability or EBITDA targets so they can position the company to sell and then, oftentimes that’s gonna be a rinse and repeat. A lot of times founder-led companies I’m a founder. I’m still leading SCM Talent Group, and you’ve got different dynamics there as it relates to resources, infrastructure, decision-making, speed and d- think about boards.

You’ve got a board of directors. You’re gonna see that in a lot of the larger companies whether they’re publicly owned or privately owned, and a lot of decisions needs to go through, through that board. And having that exposure is important for some roles, right? These are the things you’re gonna see, that, that are gonna vary drastically from company size, the ownership, and the culture is– can vary quite a bit too.

[00:25:00] And I– when I take new searches Of course, we’re gonna go down those must-have, nice-to-have across the functional technical competencies, and oftentimes the all-important leadership competencies. But I always feel like equally important are the company values. What is their mission?

What is their purpose? You’ve gotta get a good read on that because you can find the perfect candidate, checks all the boxes, they can walk on water, but if they don’t fit into the culture and the values and they can’t integrate it is very rare that they’re gonna stick around for the long haul.

So that’s– so those are some some additional perspectives when it comes to the ownership, the company size, all of that stuff matters.

Chris Gaffney: Rodney, I would comment on this that I think it– as the roles rise a lot of these things, if I’m an analyst or a frontline manager or whatever, th- these are less of a consideration.

But as you rise, they become more relevant. And I do think this is both the hiring side and the candidate [00:26:00] side. As you and I talk to people who are, at that VP and above level, they’re very cognizant of these things, right? They know, in some cases, there can be very different pros and cons in public versus private.

I think you either like to work in PE or don’t, right? It’s– I think it– that one’s pretty binary because of the level of intensity that’s there. As you say, I think with founders, it’s just eyes open, right? If you’re gonna work in a founder in a startup and you’re going that, you know there’s a high risk and a high reward metric that’s there.

So I think that’s relevant. I do say for lots of candidates, getting exposure to a board, even in a smaller setting, like I worked in some kind of training wheels board situations in my roles at Coke, super valuable to then understand that dynamic, and I think that’s coaching for our audience who are a click below these levels and say, “Someday I wanna aspire to these roles, but I need to be a little more thoughtful to what does it look like in my company [00:27:00] that’s public, that’s very quarterly-driven versus, an experience working for a family-owned business that has a longer-term horizon, whether it’s my experience or friends.”

I think these are things you wanna get exposure to, to start to understand your own litmus test as a candidate and say, “How do I position myself if I, I c- I have those opportunities in the future?” But I think it’s on the hiring side, This is another example where I think if the person has the goods and you believe in their hows, I think a lot of these, are solvable.

These weren’t– these wouldn’t be the reasons. If I had the right candidate who had the right profile of experience and the soft skills or whatever, I wouldn’t get hung up if they’d never worked in my type of organization

Rodney Apple: Chris, what are your thoughts as it relates to you move up into the executive ranks.

We’ve talked about the complexities, the ambiguity but when you hear the term supply chain, [00:28:00] I need a head of supply chain, and we’ve got a number of those searches ongoing right now. In my opinion and from what I’ve seen, no, no two supply chains are identical. As we’ve talked about they can vary very drastically across a number of attributes.

But when you hear that term, “I need a VP of supply chain,” what does that actually mean?

Chris Gaffney: I think from a nominal standpoint, my view in today’s world, if you’re looking for an end-to-end supply chain, or if you’re looking for a VP of supply chain, it should be end to end, right? So my starting point would assume that procurement is in scope, manufacturing is in scope, logistics is in scope, planning is in scope, right?

Those are at least the big rocks for me, the classic big score rocks. But then you need to listen, right? Because you can come into an organization and they say, “We’re hiring for VP of supply chain,” and oh, by the way, their peer is the VP of manufacturing. I’m like that’s… Right [00:29:00] there, that’s a big asterisk.”

You go into other organizations and they say, “Oh procurement is separate,” right? Again, I think for a company and a candidate, if you are mentally describing your VP of supply chain and it’s end to end, then you have access to the best candidates. You have access to people who aspire because they want to run, they want to report to the CEO as a senior leader, right?

That’s probably the other thing is they’re not embedded underneath somebody at the C level. They report to the CEO, and they’re responsible for the whole show, plan, source, make, deliver. When you start carving that up, you should accept that… But by definition, you really don’t have a true supply chain leader because you’re not giving them the full scope of accountability, and that may be your decision for your business.

But I, in my view you lose access to the best candidates because you start saying you really want somebody who’s heavy on planning and logistics.” Like you and I have seen it where like [00:30:00] the VP of supply chain has planning and logistics. That’s not a head of supply chain. So w- wonder why you can’t get the type of candidate you want- and you have high expectations in the role, it’s like someone says, “Why would I take that job?”

That’s not… if I have aspiration to rise, throughout my career, that’s not a great stepping stone. So that’s kinda my caution to, to people who misuse that title, to be very honestly. I- Yeah … I guess I would say the real answer is chief supply chain officer, right? If you want the best and the brightest, your organization needs to be able to brand it chief supply chain officer.

They’re on a C-suite level, they have full scope of accountability. Their peers are a head of commercial, maybe a head of marketing if you’re a branded company a CFO, a CIO, a CHRO. If y- if that’s… if you wanna play in the big leagues that’s what the, the best people are looking for.

Rodney Apple: Yeah.

And we know what happens when you don’t get that integrated [00:31:00] supply chain leader, everybody’s on the same page. We have a common set of goals that are geared towards the enterprise and the company. You’re gonna get the silos, right? And I’ve seen my fair share of those. And I find it always interesting when we kick off a, a veep, a head of supply chain search.

It’s there’s, companies start going down the wish list, and I start shaking my head. They have to have deep expertise, and have stood up an S&OP process. And, oh, they need to have done a network optimization where they’ve, we need to consolidate or open up new facilities. And, oh, by the way, yeah, they need to have worked in a plant and have led plants, and on.

I’m like, “You’re okay now. You’re getting into a unicorn situation where you’re, you’re describing candidates.” Very rare that someone’s gonna be a deep expert in all of the different functions that fall up under supply chain. And so you have to kinda understand, where am I mature? Where are my opportunities?

Ideally, yeah, we need to have us a better S&OP. We need [00:32:00] to have somebody that’s worked in planning. So you start finding, looking like… I’m the recruiter, I’m looking for candidates that have maybe, think about this is my major, this is my minor. Yeah I did spend time in planning. I am deeply expertised in that area.

But then you understand where in the rest of the organization do you have gaps. And if I have a gap myself as the head of supply chain, then, I’m, hopefully I’ve got a, I can identify a really strong leader that’s gonna close that gap. ‘Cause at the end of the day it’s about leading. Like you said, Chris, it’s leading the show, and, you’re not gonna find everyone that’s gonna solve every single problem, that’s got all the deep expertise.

It’s that balanced team, that integrated team that operates as one team versus a bunch of silos.

Chris Gaffney: Yeah I’ll just comment on it, it’s hard when you, in your role, Rodney, say you’re looking for a unicorn. But I really want… I- I mean if you’re listening to this, you need to be objective and say when you’re looking for a unicorn, you should manage your expectations because they either don’t exist [00:33:00] or, and you’re gonna pass by wonderful candidates who if you wrote their s- na- their names down, find out they, they will have been super successful like a first round draft pick that you missed.

And/or you need to be prepared to take a lot of time. Yeah. And I think that’s the hardest thing is getting people to calibrate on that.

Rodney Apple: Yeah. Yeah, we spend a lot of time advising clients on, “Okay we’ll look for this,” but we should also be thinking about where we can pivot if we don’t find that perfect unicorn within a reasonable timeframe.

And that… we’ll get into the trade-offs ’cause that’s where you… That’s what yields success and faster results. Mike, we’re gonna turn it back over to you. We’ve got this, chris, you alluded to this early on. We see a lot of companies are just transforming their supply chains and this dynamic is where we get, we pick up a lot of searches is people struggle.

They’re they’re either really good at running the day-to-day operations, or they’re really good at the strategy and transforming. But when you put both of those together, [00:34:00] sometimes people struggle with call it building the airplane as we’re flying it. So you wanna dive into that one, Mike?

Mike Ogle: Yeah I love to use that particular analogy or way of being able to state that all the time. I- you know, it- as you said, it is like running the operation or thinking of it as, as the big machine, the big network, whatever way you wanna look at this, versus being a transformational type of person.

Were you hired to do that? Or were you hired to come in and run the operation pretty much as it was with the idea that you’re always going to continually improve it? However, you end up getting in there and you find out this is gonna take a major transformation. There’s something happening in the industry, there’s things that you’ve seen or that you’ve been used to.

Do you know how to go through a really big transformation? H- do you have experience with that, or does it look like you’ve got the capability to do [00:35:00] so you really think about, it could be that you’ve never done really in that position, sales and operations planning or integrated business planning.

It’s a multi-departmental kind of coordination, and going across those different levels is, Chris was talking about do you have responsibility across all those where you can manage it? Or are you one of the cogs inside of that and somebody else sits at a higher level? Can you prove that you’ve been able to work across different departments, for instance, different functions to be able to make it happen?

And with the previous thing that I was talking about, have you proven that you can work with different partners in going through that kind of transition? Maybe bringing in a partner is certainly a transition if you’re doing now third-party logistics or whether it’s just transportation, whether it’s warehouse side of things, whether it’s other kinds of clients, whether your company’s ever worked with a [00:36:00] big transformational specialist that comes in and consults and actually stays through the transition.

You’ve got all those kinds of things that you have to understand how that’s done. Are you trying to go from traditional equipment to highly automated? Are you trying to bring in AI? Are you reorganizing the design of the facility? So it all comes down in the end to you’re trying to change the operating model somehow.

People resist change. Are you good at being able to work with cultural change to get people to buy in, to be part of your team and realize we’re going this great direction, let’s make it happen and let’s go win? So how do you distinguish somebody who’s worked around a transformation from somebody who’s actually led it?

And, how different should that profile be for somebody to be able to transform that organization versus somebody that was hired, as, as Rodney was introducing this, to operate and continuously [00:37:00] improve it? Those are the big issues for me on that one

Rodney Apple: Good stuff, Mike

Chris Gaffney: I will, Go ahead, Chris

so I would like to step back on what I said before about agility. I think when it comes to transformation, in this case, someone has to have done it, right? Yeah. You can’t claim that you’ve done something like that, right? Now, you may say, “I did not lead the full transformation effort, but I led a work stream.

I was dedicated to this.” It can’t just be, “I was a project team member on that,” when you’re looking for the bigger roles. So I think that this one is a big deal. I also think this is tricky because how do you ferret this out? This is part of a longer discussion in a multi-step interview process to really get somebody to be able to demonstrate to you that they’ve, they pack the goods here, right?

They’ve dealt with the change management piece. They’ve dealt with the human elements. They’ve dealt with process and technology. They might have dealt with merging cultures due to an M&A. So I [00:38:00] think this is where your, screening and interview process becomes really important to really get a sense of does somebody really have the essence of this?

And this is the one that, that probably amongst all the things we talked about is the hottest one because everybody’s worried about their digital transformation or how they’re gonna compete differently in today’s world, and we know. The other thing I guess you could ask is has the person been part of a successful transformation?

Because we know I could’ve been involved in one of those high percentage of transformations that fail. Now I’d be happy if someone says, “Here’s what I learned from a failed transformation, and I participated in another one that was successful.” But this is definitely I think a, a key differentiator in any of these, director plus VP searches.

Rodney Apple: Agree 100%. I’ve got a VP of supply chain search now. It is a major multi-year journey. There’s baby concepts of a of a roadmap in place, and so we’re [00:39:00] absolutely looking for that proven transformational leader. They’re shifting their operating model, make to order. They wanna make to stock as well and they…

So they don’t have that command control tower, you know, looking at things from a macro or full network perspective. A lot of it’s decentralized by the site, and it’s just gonna be a major shift in the way they do their business. And then definitely looking for, candidates that have been through and have led a significant transformation knowing that we’re gonna have to stand up advanced planning, knowing that we’re gonna have to completely optimize and shift their distribution network.

So back to what we talked about earlier, when you look for that, that, that candidate they need to have worked in a model that has that proper balance SKU segmentation between make to stock and make to order, And then, and they’ve built the teams and stood up the processes and the systems that enable it all to work as it relates to advanced planning and getting S&OP put in place.

And then they’ve [00:40:00] gone through a network study and have designed a new network and optimized it and have the right facilities in the right locations at the right sizing, stock and the right inventory. And then you got the right transportation strategy around that to s- what they’re ultimately trying to do is speed up their lead times and their product availability while delighting their customer is the, is the ultimate goal.

And that’s a special– even though it’s a remote job and it’s still challenging, because you have to find that right size, co- complexity SKU complexity, all of that has to come into play. And that, that’s a perfect example of all the things we’ve talked about that, that makes it difficult.

Oh, it’s remote. There’s probably a million people out there that can do that. No, not quite. You gotta find the right companies that are comparable, and then you gotta find the right leaders that have taken these companies through these types of transformations. And it’s easier said than done