According to recent data from CIPS, procurement salaries in the UK have risen by an average of 5% this year, above the national average of 4.2%.
But that has led me to wonder two things:
- Why are the salaries we are being briefed on so low?
- Who is benchmarking these salaries?
The war on talent is a real issue for many organisations at the moment, with an obvious skills shortage in procurement and supply chain – particularly in certain spend categories – so it amazes me how low the range of salaries seems to be at the moment.
Quite often when I ask organisations where the salary has derived from, or how they reached the pay scale, it is through a Google search of the average salaries or looking at a salary survey.
It’s really important to partner with a procurement recruitment agency that can show you empirical evidence as to what people have and should be paid for their profession, particularly where organisations haven’t had a procurement function before and therefore have no internal benchmarking.
It’s great to see that the national average has increased over the past year.
However, to attract the best talent, you not only need to pay for it, but you need to look beyond the base salary and recognise what good procurement professionals can bring to an organisation in terms of both savings and value.
If your salaries are fixed, look at other parts of a package and see how it can be structured to make the overall remuneration more appealing – whether that’s through bonuses, car allowance or remote working for example.
There is more than one way to skin a cat – how will you shape up when attracting procurement talent into your organisations?
Hayley Packham is Operations Director at Procurement Heads..
Typical roles Hayley recruits include; Heads of Procurement and Procurement Directors, Category Leads and Managers and Senior Category Managers.
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