Like many businesses, recruiting has been known to slow down in the summer. At Argentus, we’ll recruit the whole season long—with, of course, some vacations on our end—but activity from clients tends to take a slight dip. With more hiring managers on vacation, interviews take longer to arrange. Feedback on candidates we’ve submitted takes a bit longer. Some companies take their foot off the gas for hiring, getting ready to gear up for the busy fall supply chain season.

Not this year.

This year has been unlike any other in recent memory. In fact, it’s been our busiest summer in years. Our summer recruiting push has seen a boatload of successful placements in supply chain management and procurement roles. These roles have been at different levels—from analyst-level roles all the way to directors, in a variety of industries.

Across the supply chain and procurement fields, companies are managing tremendous difficulty placing candidates into their open roles. This is true across the wider economy, but acutely so in a field where relentless disruptions have placed untold pressure on people to deliver. Many companies also have increased hiring needs, as supply chain disruptions have placed a renewed focus on adaptation, systems and process upgrades, and supply chain strategy.

Those two factors combined have created an environment where hiring hasn’t slowed down over the summer. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The problem isn’t just identifying the right candidate, as it was in previous markets—although that’s difficult enough. It’s actually securing that candidate, in a market where candidates are often fielding multiple job offers at once.

That’s our specialty. So as we look to fall—which promises to be just as busy—we wanted to write this post to highlight a few of our recent recruitment efforts. If you’re a candidate looking for a new role, we hope that these examples show the roles you can expect to see when you work with us.

And if you’re a company hiring in supply chain, we hope these case studies give you some insight into the depth and breadth of our expertise. We’re here to trumpet our accomplishments—if you’ll indulge us—and in the process, give you a snapshot of the supply chain hiring picture in summer 2022.

Here are a few of the highlights:

A Director of Supply Chain in the Cannabis Industry

The Cannabis industry has been in a fair amount of flux recently. Several large companies who entered the industry following legalization in 2018 have shuttered, yet several companies are thriving in this uncertain environment. This company is a new client of ours who reached out with several Supply Chain and Procurement searches, including a Director of Supply Chain for their Toronto head office, focused on supply and demand planning.

This new client is growing (no pun intended), and needed a Director of Supply Chain to provide high-level strategy and execution for a variety of areas including demand planning, supply planning, materials requirements planning, capacity planning and inventory management. We tapped our network and forwarded several rockstars with consumer packaged goods industry chops—people with a deep understanding of how to balance demand and supply for fast-paced industries who could apply that knowledge to build out process and technology for the growing company. The client immediately hit it off with one individual who had this deep consumer goods industry knowledge, as well as a track record of successful supply chain systems implementations. Everywhere this candidate has gone, he’s provided upgrades to process and technology, improving the sophistication of supply chains and making it a key driver of strategic growth. They made the hire.

Multiple Sole Contributor Roles in the Automotive Manufacturing Industry

This new client been a big part of our expanded push into the automotive industry. They came to Argentus to fill out their bench in their manufacturing supply chain, with a number of analyst and supervisor-level roles for their Vaughan, ON facility. They needed people with strong functional expertise in Inventory Planning, Production Planning, Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) and others. Over the summer, we’ve opened a steady pipeline of supply chain candidates to them—both from automotive, and from other similar manufacturing industries—leading to several successful placements including a Materials Analyst, a Pre-Production Planner, and others—with more on the way.

A Distribution Manager in the Consumer Goods Industry

This consumer goods company, which manufactures a variety of products for consumer and commercial applications, had an urgent need for a Distribution Manager for their Milton, ON Distribution Centre. They had been working with another (generalist) agency, and had a very tough time finding someone suitable. After the role was open for quite a while, they finally got a candidate to the offer stage, who ended up accepting another role—always frustrating when the need to hire is urgent.

Rather than continue to work with a generalist agency, they called the supply chain experts. Within a few weeks, we placed a candidate with an accomplished Distribution Management track record across a variety of industries. This candidate fit the bill as a tireless, hands-on manager with exceptional communications skills to build strong relationships both with Distribution Supervisors and warehouse staff, but also with senior leadership in the business as they work to continuously improve the operation.

A High-Skilled Public Sector Procurement Consultant

One of our longstanding Public Sector clients had numerous hiring needs over the summer for their procurement function, and this was a highlight. This large, well-known public sector organization boasts a centre-led procurement model that’s made major strides in recent years upgrading and upskilling their strategic procurement for indirect categories like Information Technology, Travel, HR, Marketing, Professional Services, and others.

We’ve placed quite a few individuals there with a Procurement Director who is keen to attract individuals with proven indirect strategic procurement experience. Their needs this summer included a highly strategic consultant who could develop and deliver strategy for complex, high-value sourcing projects.

We filled the role with a stellar individual who we’ve placed in numerous high-skilled contract roles—a procurement star who has delivered major cost savings, risk mitigation, and innovation throughout his career. For contract (contingent) roles, we pride ourselves on our base of high-skilled procurement leaders who can step in and deliver projects fast. With our established roster of candidates, this Director was able to place this individual remarkably quickly, leveraging their world-class background.

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We want to thank all of our clients and candidates for their support during this busy run of recruiting. As we head into fall, we have a full slate of supply chain jobs that we’re working on (click here to see our active roles).

But we still have more bandwidth! If you have any immediate or upcoming supply chain or procurement hiring needs, reach out to us! Not only do we have a wealth of supply chain experience and a broad and deep pool of candidates, we specialize in closing the deal. If you find that your own internal efforts aren’t attracting enough candidates, or the right candidates—or if you find that you’re losing out on candidates after making an offer—why not find out what Argentus can do? Our contingency model means that you don’t pay until you close the hire, and our services are backed by guarantee.