Having spent much of an earlier career on the other side of the table, pitching to people with buying power, it’s easy to imagine how straightforward it would be to simply spend, instead of constantly trying to convince others to spend with you.
Having now worked closely with the purchasing and procurement sector, one commonly held misconception stands out: the assumption that procurement must be straightforward, since you’re “just spending money”, how hard can that be? In reality, the opposite is often true, and the paradox is that many procurement professionals would happily hand these complex decisions to someone else.
Here are the characteristics that consistently separate great purchasing and procurement professionals from the rest, and, just as importantly, how we actually test for each of them when recruiting.
1. Attention to detail
Consider a manufacturing business whose previous project buyer was tasked with sourcing metal plates. The plates arrived to the right specification in every respect except the finish, which meant they were unusable. The buyer hadn’t been told to source a specific finish, but the responsibility still landed largely with them. It’s a simple mistake, but it underlines two things: every aspect of a sourced product needs to be correct, and it’s the buyer’s responsibility to make sure they’ve been told everything they need to know to meet the needs of the business.
How we test for it: we ask candidates about a specification that went wrong, and listen for whether they take ownership of the gap in the brief or blame the person who wrote it. The strongest buyers describe the questions they now ask upfront as a direct result.
2. Excellent time management
If a product or service isn’t in place, the business processes that depend on it can’t move forward, causing delays that ripple through the wider organisation. That’s manageable with a single purchase; multiply it across dozens of items and varying business sectors, and managing tenders and timelines becomes a genuinely different challenge. Good buying professionals manage other people’s time as well as their own, and build in tolerance for delay.
How we test for it: we ask how many live sourcing activities a candidate typically runs at once, and how they decide what gets attention on a bad week. Vague answers here are informative.
3. A healthy scepticism
Everyone has had the wool pulled over their eyes at some point, and there will always be suppliers trying to sell products that aren’t fit for purpose. A poor personal purchase only affects the person who made it. High-value business buys are a different matter entirely, and require real diligence to ensure every legal and professional requirement is covered. Nobody wants to be the person responsible for software that isn’t fit for purpose, or who commits significant spend to a supplier that can’t deliver, but these are scenarios a procurement manager can find themselves in if they don’t stay alert.
How we test for it: we ask about a supplier who did not work out, and specifically what the warning signs were in hindsight. Candidates with genuine scepticism have usually built those signs into how they qualify suppliers since.
4. Relationship building and enforcement of supply terms
It’s tempting to think the job is largely done once a supplier is selected, but that’s rarely the reality. Once suppliers feel secure in their position, standards can slip. A great procurement or purchasing professional manages these relationships carefully, ensuring everything promised is delivered, generally by building a relationship suppliers genuinely want to perform well for. But when goods or services aren’t fit for purpose, a good procurement professional also knows when to draw a line and enforce the needs of the business.
How we test for it: we ask about a supplier relationship that had to be escalated or exited, and how the conversation was handled. The answer usually reveals whether someone avoids conflict, enjoys it a little too much, or handles it properly.
5. Negotiation
Buying doesn’t remove the need to negotiate. Sometimes the leverage sits with the buyer, particularly in a buyer’s market. Other times, a very specific requirement means dealing with knowledgeable suppliers unwilling to move on price. A great buying professional knows when to play their hand strongly and when to play it fairly: alienating a key supplier by pushing prices too hard rarely ends well, and driving a price too low can mean losing the service or quality you actually need.
How we test for it: we ask about a negotiation where the candidate deliberately did not push for the maximum available saving, and why. Buyers who have never made that call tend to be earlier in their development than the CV suggests.
It’s worth noting that negotiation is now treated as a trainable discipline in its own right rather than an innate talent. Specialist firms like The Gap Partnership build entire structured methodologies around it, and buyers who have been through that kind of formal training tend to approach a negotiation with a plan rather than an instinct. Where a business is hiring into a heavily commercial buying role, asking whether a candidate has had that grounding is a reasonable question.
Where formal qualifications fit
The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply is the profession’s global body, and MCIPS is the most widely recognised benchmark for professional procurement competence in the UK. Its qualifications cover negotiation, category management, supplier relationships, risk and ethical sourcing.
In practice, MCIPS confirms someone has been taught the discipline properly. The five characteristics above are what determine whether they apply it well under pressure, and they show up in conversation rather than on a certificate. The strongest hires usually have both, but where a business has to choose, the behaviours tend to predict performance better than the postnominals.
Final thoughts
From the outside, it’s easy to underestimate the pressure placed on the people businesses rely on to source materials and services in a timely, efficient and cost-effective way, and how far mistakes in that process can ripple through a business, affecting other teams’ ability to hit their own targets.
It’s exactly this combination, detail, time management, scepticism, relationship management and negotiation, that we screen for in purchasing recruitment at every level, from Buyers and Senior Buyers through to Category Managers, Procurement Managers and Heads of Procurement. As a specialist procurement recruiter, that is where most of the screening conversation goes. Technical category knowledge can often be learned. These characteristics are considerably harder to teach, which is why we spend most of the screening conversation on them.
One further point worth making to any business hiring in this space: these characteristics are in demand, and the people who have them have options. CIPD’s work on employer brand makes the point that candidates assess the organisation as much as the role, and that applies squarely to procurement, where a strong buyer weighing two offers will look hard at whether they’ll be given genuine commercial authority or simply asked to process orders.
Cambridge Talent Partnership works across procurement, purchasing and the wider supply chain, and has years of experience recruiting for these roles. If you need support hiring for your procurement or supply chain team, get in touch with a specialist procurement recruitment agency. We have a strong track record of delivering candidates for roles other approaches have struggled to fill.
Cambridge Talent Partnership provides procurement recruitment and sourcing recruitment across the South of the UK, including London, Southampton, Oxford, Winchester and Brighton, as well as further afield for the right role. Wherever your vacancy sits, our approach stays the same: proactive search, genuine sector understanding, and candidates with the discipline and judgement the role genuinely demands.
