A lot of Pricing Manager job specs are still built around a skill that mattered most in 2023: defending a price increase. That skill hasn’t disappeared. But for a growing number of businesses, it’s no longer the main job, and a job spec that doesn’t reflect that is filtering out exactly the candidates who’d perform best in the role.
The market moved. Most job specs didn’t.
For the best part of three years, pricing ran on a fairly simple playbook. Costs go up, you push a price increase through, and as long as it broadly lands, margin holds. Inflation gave cover for blunt pricing action in a way that hadn’t been true for a decade.
That playbook has run its course. Industry analysis presented at this year’s FMCG and CPG Revenue Growth Management Forum in London pointed to the same thing pricing leaders are now seeing directly: the mechanism that let price increases offset inflation and protect margin has largely stopped working. Retailers are pushing back harder. Private label is taking share in categories it never used to touch. Pushing price and hoping volume holds is no longer a safe bet.
What’s replacing it is more demanding. Price pack architecture, structuring different pack sizes and formats to protect volume at different price points, has gone from a nice-to-have to a core skill. Channel-specific pricing is now expected rather than advanced. The businesses doing this well treat pricing as a portfolio decision, weighing volume, mix and margin together, rather than pushing a flat increase across a range and hoping it nets out.
A Pricing Manager who is excellent at cost-plus modelling and negotiation, but has never had to think about pack architecture or channel elasticity, is going to struggle with what the role now actually demands. That’s not a competence problem. It’s a job spec problem: the role changed underneath the person it was written for.
This isn’t only a pricing problem
CIPD’s own analysis on activating employer brand makes a broader point that applies here too: candidates aren’t just evaluating whether they can do the job listed, they’re evaluating whether the organisation behind it is somewhere they actually want to build a career. A job spec built entirely around 2023’s version of the role answers neither question well.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere. In procurement, a Buyer role has often shifted from transactional purchasing to supplier risk and ethical compliance management without the job spec catching up. In supply chain planning, a Demand Planner is now expected to be commercially fluent with data visualisation tools that barely featured in the role five years ago. Pricing is a particularly visible example of a much wider pattern: job specs get written once and reused for years, long after the role has quietly moved on.
What a strong pricing candidate is actually looking for now
A list of duties tells a candidate what they’d be doing. It rarely tells them why the role is worth taking. Given how much the day-to-day has shifted, that gap matters more than it used to.
The strongest pricing candidates right now aren’t just weighing salary. They’re asking whether the role offers genuine exposure to the harder, more strategic end of pricing, portfolio decisions, price pack architecture, cross-functional influence, rather than a narrower analytical function feeding numbers upstream. They’re asking whether there’s support to build that capability if they don’t have it yet, through Pricing Society certification or direct exposure to categories and channels they haven’t worked in before. None of that shows up in a duties list. All of it shows up in whether a strong candidate actually replies to your approach.
What this means when you’re reviewing a pricing vacancy
Before rewriting a job spec, ask an honest question: does it describe 2023’s version of this role, or 2026’s? Does it show a candidate the strategic, portfolio-level work that now defines strong pricing performance, or just the modelling and negotiation skills that used to be the whole job?
This is exactly the conversation we have with clients before a pricing search starts. A technically accurate job spec built around an outdated version of the role will keep attracting the wrong shortlist, however many times it’s re-advertised. As a specialist pricing recruiter, we build both the substance of the role and the case for why someone genuinely strong should want it.
This holds at every level, from Pricing Analyst through to Head of Pricing. The spec has to describe the role as it exists now, not as it existed three years ago, and pricing analyst recruitment suffers from this as much as any other level. If your pricing vacancy has been open longer than it should be, get in touch for a confidential, no-obligation conversation about pricing recruitment. We aim to respond to all enquiries within one hour.
Cambridge Talent Partnership is a specialist pricing recruitment agency covering the South of the UK, including London, Southampton, Portsmouth, Oxford and Milton Keynes, as well as further afield for the right role. Wherever your pricing vacancy sits, our approach to pricing recruitment stays the same: proactive search, genuine sector understanding, and a job specification built to attract the candidates you actually want, not just the ones who happen to be looking.
