Supply Chain & S&OP Recruitment

We recruit across the full Supply Chain & S&OP function, including Supply Chain Executive, Supply Chain Manager, Head of Supply Chain, Supply Chain Director and specialist Sales & Operations Planning roles at all levels of seniority. We place both permanent and interim supply chain professionals, and our case study above is a good example of the kind of niche, cross-border interim search where specialist supply chain recruitment capability makes a genuine difference. Whether you need someone to own the day-to-day planning cycle or someone to lead a wholesale transformation of your S&OP process, we understand the difference in what each level of role actually demands.

Sales & Operations Planning is one of those disciplines where technical competence is almost table stakes. The candidates who genuinely excel are the ones who can bring an entire organisation into alignment, which requires influence, credibility and the ability to facilitate difficult conversations between functions that often have competing priorities. In our experience, the best S&OP leaders are comfortable challenging both the sales forecast and the production plan in the same meeting, without losing the room. We assess for this through structured, in-depth conversations that go well beyond the CV, exploring how candidates have navigated cross-functional conflict, how they’ve handled planning cycles that broke down under pressure, and what their instinct is when the numbers don’t add up. The technical questions are important, but it’s the behavioural ones that tell us most.

Yes, and it’s an area where our approach as a specialist supply chain recruiter adds particular value. Interim Supply Chain & S&OP searches are often more time-pressured and more specific than permanent hires, with businesses needing someone who can make an impact quickly rather than learning the role over several months. We’ve placed interim supply chain and Sales & Operations Planning leaders across a range of situations, including transformation programmes, maternity cover, capacity gaps during periods of rapid growth, and assignments like our case study above where the requirement was international and highly specialist. The screening process for interim roles is different too: we place more weight on pace of impact, adaptability and how quickly a candidate can get up to speed in an unfamiliar environment.

Significantly. A Supply Chain Director managing a single UK site has a fundamentally different role to one overseeing operations across multiple countries, languages, regulatory environments and time zones. The supply chain recruitment brief looks similar on paper but the candidate profile is very different, requiring broader stakeholder management experience, greater comfort with ambiguity and often specific language or cultural knowledge. We’ve placed supply chain professionals into international roles across Europe and beyond, and we understand how to screen for the combination of technical S&OP expertise and personal resilience that those assignments demand.

Sales & Operations Planning is evolving rapidly. Businesses are moving away from traditional monthly planning cycles towards more dynamic, data-driven demand sensing processes, and they’re looking for supply chain leaders who understand how to get value from modern planning technology rather than simply working around it. There’s also a growing focus on supply chain resilience following the disruptions of recent years, with businesses wanting S&OP leaders who can design planning processes that are robust to shocks, not just optimised for normal conditions. At the same time, the best supply chain candidates are increasingly selective about the organisations they join, looking for genuine cross-functional influence and a seat at the strategic table rather than a purely operational remit. That raises the bar on how businesses need to position and present these roles, and it’s something we help with as part of every supply chain recruitment search we run.

We focus on supply chain recruitment and S&OP recruitment across the South of the UK, including London, Bristol, Reading, Southampton, Winchester and Milton Keynes. As our case study above shows, we’re also regularly trusted with international assignments where the requirement is genuinely specialist. Wherever the role sits, our approach stays the same: proactive search, structured screening, and candidates who can operate at both the detail and the strategic level.