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Foreword
The search for talent
There is, and has been for some time, a consensus in our industry that the sales organisation is increasingly under resourced. Demand for talent has never been so high, but with the evident shortage in supply of qualified and skilled salespeople, particularly at junior and middle management levels, the matter is exacerbated.
Further compounding the issue is that there is very little evidence of industry macro investment in grassroots attraction and retention. The days of classic graduate milk round recruitment and training programmes are long gone, and it is only in a minority of cases that such programmes take place, often under the radar of the many colleges and universities who would love to participate, but don’t know where to start, or who to approach.
As such, the need and demand for specialist recruitment companies in FMCG remains high despite the everyday access to digital media and technology available to attract talent. Demand is driven further by employers’ reactive behaviour to the need. Strategic recruitment planning, ahead of the demand curve, is rare these days. A likely outcome due to most organisations’ focus on reducing overhead and delivering greater output from their existing labour force, without incremental human investment and headcount.
At present, boardroom discussions centre on deployment of existing resources, finding ways of achieving ‘more from less’, and controlling human capital overheads. Consequently, future manpower planning is frustrated, often denied in favour of short-term focus on profit performance in the immediate financial year, rather than in the future, as perhaps might have been the case in the past. When need arises, due to an organisation gap, and no talent pipeline exists, it is dealt with through external ‘reactive’ recruitment, and the associated costs thereof become the necessary evil.
If, as they did two decades or so ago, FMCG employers truly invested in scaled apprenticeships, internships and graduate schemes (and it needn’t be large volume), then trained the essential skills in sales and account management,
it would benefit the entire industry of small, medium and large organisations within only a few short years. Without doing so the scramble for talent will only worsen and at present the forecast is gloomy.
Benefits
Benefits are stretching the bounds of employers’ imaginations. A new generation of Millennials is placing different demands on employers when it comes to their expectations around overall remuneration package.