Talent. It’s cropped up plenty in recent weeks, in looking at marketing procurement and leadership, for example. It feeds into everything else and procurement managers are often expected to have plenty of tools in their belt. So where are these renaissance men and women supposed to come from?

Talking with Rentokil Initial’s CPO Damon Jones underlined just how important it is to him to get the right people in. He’s one of an apparently growing number of advocates of looking to different sources for specialists.

“I’ve recently hired a fleet specialist”, he recounts.  “We’ve been able to train him in buying techniques and turn him into a very strong category manager. He knows the supply base, he knows the industry and where the money is made and that makes him far more effective in his field. ”

Surely he’s not alone in this approach, but it’s interesting to see how it compares to the strategies of companies who have stuck with more familiar sources for their recruitment.

John Hans, VP of purchasing at Heinz, in a recent interview with Procurement Leaders, spoke about how talent management was crucial to the restructuring going on at his company. He focused on the need for procurement to have a more commercialised agenda in order to maximise value from its supplier relationships.  

It hasn’t escaped our attention that Hans himself has a commercial background which has been a key influence on Heinz’s recent initiatives to revamp its procurement function.

What seems clear is that there is still a premium on finding procurement managers with skillsets that allow them to be more than simply cost cutters, if you’ll excuse the generalisation. Moreover, this broadening of skills has a big bearing on what level procurement is able to interact with other areas of business.

How they get them in and how they keep them will be something to watch closely in the coming months.