One of my client e-auction teams is going through a transition right now. Half their number is moving on to bigger, better things within the company and so they are hiring replacements. This is great! And it’s happening sooner than expected. Typically I see turnover in e-auction teams about every eighteen months and this team is only a year old. When the team lead first started, I warned him, “this job will make you really visible to leadership and you will find yourself moving on to bigger and better things faster than you imagine.” While I’m cheering him on every step of the way, it also means helping this client find someone to replace him. This week let’s talk about what to look for in an e-auction team lead or member, which is not-so-coincidentally very similar to what’s needed in procurement team members.
Temperament
Hiring for “temperament” or “personality” can be tricky. It’s like hiring for “culture fit” and is absolutely fraught with bias. That being said, the main personality trait I find helpful for e-auction team members is the ability to stay calm under pressure. I lucked out with my very first e-auction team member, who remains to this day the most unflappable man I’ve ever met.
Being able to stay calm under pressure is critical because e-auctions tend to come with high emotions. Suppliers, internal stakeholders, and procurement team members are all worried about getting good e-auction results and tend to come at e-auction team members with their worries and fears intact. Many people still believe the six e-auction myths, so they expect poor results, a narrow focus on price instead of value, and a long, painful process. While none of this has to be true, emotions often run high when working with the e-auction team. That’s why team members need to stay calm, build trust, and ease concerns on the other end of the phone.
Experience
In most jobs, experience is usually the largest part of a job description, so I have a few thoughts on the e-auction team member or lead job description. It is nice if the team lead has some experience with e-auctions or even supplier negotiations. Even if you do not put a full manager/director at the head of the e-auction team, you will probably still need a team lead to be the face of e-auctions for the rest of the organization and serve as an escalation point for stakeholders. This can be a good place for someone to get some management experience with a small team, as you can run a very large number of auctions with very few people (my team ran 2400 auctions a year with 2.5 people where the 0.5 person was a part-time intern). The team lead also needs to be the kind of person who can run metrics and make an argument for the value e-auctions bring the organization.
I prefer to hire e-auction team members without much procurement experience. I like “the newbie” for the e-auction team for a few reasons.
- The e-auction team sees everything in an organization if you’re running a full e-auction program. They see all the scopes of work (good and bad), they deal with all kinds of suppliers (both suppliers and vendors), and they work with all kinds of departments. The e-auction team is a great place to launch a career and learn a lot about a business and procurement all at once.
- E-auctions still carry a stigma. With that stigma comes habits to unlearn, and I would rather have someone willing to embrace the tool for the chainsaw it is (instead of thinking of it as a hammer). People with a lot of experience in procurement tend to view e-auctions with distaste and won’t even give them a chance.
- I like to put new team members in the e-auction team because it teaches skills that will serve them very well for the rest of their career. The e-auction team learns to pick up a phone, to deal with people at all levels of an organization, and to advocate for their work. They tend to learn how to analyze a bid, coordinate calendars, and talk to suppliers. While these skills are useful at all stages of procurement, I like when I can teach them to team members early. The e-auction team is a great talent pipeline both into procurement and the rest of the organization.
I don’t tend to put a lot of stake in formal education. I’ve met so many people in procurement roles with a high school diploma that are absolutely fantastic at their work. I say this as someone who holds two bachelor’s degrees and two master’s degrees, so it’s not that I don’t value education. I do think requiring a degree beyond high school can be useful, but it must always be balanced with a number of years of experience to help eliminate bias and open the field just a little wider. For example, you might require a 4-year degree OR six years of experience. Or you could look for a 2-year degree OR three years’ experience. I’ve known people with PhDs who never figured out how to approach procurement productively and those who earned GEDs later in life who can out-negotiate any supplier representative.
Skills
The number one skill I hire for in e-auction teams is customer service. A customer service mindset is absolutely crucial to success in e-auctions. This is because everyone is their customer. While this is true with almost all roles in an organization, it’s critical that e-auction team members remember that procurement team members, technical team members, and suppliers are all their customers in every interaction. If a supplier has a bad experience with e-auctions and doesn’t understand their benefit, it will cause trouble for the organization. I love when I can find talent with experience from a customer service call center or retail work because they really treat everyone they meet with the kind of care needed for a successful e-auction program.
Similar to customer service, I look for e-auction team members with skills in diplomacy. This is very similar to keeping calm under pressure, but it’s the skill side of the equation. Diplomacy means being able to influence people, being able to state difficult problems inoffensively, and generally getting people to trust you. These skills are critical for e-auction team members because of the high emotions and often millions of dollars at stake in an e-auction. Suppliers and technical team members who are offended are very hard to win over to the benefits of e-auctions and will absolutely sink the success of an e-auction program every time.
Filling Gaps
So while a calm person with a little experience (but not too much) in e-auctions, excellent customer service, and diplomacy skills is ideal; they may also be hard to find. Especially the piece about having exposure to e-auctions can be tricky to hire for in a world where e-auctions are viewed as a niche tool. So what to do? First, when building a team do as much as you can to keep the whole team with the right temperament, experience and skills. If one person lacks a bit in one area, overcompensate with other team members and encourage them to support one another. Second, it’s a little self-serving of me but I will say: hire some help. That might be an e-auction expert to help guide the team on e-auction strategy and when to use which type of e-auction. Or it might be getting some extensive customer service training for the team or having them sit with your company call center for a while to learn those skills. Perhaps it means getting a better analysis tool or an e-auction tool with a few more bells and whistles to help the team make good decisions without as much experience or expertise. An e-auction team is no different from any other – they will grow into these experiences and skills. Before you know it, they will have moved on to bigger and better things while telling their new colleagues how valuable it is to bring negotiation back into procurement.
Let me know if you’d like me to send you job descriptions for either an e-auction team member or team lead and I would be happy to do so. If you would like to talk about your team’s temperament, experience or skills (one leader to another), let’s chat. If you’d like to get these articles weekly straight to your inbox and never miss one, sign up for my newsletter.
My book, Transform Procurement: The Value of E-auctions is now available in ebook, paperback and even hardcover format: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F79T6F25
