SCM Talent Group FAQs
General Questions:
President and Founder Rodney Apple began working in supply chain recruiting and executive search back in 1998 so he’s been in the business for the vast majority of his 20+ year career. Rodney served as a supply chain recruiting consultant on the corporate side for over 10 years, leading supply chain recruitment for The Home Depot, The Coca-Cola Company, Kimberly-Clark and Cummins during this timeframe. He founded SCM Talent Group in 2004.
We have very deep and broad recruitment experience that spans the entire end-to-end supply chain management discipline. This includes Strategic Sourcing & Procurement, Logistics, Inventory Planning, Manufacturing, Quality, Continuous Improvement and everything in between.
We primarily recruit for manufacturers, retailers and distributors so if your company makes or sells/resells products, you’ll likely fit into our typical customer profile. Core industries that we have provided supply chain recruitment services to include Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG / FMCG), Retail, Wholesale & Distribution, High-Tech, Consumer Electronics, Logistics & Transportation, Telecommunications, Medical Device, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, Automotive, Industrial Manufacturing, Aerospace & Defense, Food & Beverage, Paper & Packaging, Textiles, Chemicals, Cosmetics, Energy & Utilities, Management Consulting, Non-Profit (Supply Chain Associations) and more.
We have filled more than 1,000 professional level supply chain positions ranging from executive level officers in Fortune 500 headquarters to leadership and staff level roles across large networks of manufacturing and distribution facilities within the United States. Positions filled have spanned from Analyst roles up to Chief Supply Chain Officer for clients ranging from Fortune 15 to start-up.
We provide nationwide supply chain recruitment services across the United States and have clients from coast to coast.
What sets SCM Talent Group apart from our competition is that we have many years of recruiting and executive search experience that spans the entire end-to-end supply chain discipline and within most major industries. Having filled more than 1,000 supply chain positions over the years, we have established a solid track record of success with clients that range from Fortune 15 to start-up.
We attribute our success to having a robust recruitment process that allows us to fully understand the most important criteria and aspects of each search assignment, and having a vast candidate network relationships, best-in-class recruitment tools, and a strong supply chain knowledge base that ensures candidates we present to our clients meet or exceed expectations.
Our Services / Process
We only recommend engaging multiple firms if you have an extremely challenging position to fill, such as a position that’s located in an undesirable location or if the required skills are very rare. Just because you engage multiple firms, let’s say three firms for example, does not guarantee you’ll receive three times the amount of candidates or three times the level of service. Why? Recruiting firms know or will find out when a search is called out to multiple firms, and they know their odds of filling the position are lowered significantly versus an exclusive search. If the firm has retained or exclusive searches, they are going to prioritize the retained and exclusive searches over the non-exclusive contingency searches.
In addition, the odds are pretty high that if you engage multiple firms for your search, multiple recruiters from different firms will be reaching out to the same group of candidates. This barrage of messages coming from different recruiters at different firms can send a confusing message to the candidates and ultimately deter the candidates from pursuing the opportunity.
We work to serve as your long term, trusted advisor and strategic business partner, working to provide you with the most accomplished supply chain talent in the marketplace – the right talent, at the right place, at the right cost. Our broad portfolio of customizable supply chain recruiting services includes Retained Executive Search, Contingency Search and Contract Staffing.
After conducting an in-depth intake (kickoff) call with your hiring team and developing a robust search profile for your job opening, our recruiters develop a personalized phone interview assessment form using the core criteria you provided to us during the intake call. This criteria includes functional, technical, leadership and other criteria that you deem are critical for success. Each candidate is vetted thoroughly, and only the individuals that meet or exceed your requirements are presented to you. We will furnish you with copies of resumes as well as the completed phone interview assessment results for each candidate, so you’ll have a lot of rich and relevant detail to review. We also schedule candidate slate review calls with you so you can learn how each candidate matches up against your requirements and so we can address any questions or concerns that you may have.
We develop a unique candidate sourcing strategy for every search assignment that utilizes an omni-channel approach, allowing us to quickly identify and engage with a large group of potential candidates across a broad array of candidate sourcing channels. Sourcing channels include our extensive resume database that we’ve been building for many years, LinkedIn and other social networks, relationships we’ve built in the supply chain sector over the last 15+ years, paid contact databases, memberships with top supply chain associations such as ASCM (formerly APICS), and many more.
It’s rare that we advertise our job vacancies on paid job boards. For the vast majority of our searches, we rely on direct sourcing techniques using a wide array of candidate sourcing channels such as our resume database, for example.
Every search assignment is different and there are many factors that can impact the time to fill metric such as job location, compensation package, skill set demand, labor market competitiveness, company reputation, etc. With that said, for non-executive searches we strive to generate a slate of qualified candidates within two weeks of kicking off the search assignment. For executive-level searches such as Director-level up to C-level, it typically takes longer.
Yes, we will check candidate references and there is no additional cost for this service.
Yes, we offer a candidate replacement guarantee for all search assignments where we would replace any candidate that doesn’t work out to your satisfaction within the agreed-upon timeframe. There would be no additional cost for replacing a candidate and the candidate guarantee period is 120 days for most searches, with longer candidate periods for retained or executive searches. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about our candidate guarantee program.
