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JOB SEARCH
Operations take a big hit in recessions; but those skilled in teaching other operations manag-
ers how to work more efciently will nd big opportunities.
Operations Jobs Pick Up Steam
By Kevin Fogarty
IN MOST PROFESSIONS, when people realize the light atthe end of the tunnel is a train, the normal response is, “Uh-
oh.”
In operations management, it’s more like, “The shipment’shere so we can nally get to work.”
The tunnel’s not getting lighter yet, but some in the opera-tions market are starting to feel rumbling on the tracks.
“We’re starting to see signs of a turnaround,” said Jeff Chaponick, president of MAC Executive Recruiters Inc., a Texas executive-search company with a focus on efciency ex-perts in supply-chain, logistics and distribution functions. “The
business-development folks in my organization spend all day on the phone with potential clients and, for a long time, theanswer was usually, ‘We don’t have any jobs to ll’ or, ‘Call back in six months.’ Now we’re either getting the work or they’resaying, ‘Call back in two weeks.’ ”
That’s not an indication that the economy as a whole is re-covering, Chaponick said — or even the overall market for op-erations specialists. MAC’s specialty is placing operations man-agers certied in Six Sigma — a complex discipline whosegoal is to identify errors in production that lead to defects ina product or an inefcient process that wastes time and re-sources.
Lean Production (or Lean Six Sigma ) can be applied toany business process, not just manufacturing or distribution,
said Tim Noble, managing principal of The Avery PoinGroup Inc., a search rm in Alpharetta, Ga., that also special
izes in efciency expertise. Applied correctly, working lean can
improve efciency and reduce costs so dramatically that the
processes themselves become even more attractive to compa
nies that understand how to benet from them, he said.
In a lean economy, lean production becomes a necessity, and
the expertise remains highly prized. Lean-Production and Six-
Sigma jobs have proven more immune to layoffs and declines
in hiring than operations jobs outside the specialty, Noble said
“That said, we still see a lot of companies that aren’t fully
committed to Lean or Six Sigma laying off their continuousimprovement staffs,” Noble said. “And there are obviously a
lot of losses among operations staffs in general. But for people
with Lean and Six-Sigma skills, things are a lot healthier than
in the broader job market. What these folks are about is taking
out costs, improving businesses, improving services — all the
things a company should be doing during tough times.”
Bright spots in ops
In general, operations employment has suffered. The indus
tries most reliant on operations professionals are shedding
jobs faster than the national average. Between March 2008 andMarch 2009, manufacturing jobs declined 9.2 percent, durablegoods jobs dropped 11.29 percent, and automotive-parts and
• Resume Guide for an Operations Manager Page 2
• Hired! Procurement Jobs for Financers Page 3
• Interview Prep: Operations Page 5
Editor’s note: This article was originally available to attendees of TheLadders’ operations-industry career event in summer 2009. For information on future career events from TheLadders, contact [email protected].
IN THIS PACKAGE:
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Page 2 Operations Jobs Pick Up Steam
assembly jobs fell 24 percent, according to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
“There has been a pretty heavy hit in supply chain, manufac-turing, engineering — either in layoffs or pay cuts — whateverit takes to cut their direct labor costs,” Noble said. “Especially in places like automotive, where Chrysler, Ford and GM sit;their volume is down 30 or 40 percent. That cascades rightthrough the supply chain, and there’snothing you can do. There are a lot of ‘A’ players out there who are out of a job.”
But other operations sectors havefared better in the recession — primar-ily those involved with moving thingsfrom one place to another. Transporta-tion and warehousing jobs actually rose8.9 percent while employment in thetrade, transportation and utilities sector
is down 3.14 percent, and wholesaletrade is down 3.9 percent in the sameperiod, according to BLS data.
“C” players
The decline in available positions re-sulted in a backlog of candidates forrecruiters and hiring managers to sort through, something Noble and Chaponick referred to as the “C” players problem.
“Employers are denitely leveraging the economy to saveon their payrolls,” Chaponick said. They’ve taken advantageof cost cutting to drop second- or third-tier performers from
their roster. The result is a lot of “C” players looking for thesame jobs as “A” and “B” players, he said.
That makes getting hired a tougher prospect for anyone who’s out of a job, Noble said. Recruiters are having to spenda lot of time guring out if candidates are “A” listers out onthe street through no fault of their own, or “C” listers whomight be competent enough, but don’t have the chops to make
it in a market where employers have sucha wide selection of candidates.
The hiring cycle is much longer nowChaponick said: A hiring decision thatmight have been made in seven days ayear ago is taking three and sometimesfour weeks now.
In operations, job descriptions and listsof requirements have not gotten longeror more onerous, Noble said. By con-trast, in sales, marketing, IT and other
functional areas, recruiters complain thatemployers use long lists of skills to lterthe mass of candidates down to a fewthat match specic requirements.
In operations, hiring managers seemto be enforcing much more consistently
the requirements they already had and pressuring recruiters to vet a candidate’s qualications more thoroughly before they’llschedule an interview, according to Noble, who said he hasn’tseen any clear signs of an economic turnaround.
By Kevin Fogarty
DON’T IGNORE the process,
said Kristen Jacoway, a certi-
ed professional resume writer who
works with TheLadders.
A successful resume for an opera-
tions executive can’t simply say what
you accomplished; it must explain
how you did it — what was the pro-
cess, she said.
“Most resumes I see are missing
either the action or the result when
they’re talking about past jobs,” Jaco-
way said. “Some people will say they
saved the company $100,000. That’s
great, but how did you get there?
What was the project, and what did
you do to create that savings?”
Demonstrate value
Demonstrating your competence
— and even your level of excellence
— is absolutely the right thing to
do, but it might not be enough in an
economy like this, said Tim Noble,
the managing principal for The Av -
ery Point Group, Inc, a search rm in
Alpharetta, Ga., that also specializes
in efciency expertise.
In an employers’ market, compa-nies get selective about hiring. They
know they can be choosey, Noble
said, and they have to be more careful
committing to the expense of lling
an empty job slot.
Demonstrating you’re good at your
job — an ‘A’ player who got laid off,
Resume Guide for an Operations Manager To sell yourself in ops, your resume can’t just say what you did; it needs to say how you did it.
4 See OPS Page 5
The hiring cycle ismuch longer now,Chaponick said. Ahiring decision thatmight have beenmade in seven daysa year ago is taking
three and sometimesfour weeks.
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Page 3Operations Jobs Pick Up Steam
TO SWITCH FROM WORKING
in technology and manufactur-
ing to legal services takes courage
and imagination, qualities Christin
Burek has in spades.
Burek, who had worked for both
IBM and Honeywell in Phoenix,
began searching for a new position
when her spouse took a job in Illi-
nois and the couple decided to relo-cate to Chicago. While location was
key, Burek was open-minded about where she could apply her
experience in global procurement and supply-chain manage-
ment.
She did not actively start exploring her job options on
TheLadders until the decision to relocate was denite. That
was in July 2008. “The search was fast, and it was effective,”
she recalled. “In fact, I had two offers to consider in October,
which was surprising in this environment. And the other one
also came off TheLadders.”
The offer that intrigued Burek the most came from Mayer
Brown, an international law rm operating in most major cit-
ies worldwide. Mayer Brown had just created the position of
director of global procurement, and the company was willing
to ll it in London, New York — or Chicago.
New twists on procurement
For Burek — whose background is strictly procurement
supply chain, not law — the role presented a couple of
enticing challenges.Mayer Brown had shifted its focus, Burek said, from operat-
ing as a law partnership within a small structure to running the
rm like a fully edged business operation. “That presented
a signicant amount of challenge,” she said. “Something that
from a career standpoint I had not yet had the opportunity to
do. It was almost a green eld because procurement wasn’t
necessarily a formal function within Mayer Brown prior to
my arrival.”
Procurement Jobs for Financers When Christin Burek had to leave her job in Phoenix as director of IT procurement with a Fortune 500 company,
she didn’t anticipate landing a challenging position with a global law rm in Chicago.
By Karl Rozemeyer
not a ‘C’ player someone got rid of
— is only half the battle. You have to
be able to show on your resume and
in your interview where you acted cre-
atively to save money or time, solved
a problem, or showed the persistence
to continue improving a process even
after having seen some results.
Speak the right language
Operations executives are typically
faithful to one process or discipline
(like Six Sigma or Information Tech-
nology Infrastructure Library), and
they speak that one language, Jacoway
said. The HR managers and recruiters
who write the job postings probably
describe it the same way. Unless your
resume follows the same discipline
and employs the same terms and lan-
guage, the recruiters and Applicant
Tracking System (ATS) software that
sorts resumes will probably remove
your resume from consideration.
“When you read the job postings,
you have to look at the keywords that
the company is using, then go back and customize that resume with those
keywords,” she said. “Apply them to
your experience, put them in your key -
words section, and weave them into
the text of the resume. You have to
be sure the description is accurate, but
which words you use make a big dif -
ference.”
Summarize your
core competencies
Jacoway usually leaves the rst sec-
tion of the resume — a list of the can-
didate’s core competencies — for last.
“It helps me get to know the person
a little better, but you also have to be
sure there is evidence in the statement
describing the job duties that sup-ports that core competency. You don’t
just put it up there because someone
is looking for it. They’ll read farther
down and you have to show why it’s a
real competency.”
4 See BUREK Page 4
HIRED!
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As director of global procurement, Burek is responsible for
organizing and implementing contracting and procurement
strategies and increasing international operational efciency
and protability. This includes all business categories from
services to travel, ofces to facilities, real estate to IT. And
within the overall operational plan, the focus of the role isto create a strategic policy of process for each category. For
Burek, the primary challenge was adapting her approach from
her previous operational experiences at IBM and Honeywell.
From head of procurement for a technology operation to a
legal rm was a huge change-up in terms of scale and size of
the company. “Whereas at Honeywell, I managed over a billion
dollars of funds, here I manage maybe a quarter of that. But
in terms of the overall scope and challenge, it is signicant.”
So while some analytics Burek has been
used to working with are either “different
or not there at all,” she said she believesthat, taking the current economic envi-
ronment, the different conditions in the
market place and the size of the rm into
consideration, factors line up well for new
procurement strategies and processes to
be implemented in 2009 at Mayer Brown.
In November 2008, shortly after Burek
joined Mayer Brown, the rm laid off 33
people from its U.S. ofces, citing the eco-
nomic slowdown. The jobs cut included
lawyers as well as support personnel. “Themanaging partners and planning commit-
tee really supported the concept of bring -
ing procurement in and formalizing it so
that it could make a contribution to the
rm in the difcult economic times that
we are in,” Burek said. “Whether there are new positions being
added or otherwise, we still have a focus on strategic hiring,
even though we had to take the action [to downsize].”
A diversied portfolio provides job security
Mayer Brown serves many of the world’s largest companies
and nancial-services organizations, including a large propor-tion of the Fortune 100, FTSE 100, DAX and Hang Seng
Index companies and most of the major investment banks.
Despite turmoil in the sector, Burek said, the rm is well po-
sitioned to weather the economic recession because it has di-
versied its practices; as some of the sectors decrease, others
should improve. “Obviously,” she said, “there are challenges
in that nobody is seeing a signicant upswing right now. But
areas like litigation will go up as nancial indicators go down.
The positive in that sector is that there is still a need for lega
support in some of those areas.”
Another challenge for Burek was adapting to a signicantly
different corporate culture. Mayer Brown is a 127-year-old
law rm that Burek said has “an outstanding reputation” with
both its clients and the legal community. Burek was also attracted to Mayer Brown’s commitment to pro bono law, repre
senting disadvantaged clients and often unpopular causes. “It
is absolutely engrained. And a signicant amount of hours are
expected of each attorney.” She also noted that there are addi
tional opportunities for staff to become involved. “In Chicago
for instance, we have the Stockton School Reading Program
and any Mayer Brown associate, lawyer or staff [is encouraged
to] help with the third-grade reading at Stockton. So there is a
great commitment across the community as
well as true bono work.”
Another factor Burek cited in her decision The rm is a strong proponent of women
in the workplace, she said, and is both very
family- and women-friendly. Burek said she
appreciates that it is often more challenging
for women to make it to the top of large
law rms. “From my own experience as a
woman coming through the ranks of cor
porate culture, I think you can see women
making the conscious choice to stay home a
a certain point and take a pause in their ca-
reer, and that denitely has an impact whenyou transfer that into the legal environment
Some of those years that you may choose to
focus on other things are critical to the part
ner path.” The fact that one of the partners
who interviewed Burek for her new position
was a woman was crucial. “That really made a difference for
me,” Burek said.
Burek stressed the importance of procurement for Mayer
Brown as a global function. In her previous role at Honeywell
Burek had completed signicant work with its internationa
team in rolling out procurement with a global strategy, particularly in Europe. “I think that was one of the decision fac
tors as to why Mayer Brown picked me,” said Burek, who has
two undergraduate degrees. One is in business from Michigan
State, a top four supply-chain procurement school in the U.S
The other is in Spanish. “Spanish is denitely a huge asset. The
rst company that I worked for was a French company, so I
also speak some conversational French.” Burek decided early
on that she wanted to leverage her language skills and work
4BUREK
The managingpartners and plan-ning committeereally supported theconcept of bringingprocurement in andformalizing it sothat it could make acontribution to therm in the difcult
economic times thatwe are in.
“
”—Christin Burek
4 See BUREK Page 6
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Page 5Operations Jobs Pick Up Steam
“A lot of companies are in wait-and-see mode, and they’reall being much more selective because there’s the perceptionthat they can be,” Noble said. “They want to make sure that if they bring a person on board, it’s someone who can contributeright away and is accretive, additive to their situation.”
That abundant supply has also driven down salaries about 10percent, even for those with Six Sigma and other special skillsets, Chaponick said. And it has reduced or eliminated benetslike relocation expenses and help selling a house.
“Two years ago, companies might have a program to helpa good candidate sell their house, and if they didn’t, to buy itfrom them as part of a relocation package,” Chaponick said.“That’s completely gone; no one’s doing it. We deal in a highersalary range, so our clients generally keep their houses and rentthem out until the economy turns around, but they’re not get-ting much help from employers.”
But there are signs of overall recovery for operations manag -ers, Chaponick said. His business remains below what it wasa year ago, and he doesn’t see a dramatic turnaround, but hisclients are calling, he said. They’re booking his company to vetoperations specialists for a host of new positions.
“Our revenue for April will probably be about the same asfor last month, which is somewhere between 10 percent and15 percent down from last year,” he said. “But we’re denitely seeing an uptick in response and things are starting to move alittle faster. If (job openings) we’re tracking come down from90 days to 75 days (to hire a candidate and nish the contract)that will be a really big deal.”
4OPS
OPERATIONS PROFESSIONALS need to be able toshow their value in an interview. This is the one tip
recruiters who specialize in placing operations professionalskeep coming back to. “For anyone on the operations side of
things, in today’s market especially, you have to show the val -ue. You have to show that yourrole has impacted the businessin a broader scope. The mostsuccessful candidates under-stand the full scheme of thingsyour ability to communicate thisis critical,” said Ronald Parksmanaging director at eConsult America in Minneapolis.
Furthermore, few interviewers
are going to let you off with gen-eral responses.
“I want to know if they’requalied,” said Frank Laux, president of Strategic SearchPartners in Keller, Texas, “and I am going to ask themspecics, like what kind of cost-reduction work they havedone, their spend-level responsibility, and how they achievedthese results.” A job candidate, especially a more establishedone, should expect to be asked what commodities they’rein charge of now and how big their spend responsibility isand they should be able to give examples of how they havereduced costs and improved productivity — be specic and
list examples.
Laux
Interview Prep: OperationsBy Deb Perelman
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Page 6 Operations Jobs Pick Up Steam
in the eld of procurement so she chose to rene her educa-
tion by also graduating with a supply-chain management MBA
from Arizona State University.
Opportunities for nance professionals in procurement
Burek said she believes nance professionals with the right
combination of skills and education have an excellent op-
portunity to move to procurement. She had been involved
in recruiting MBA graduates from Arizona State into IBM’sSupply-Chain Leadership Program and pointed out that the
recruiting team often gave preference to students with nan-
cial backgrounds because of their strong analytical skills and
understanding of P&L and how to manage the budgeting.
As the economy slows, rms are going to be looking fo
ways to avoid waste, to consolidate manpower, and to track
and analyze global spending effectively though supply-chain
management. Burek noted that most of the procurement job
opportunities that she considered in her search were new posi
tions in their organizations. “I think you are starting to see the
mid-level privately held rms looking at procurement because
they either have managed it without much discipline to it, or
they are starting to recognize that they need to focus on it, as ireally can contribute to the bottom line.”
4BUREK
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