Market update

The market for supply chain management positions in the Netherlands is still slow. Many companies have used the year 2009 to focus on cutting out complete management layers and downsize their organizations to an absolute minimum level in order to survive during the dramatic economic downturn. There is a very careful positive upturn in activity which is something the logistics industry feels almost immediately and in talking too many of our clients we understand that business is slowly picking up. This does not mean that logistics and supply chain management vacancies are showing a similar trend. Yes there are some positive signs, but most companies are extremely careful in adding more management resources to their cost structure. Most organizations have told us that the pipeline of new potential business is thickening and some very encouraging successes have been achieved during the last 6 months. Companies are however still extremely reluctant to add management resources and prefer to keep their management structure lean and mean.

The near future shows that, as business is increasing to grow and new business is successfully closed, that this will have direct consequences to an increase of management vacancies in the logistics and supply chain sector. Many think that the increase will start with a spike in the use of interim management resources. We don’t believe this will be the case as there is big group of high quality logistics and supply chain managers who have been forced to unemployment due to the economic crisis. Of course there are logistics and supply chain managers who have been released because of bad performance over many years, but a big group within the current unemployed crowd has been let go for economic reasons only. Finding the right quality of supply chain and logistics managers within the large group of unemployed is where the challenge is. The big advantage of these unemployed high quality managers is that they are available on short notice and most of them will be flexible in relation to short term contracts to start with, making them a serious competitor to the expensive interim management solution.