Retail supplier job market comes full circle

Some of the most demanding and highest paying jobs in Northwest Arkansas can be found in the Wal-Mart supplier community. 

In any given month there is between 80 to 100 jobs open among the product and service suppliers that hang shingles in Benton and Washington counties, according to Cameron Smith, CEO of Cameron Smith & Associates.

Smith said the local market is roughly 6,000 jobs divided into 1,300 teams, and a fair number of those are one-person teams that work from home.

He estimates that about 30% of the openings are new positions created from local suppliers expanding their teams and other companies — domestic and international — that are building a workforce from the ground up within the local area.

Clint Lazenby has worked inside and outside of the local supplier community over the past 16 years and said when he took his first supplier job in the late 1990s, he remembers a fairly tight labor pool.

“Larger suppliers would rotate their top sales candidates through Bentonville for a tour of duty that lasted between two and three years before they would call them back to the home-office and then backfill with another candidate,” Lazenby said.

As Wal-Mart’s top line business grew, he said more suppliers came to Bentonville and the demand for seasoned sales professionals rose, which in his opinion helped to push salaries higher.

Positions in the supplier community range from $65,000 entry level jobs to more than $125,000 for seasoned sales professionals calling on Wal-Mart or leading a retail team, according to local job postings at CSARecruiters.com.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Tyson Foods have said publicly that recruiting top talent to Northwest Arkansas is not without its challenges. But once business professionals get settled in they have been known to turn down opportunities for advancement when it required them to relocate.

Scott Winchester moved his family Northwest Arkansas in January of 2000. He worked for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare as the customer operations manager for the Wal-Mart team.

“After four years, my company came to me and said congratulations, you're being promoted back to the corporate headquarters in New Jersey. But, by then we had fallen in love with Northwest Arkansas, and even my wife who is from New Jersey, did not want to go back,” Winchester said.

That’s when Winchester said he found Blue Rhino and took a sales director job that allowed him to remain in this area.

“I have heard many similar stories,” he said.

As more of these executives remain in the area, the level of expertise in the consumer packaged goods and retail areas is deemed highly concentrated for a metro area this size.

Lazenby said the local concentration of talent in professional retail is similar to what Silicon Valley has in the tech world. And every time Wal-Mart expands or moves in a different direction local suppliers have been known to add to their teams.

Diane Natishan, senior partner with CSA Recruiters, recently said in an interview with 8th & Walton that some suppliers continue to add to their local teams. She said in recent years shopper insights and social marketing expertise has been sought out by suppliers.

Lazenby agreed, saying not too long ago there were few marketing experts to be found in the immediate region. But about three years ago large suppliers such as ConAgra, began to look for experts with true-brand experience and these marketers were added to the Wal-Mart teams.

“This gave the local job market a boost because these were new jobs across a number of large suppliers,” Lazenby added. “The role du jour these days is the shopper marketing position, at least that’s what I am hearing.”

Natishan said suppliers are looking for candidates that are social media savvy and able to go beyond the numbers to create stories that help reinforce their brands. That is quite different from analytical retail link experts, and then replenishment experts that were the “roles du jour” from a few years ago, Lazenby said.

CAREER  MOVES
Natishan said people in general make job changes more often today than in years’ past when a person retired with a company pension. The same is true in the supplier community, to some extent.

She said sometimes it’s because professionals are placed in silos with little chance for role expansion. Other times career professional are looking for quality of life issues around working from home or flex-time benefits. And just like the overall workforce, some people look for career growth opportunities and higher wages.

Lazenby sees the supplier job market as fairly elastic, with some professionals moving two or three times to get the quality of life, salary or job experience they need at a particular time. He said it’s fairly easy to find another job, but being able to continue climbing the career ladder and remain in this area can be a challenge, especially for executives at the top of their teams.

Lazenby said he chose his career moves strategically, having started in the entry level position with Johnson & Johnson in 1999. 
He opted to move to category advisor in 2000 for The Scotts Co. because the position gave him more flexibility and opportunity to call directly on Wal-Mart. This job allowed him to gain supply chain management experience which he used to get his first international job in mid 2003.

Having studied abroad for two years in Moscow, Lazenby said the international arena was high on his career list. He was a director/general manager for World Kitchen for nearly five years before he joined ConAgra’s International Wal-Mart team in 2008.

For the past 16 months Lazenby has been the international director for ConAgra Foods Lamb Weston Division, he is also a member for the Arkansas District Export Council, a job he does from his home base in Northwest Arkansas. He said something he has recently witnessed is large suppliers not hiring from the local talent pool for those top positions on the ground.

“I know a few suppliers who have rotated in guys from their international division to head up the Wal-Mart team for a 'tour of duty' before they are moved on to another position. I find that interesting given that was the game plan many suppliers first came to region with 15 years ago.”