Third-party logistics and technology companies are hiring supply chain professionals right now. If you want to get their attention, then you'll need to be familiar with a wide range of functions, says recruiter Don Jacobson.
Economists say we're in a "jobless recovery"—the economy is rebounding yet we're not seeing a commensurate increase in employment. But according to Don Jacobson, one of the top recruiters in the supply chain field, that doesn't seem to apply to the supply chain job market. So far, the hiring outlook for supply chain professionals looks brighter this year than last, says Jacobson, who heads up Optimum Supply Chain Recruiters, a specialist in finding talent for third-party logistics companies (3PLs).
Before becoming a professional recruiter, Jacobson managed operations, customer service, and supply chain functions at Corning Glass Works, Mikasa, and Delco. For the past 28 years, he has been involved in recruiting and placing supply chain executives throughout North America. He has been a member of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) for more than 25 years.
Jacobson regularly shares his knowledge and experience by writing articles for such publications as DC Velocity magazine, CSCMP Supply Chain Comment, and The WERCSheet, published by the Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC).
In a recent interview with Editor James Cooke, Jacobson discussed the current hiring outlook for supply chain professionals, including what makes a candidate attractive to employers and where the jobs are these days.
What is the hiring outlook for this year? Are jobs opening up in the supply chain field?
We have seen more than a 30-percent increase in opportunities as compared to the first quarter of last year. With companies still running so lean, we expect this level of activity to continue to grow throughout the year.
Still, understaffed Human Resources departments are hard-pressed and at times under-qualified to meet the demand for new, specialized hires. The time it takes from when someone submits a résumé to when he or she is hired has increased over the last few years.
Are there any particular areas where companies are recruiting supply chain professionals—logistics or procurement, for instance?
There has been a tremendous amount of activity [recently] in hiring individuals in business development, and the competition for these people is very strong. This is usually a precursor to hiring in the engineering and operations areas. Procurement has remained a hot area, as companies of all sizes are looking at taking a strategic approach with new [software] systems and utilizing multisource hiring on a global level.
Third-party logistics companies are also looking to diversify their [product and service] offerings. But they do not have the right people in place to make that happen, and they have to go to the outside to find the right people.
Are there any industries that are hiring more supply chain professionals than others right now?
As the shift to outsourcing continues, the service providers, technology companies, and software companies seem to be hiring at a higher level. And although we have finally seen the Fortune 500 companies opening up their hiring, it is the small to medium-size companies that are experiencing the most growth.
Name: Don Jacobson Title: President Organization: Optimum Supply Chain Recruiters Education: Bachelor of Arts in management, City University of New York Business experience:
Operations/customer service manager at Mikasa
Director of operations, Corning Glass Works
Vice president of operations, Delco
Partner at Hunt Ltd.
Founder and managing partner of LogiPros LLC
CSCMP Member: more than 25 years
What background or qualifications make a supply chain professional stand out from the crowd?
Of course you need to have at least a bachelor's degree. In addition, companies that are hiring are combining more than one position and are looking for candidates with multiple areas of expertise. It is important to do what you can to get cross-functionally trained in several areas of your company's supply chain.
It is important to realize that initial screening [of job applicants] has been pushed off to Human Resources, so the standard requirements stated in the job description have become a "go/no-go" test when the résumé is reviewed. For example, all the experience you have may not substitute for a degree. If your résumé does not have the key words that are in the company's job description, then there is a good chance that you will not be considered. ... Unfortunately, the "soft" skills that are a major component of success are many times not taken into consideration.
Are there any particular certifications that hiring companies are seeking in supply chain candidates?
Depending on the position that a person is looking for, certification is becoming more and more important. APICS certification, CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management), Six Sigma, and Lean, plus warehouse management systems, transportation management systems, and SAP knowledge are all in demand and are included in the job descriptions.
Companies are no longer willing to train new recruits in the most common business tools. They want candidates who can hit the ground running. Continuing your education is always a benefit to your career.
What's the employment outlook for students who are now graduating with supply chain management degrees?
Although we do not specialize in the placement of recent graduates, when we do speak to them, we advise them to take advantage of as many internship programs as they can, whether paid or unpaid. We also advise them to get very involved in both the local and national chapters of industry associations that are related to the supply chain area they want to specialize in.
The recent graduate needs to explore all available options: job boards, recruiters, company websites, social networking, alumni groups, job fairs, and even traditional print media. Any opportunity to gain experience should be explored and followed if it makes sense and advances the candidate's network and career.
How important is international experience in landing the top supply chain job these days?
Of course it depends on the company and its global exposure. However, those that have this experience will have an edge over the candidates that do not have this experience.
If you could give one piece of advice to a supply chain professional in regard to moving up the career ladder, what would that be?
I can't do justice to this question with just one piece of advice. I would always have a résumé ready and updated, even if you are not in the market [for a new job]. I would develop a relationship with select, specialized recruiters and maintain a dialogue with them, even if it is only once every six months. Keep learning cross-functionally, and get involved in associations to strengthen your network.
The ability to perform multiple functions adds value when covering multiple responsibilities or working on special projects. The most successful companies traditionally have rotated new employees through multiple career paths to prepare them for future promotions. Although this practice has diminished somewhat, you can volunteer to participate in projects in other departments to get the experience needed to round out your background.
Benefits for Amazon's customers--who include marketplace retailers and logistics services customers, as well as companies who use its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform and the e-commerce shoppers who buy goods on the website--will include generative AI (Gen AI) solutions that offer real-world value, the company said.
The launch is based on “Amazon Nova,” the company’s new generation of foundation models, the company said in a blog post. Data scientists use foundation models (FMs) to develop machine learning (ML) platforms more quickly than starting from scratch, allowing them to create artificial intelligence applications capable of performing a wide variety of general tasks, since they were trained on a broad spectrum of generalized data, Amazon says.
The new models are integrated with Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes FMs from AI companies and Amazon available for use through a single API. Using Amazon Bedrock, customers can experiment with and evaluate Amazon Nova models, as well as other FMs, to determine the best model for an application.
Calling the launch “the next step in our AI journey,” the company says Amazon Nova has the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, so customers can use Amazon Nova-powered generative AI applications to understand videos, charts, and documents, or to generate videos and other multimedia content.
“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 Gen AI applications in motion, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, said in a release. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, information grounding, and agentic capabilities.”
The new Amazon Nova models available in Amazon Bedrock include:
Amazon Nova Micro, a text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses at very low cost.
Amazon Nova Lite, a very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs.
Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks.
Amazon Nova Premier, the most capable of Amazon’s multimodal models for complex reasoning tasks and for use as the best teacher for distilling custom models
Amazon Nova Canvas, a state-of-the-art image generation model.
Amazon Nova Reel, a state-of-the-art video generation model that can transform a single image input into a brief video with the prompt: dolly forward.
Economic activity in the logistics industry expanded in November, continuing a steady growth pattern that began earlier this year and signaling a return to seasonality after several years of fluctuating conditions, according to the latest Logistics Managers’ Index report (LMI), released today.
The November LMI registered 58.4, down slightly from October’s reading of 58.9, which was the highest level in two years. The LMI is a monthly gauge of business conditions across warehousing and logistics markets; a reading above 50 indicates growth and a reading below 50 indicates contraction.
“The overall index has been very consistent in the past three months, with readings of 58.6, 58.9, and 58.4,” LMI analyst Zac Rogers, associate professor of supply chain management at Colorado State University, wrote in the November LMI report. “This plateau is slightly higher than a similar plateau of consistency earlier in the year when May to August saw four readings between 55.3 and 56.4. Seasonally speaking, it is consistent that this later year run of readings would be the highest all year.”
Separately, Rogers said the end-of-year growth reflects the return to a healthy holiday peak, which started when inventory levels expanded in late summer and early fall as retailers began stocking up to meet consumer demand. Pandemic-driven shifts in consumer buying behavior, inflation, and economic uncertainty contributed to volatile peak season conditions over the past four years, with the LMI swinging from record-high growth in late 2020 and 2021 to slower growth in 2022 and contraction in 2023.
“The LMI contracted at this time a year ago, so basically [there was] no peak season,” Rogers said, citing inflation as a drag on demand. “To have a normal November … [really] for the first time in five years, justifies what we’ve seen all these companies doing—building up inventory in a sustainable, seasonal way.
“Based on what we’re seeing, a lot of supply chains called it right and were ready for healthy holiday season, so far.”
The LMI has remained in the mid to high 50s range since January—with the exception of April, when the index dipped to 52.9—signaling strong and consistent demand for warehousing and transportation services.
The LMI is a monthly survey of logistics managers from across the country. It tracks industry growth overall and across eight areas: inventory levels and costs; warehousing capacity, utilization, and prices; and transportation capacity, utilization, and prices. The report is released monthly by researchers from Arizona State University, Colorado State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, in conjunction with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP).
Specifically, 48% of respondents identified rising tariffs and trade barriers as their top concern, followed by supply chain disruptions at 45% and geopolitical instability at 41%. Moreover, tariffs and trade barriers ranked as the priority issue regardless of company size, as respondents at companies with less than 250 employees, 251-500, 501-1,000, 1,001-50,000 and 50,000+ employees all cited it as the most significant issue they are currently facing.
“Evolving tariffs and trade policies are one of a number of complex issues requiring organizations to build more resilience into their supply chains through compliance, technology and strategic planning,” Jackson Wood, Director, Industry Strategy at Descartes, said in a release. “With the potential for the incoming U.S. administration to impose new and additional tariffs on a wide variety of goods and countries of origin, U.S. importers may need to significantly re-engineer their sourcing strategies to mitigate potentially higher costs.”
Freight transportation providers and maritime port operators are bracing for rough business impacts if the incoming Trump Administration follows through on its pledge to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% tariff on China, analysts say.
Industry contacts say they fear that such heavy fees could prompt importers to “pull forward” a massive surge of goods before the new administration is seated on January 20, and then quickly cut back again once the hefty new fees are instituted, according to a report from TD Cowen.
As a measure of the potential economic impact of that uncertain scenario, transport company stocks were mostly trading down yesterday following Donald Trump’s social media post on Monday night announcing the proposed new policy, TD Cowen said in a note to investors.
But an alternative impact of the tariff jump could be that it doesn’t happen at all, but is merely a threat intended to force other nations to the table to strike new deals on trade, immigration, or drug smuggling. “Trump is perfectly comfortable being a policy paradox and pushing competing policies (and people); this ‘chaos premium’ only increases his leverage in negotiations,” the firm said.
However, if that truly is the new administration’s strategy, it could backfire by sparking a tit-for-tat trade war that includes retaliatory tariffs by other countries on U.S. exports, other analysts said. “The additional tariffs on China that the incoming US administration plans to impose will add to restrictions on China-made products, driving up their prices and fueling an already-under-way surge in efforts to beat the tariffs by importing products before the inauguration,” Andrei Quinn-Barabanov, Senior Director – Supplier Risk Management solutions at Moody’s, said in a statement. “The Mexico and Canada tariffs may be an invitation to negotiations with the U.S. on immigration and other issues. If implemented, they would also be challenging to maintain, because the two nations can threaten the U.S. with significant retaliation and because of a likely pressure from the American business community that would be greatly affected by the costs and supply chain obstacles resulting from the tariffs.”
New tariffs could also damage sensitive supply chains by triggering unintended consequences, according to a report by Matt Lekstutis, Director at Efficio, a global procurement and supply chain procurement consultancy. “While ultimate tariff policy will likely be implemented to achieve specific US re-industrialization and other political objectives, the responses of various nations, companies and trading partners is not easily predicted and companies that even have little or no exposure to Mexico, China or Canada could be impacted. New tariffs may disrupt supply chains dependent on just in time deliveries as they adjust to new trade flows. This could affect all industries dependent on distribution and logistics providers and result in supply shortages,” Lekstutis said.
Grocers and retailers are struggling to get their systems back online just before the winter holiday peak, following a software hack that hit the supply chain software provider Blue Yonder this week.
The ransomware attack is snarling inventory distribution patterns because of its impact on systems such as the employee scheduling system for coffee stalwart Starbucks, according to a published report. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Blue Yonder provides a wide range of supply chain software, including warehouse management system (WMS), transportation management system (TMS), order management and commerce, network and control tower, returns management, and others.
Blue Yonder today acknowledged the disruptions, saying they were the result of a ransomware incident affecting its managed services hosted environment. The company has established a dedicated cybersecurity incident update webpage to communicate its recovery progress, but it had not been updated for nearly two days as of Tuesday afternoon. “Since learning of the incident, the Blue Yonder team has been working diligently together with external cybersecurity firms to make progress in their recovery process. We have implemented several defensive and forensic protocols,” a Blue Yonder spokesperson said in an email.
The timing of the attack suggests that hackers may have targeted Blue Yonder in a calculated attack based on the upcoming Thanksgiving break, since many U.S. organizations downsize their security staffing on holidays and weekends, according to a statement from Dan Lattimer, VP of Semperis, a New Jersey-based computer and network security firm.
“While details on the specifics of the Blue Yonder attack are scant, it is yet another reminder how damaging supply chain disruptions become when suppliers are taken offline. Kudos to Blue Yonder for dealing with this cyberattack head on but we still don’t know how far reaching the business disruptions will be in the UK, U.S. and other countries,” Lattimer said. “Now is time for organizations to fight back against threat actors. Deciding whether or not to pay a ransom is a personal decision that each company has to make, but paying emboldens threat actors and throws more fuel onto an already burning inferno. Simply, it doesn’t pay-to-pay,” he said.
The incident closely followed an unrelated cybersecurity issue at the grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which has been recovering from impacts to the Stop & Shop chain that it across the U.S. Northeast region. In a statement apologizing to customers for the inconvenience of the cybersecurity issue, Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize said its top priority is the security of its customers, associates and partners, and that the company’s internal IT security staff was working with external cybersecurity experts and law enforcement to speed recovery. “Our teams are taking steps to assess and mitigate the issue. This includes taking some systems offline to help protect them. This issue and subsequent mitigating actions have affected certain Ahold Delhaize USA brands and services including a number of pharmacies and certain e-commerce operations,” the company said.
Editor's note:This article was revised on November 27 to indicate that the cybersecurity issue at Ahold Delhaize was unrelated to the Blue Yonder hack.