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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 careerevents@theladders.com.

IN THIS PACKAGE:

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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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