The Best Functions From Which to Steal Talent for Your Procurement Team

Let’s talk about something that isn’t said out loud very often. If you want to build a genuinely strong procurement team, you're probably going to have to become a talent thief.

Not the external headhunting kind, though that has its place, too. The internal kind. The kind where you spot someone brilliant in another department, quietly gauge their interest over coffee, then reel them into procurement before their current manager notices what's happening.

Talent for Your Procurement Team

Here's why this works so well. Hiring externally is slow, expensive, and full of unknowns. You're relying on a resume, a couple of interviews, and a gut feeling, hoping the person who interviews brilliantly also performs brilliantly once the pressure is on. Poaching internally is a win-win because: 

• You already know how this person operates under real conditions. 
• You've watched them handle a difficult stakeholder, push back on a bad decision, or stay calm when a deadline blew up.  
• No recruiter fees, no lengthy notice period from outside, and often a much shorter ramp-up time since they already understand your organization, your systems, and your culture.

There is a catch. Poaching talent internally means someone else's team gets smaller, and that someone is unlikely to send you a thank you card. Finance directors notice when their best analyst suddenly wants to talk about supplier negotiations. Sales leaders get twitchy when their star account manager starts asking pointed questions about category strategy. Handle it with a bit of tact, give the other function's leader a heads up rather than an ambush, and you'll preserve the relationship even while you're quietly building your bench.

With that groundwork laid, let's get into where the best procurement talent tends to be hiding.

Where to Look: The Best Functions to Raid

Finance 

Anyone who's spent time in financial planning and analysis already thinks in the language procurement needs: cost drivers, variance analysis, budget ownership, and the discipline of tying every decision back to a number that someone in the C-suite actually cares about.

Importantly, they already know how to build a business case that survives scrutiny from a CFO. Bring someone like this into procurement and you often get a category manager who can walk into a savings review already speaking the language leadership wants to hear.

Sales

Great salespeople are professional negotiators who've spent years reading a room, building rapport under pressure, and closing deals where both sides need to walk away feeling like they won. Flip that skill set around and point it at suppliers instead of customers, and you've got a negotiator who can hold their own against even the toughest account managers on the other side of the table.

The best sales hires also tend to be naturally persuasive internally, which matters enormously when you're trying to get a reluctant stakeholder to use the contract you negotiated.

Supply Chain and Logistics

If your organization has a separate supply chain or logistics function, it's often sitting right next door to procurement without anyone treating it that way. These are people who already understand lead times, supplier risk, inventory tradeoffs, and what happens operationally when a sourcing decision goes wrong.

Someone who's spent years untangling a shipping delay or managing a warehouse through a supply crunch brings a grounded, operational realism that pure category managers sometimes lack. They know that a great price on paper means nothing if the supplier can't deliver on time.

Legal

A surprisingly underused source of talent. Someone with contract law experience already reads the fine print the rest of us skim past, understands liability and risk allocation, and knows exactly which clauses are worth fighting for during negotiations. Bringing legal fluency into a category management role means fewer nasty surprises buried in a 40-page supplier agreement, and a much stronger hand at the negotiating table when it comes to indemnities, termination rights, and service level penalties.

Data and Analytics

As procurement leans harder into AI automation and data-driven category strategy, someone who already lives in dashboards, forecasting models, and statistical analysis is worth their weight in gold. They can turn a messy spend data set into a clear savings opportunity far faster than someone learning the tools from scratch.

How to Attract Talent From Other Functions

Spotting the right people is the easy part. Convincing them to make the move is where most procurement leaders fall short, mostly because they undersell what the job offers.

• Sell the strategic story. Too many people outside procurement still picture the function as purchase orders and supplier chasing. Show them the reality instead: category strategy, supplier relationship management, cross-functional influence, and increasingly, working alongside AI tools that free up time for the parts of the job that actually require judgment. People want to do meaningful work, and procurement's strategic potential is a genuinely compelling pitch when you frame it honestly.
• Show them the variety. Someone in a narrow finance or sales role often craves broader exposure to the business. Procurement touches nearly every department, which means a category manager gets a view into operations, marketing, IT, and facilities that almost no other role offers. For someone hungry to understand how the whole business fits together, that's a real draw.
• Talk about visibility and impact. A well-run negotiation or a smart category strategy has a direct, measurable line to the bottom line, and that kind of visible impact tends to appeal to ambitious people who want their work noticed by leadership. It's also worth spelling out the influence procurement has over issues a lot of purposeful young professionals genuinely care about. Every supplier decision is a chance to push for better environmental practices, insist on modern slavery due diligence deep in the supply chain, or direct spend toward minority owned and other diverse businesses. Few roles hand someone that level of real, measurable influence over how responsibly a company operates, and for a lot of people, that's every bit as motivating as the paycheck.
• Point out how much responsibility lands in procurement's hands, often earlier than people expect. It's not unusual for a fairly junior category manager to find themselves on a call with the CEO or CFO of a supplier organization, negotiating terms on a contract worth millions. Few other entry points into a business hand someone that kind of exposure, or that kind of budget responsibility, so early in their career. For someone used to sitting several layers removed from real financial stakes, that's a genuinely exciting jump, and worth spelling out explicitly rather than leaving them to discover it after they've already made the move.
• Be upfront about growth. Procurement careers can move fast for people who show strong negotiation and analytical instincts, and internal transfers often skip a lot of the ramp-up time an external hire would need. Make that growth path explicit rather than assuming it speaks for itself.
• And don't skip the human part. A genuine conversation about why you think they'd thrive in procurement, backed by specific examples of what you've seen them do well, lands far better than a generic pitch about career development.

If This All Sounds Exhausting…

If you're reading this and thinking, "great advice, except my team is already stretched so thin we can't even think about talent strategy," you're not alone. Most procurement teams are running lean, which makes it hard to find the bandwidth for anything beyond the next fire that needs putting out, let alone a considered internal talent hunt.

This is exactly where Una fits in. Rather than replacing your strategy or your team, Una works alongside you, taking on the transactional weight of common indirect spend categories through pre-negotiated contracts, so your existing people (and the great new team members you're about to poach) can spend their time on the work that needs a human in the room.

Fewer hours lost to supplier admin means more capacity for the category strategy, stakeholder relationships, and talent development that build a genuinely strong procurement function.

Start the conversation with Una today, and give your newly assembled team the room they need to prove what they can do.