The expectations on supply chain teams have shifted substantially.
Scope 3 accountability, supplier ESG requirements, sustainable sourcing mandates, and regulations like CSRD and CSDDD have created a new category of operational work that most companies are actively trying to staff.
The challenge is that most companies are still hiring for the wrong things.
Sustainability certifications get screened for. ESG titles get prioritized. Green-tinged resumes move forward. But the skills that determine whether a sustainability-focused supply chain team actually delivers are operational, commercial, and analytical — and they look far more like traditional procurement than most job descriptions currently reflect.
When companies add "sustainability" to a supply chain role, the instinct is to find someone who already has sustainability on their resume. That means prioritizing CSR backgrounds, ESG credentials, or candidates who have worked in environmental compliance.
Those backgrounds bring useful knowledge. They rarely bring the operational depth needed to do the actual work: building supplier emissions inventories, negotiating contractual ESG obligations, integrating sustainability criteria into category strategy, or generating the data that regulatory reporting requires.
According to McKinsey, two-thirds of the average company's environmental footprint lies with suppliers. Yet in their survey of CPOs at large European companies, only 20% said their organizations used sustainability measures as primary criteria in sourcing decisions or supplier reviews. The gap between sustainability ambition and procurement behavior is a skills problem as much as a strategy problem.
Most of a company's emissions sit in the supply chain. Addressing that requires someone who can work with spend data, map categories to emissions factors, and build supplier data collection programs.
This is not a data science role. It is a procurement role with quantitative fluency. The candidate who can run a spend-based estimate today and build toward supplier-specific primary data collection over two to three reporting cycles is the one who moves the program forward.
The companies making real progress on supply chain sustainability are getting contractual. They are writing ESG requirements into supplier agreements, setting measurable targets, and creating accountability structures that change supplier behavior.
That takes procurement skills: negotiation, contract drafting, supplier relationship management, and the commercial judgment to balance ESG requirements against cost and continuity. Passion for sustainability is not a substitute for any of those.
CSRD and CSDDD create concrete operational workload that lands in procurement. Double-materiality assessments, value chain mapping, supplier surveys, due diligence documentation. These are not tasks for the compliance team alone. They require someone who can read a regulatory requirement, translate it into procurement workflow, and build the documentation trail that makes reporting defensible.
Hire for people who can operationalize a directive.
Sustainability goals do not move on their own. A category manager has to make the case to finance for a higher-cost, lower-carbon material. A sourcing lead has to push a supplier toward a target that costs them something to hit. A procurement director has to get product engineering to accept a substitute input.
The skills here are the same ones that make any strong supply chain leader effective: building a business case, running a commercial negotiation, and holding a position under pressure. Environmental conviction matters. Without commercial muscle behind it, it rarely produces outcomes.
Certifications are useful early in a career, before operational experience accumulates. At mid and senior levels, they are a weak proxy for capability.
An ESG credential does not indicate whether someone can run a supplier engagement program, manage a contract negotiation, or build a Scope 3 model from raw spend data. A sustainability title in a prior role does not confirm whether the person owned any commercial outcomes.
Interview for portfolio evidence instead. Ask candidates to walk through a supplier program they built, a category strategy they developed, or a contract clause they negotiated with environmental performance requirements. The work history tells you more than the credential list.
No single hire covers all four capability areas. The better approach is to map existing procurement roles against these gaps and identify where operational sustainability capability is missing.
In many cases, the right answer is building capability into the existing procurement team rather than adding dedicated sustainability headcount. A category manager with strong commercial instincts and carbon fluency often delivers more than an ESG specialist who has never owned a supplier relationship.
Limiting the search to active candidates narrows the pool significantly. Many qualified professionals with operational procurement and sustainability experience are not actively searching for new roles at any given time. Companies that rely solely on job postings may overlook candidates with the expertise needed to advance supply chain sustainability initiatives.
Friddy Hoegener is the Co-Founder and Head of Recruiting at SCOPE Recruiting, a boutique firm specializing in supply chain and manufacturing talent. As a former supply chain professional himself, he now connects companies with the right talent to solve critical operational challenges.
