Quick Summary An insight into the recruitment challenges facing the beverage industry.
5 min Read
Hardly a week seems to pass without another craft brewery being snapped up by the global beverage brands.
The world’s largest beer maker, AB InBev, along with other global players such as Heineken, have led the way with highly acquisitive strategies aimed at diversifying their brand portfolios and building new revenue streams.
Micro-breweries and distilleries producing beers, ciders, gins and various other beverages have become the new battleground for the world’s biggest drinks brands.
It means that some of the largest drinks multinationals now have hundreds of different subsidiary companies in their stable.
This creates all sorts of business challenges, not least to the traditional centralised talent acquisition model.
Recruitment is a lot more complex when you have such a diverse range of smaller brands spread across the world, from Mexico and Peru to Belgium and India.
We have recently had conversations with the global head of HR at one of the major brewers where there are three VPs covering talent globally, all with their own ideas about the best way to recruit.
Within the business there are over 300 subsidiary companies, all with their own approaches to hiring, some favouring a contingent approach, others using insights and some still using paper-based systems.
The issue arises because the beverage giants want the smaller brands but, to get them, have to acquire lots of smaller companies and their supply chains, all with their own ways of doing things.
The challenges facing many of the multinational beverage companies contrast sharply with, for example, the largest pharmaceutical businesses.
The pharma industry is also extremely acquisitive, but has a far more established and sophisticated global approach to talent acquisition.
The same structures do not currently exist in the beverage industry, something that the larger multinationals are keen to address, while recognising that this will not change overnight.
Armstrong Craven has a proven track record of partnering with companies across many different sectors to help them put in place a far more strategic approach to their talent acquisition.
We can give organisations an ‘umbrella’ view of their internal talent and the external market.
We can help companies to meet the talent challenges posed by a fragmented and disparate collection of smaller companies in geographically and culturally different parts of the world.
Whether you require discreet and unique insight into key talent, mapping to give you a view of the current talent landscape or a proactively generated pipeline of assessed, qualified and engaged candidates, Armstrong Craven’s global teams can provide the intelligence you need to gain a competitive edge in the war for talent.
Our executive search service will also enable you to recruit the senior people you need when you need them and wherever they are in the world.
And our policy of full data ownership means we can partner with our clients to help them build out their own internal talent acquisition teams, increasing their in-house capability.
To find out more about Armstrong Craven’s services or to discuss a particular requirement, contact info@armstrongcraven.com
