STEVE SIMMANCE Fmcg offers a brilliant career ­ but major employers have been lousy at publicising the fact. That's just one of the issues over which search and selection specialist Steve Simmance takes the industry to task. He is "genuinely concerned" that employers are letting star talent be tempted away by the sexier sectors like telecoms, finance and management consulting. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, he says, there was a clear, structured and often attractive route available to newcomers to fmcg, chiefly through the annual trawl of university undergraduates. But the recessions of the '80s and early '90s saw most grocery manufacturers quit the milk round. Since then, while other sectors, including retail, have dramatically improved their image and new IT-based industries have become the place to be seen, for fmcg firms, recruitment has become a fire-fighting exercise. "Consumer goods manufacturers tend to be very climate-influenced," says Simmance, who is managing director of search and selection at NHA International. "Whenever there's a recession, they don't just slow down recruitment ­ they stop. Then, when there's a boom, it's panic stations." A reluctance to look for staff outside the bounds of their own industry makes life more difficult for consumer goods firms, he points out. They prefer to poach from each other rather than consider outsiders who won't arrive with an intimate knowledge of grocery buyers. The situation is exacerbated by what he sees as rampant ageism among blue chip manufacturers. "If you haven't cut the mustard by the age of 35, you're not likely to make it through." Employers are wily enough to avoid stating "you must be 25-28" in job adverts, but it amounts to the same thing when they tell prospective candidates "you must be a recent graduate with three or four years' experience". On the whole, the recruitment agency's hands are tied. "There are only a few examples of companies who say just bring me the skills' regardless of age, but we would positively endorse that approach." Simmance is critical of the training policies of many fmcg employers, which he says often overlook fundamental management skills. Typical graduate entrant training starts with shadowing an experienced sales executive followed by rudimentary sales skill courses, often delivered in seminar format. The next stage is to learn negotiation and customer-focused account-handling. And at senior level, the focus typically shifts to specialised functions such as category management or Efficient Consumer Response (ECR). But many of the core administrative and people skills are completely overlooked, he claims, pointing out: "You may be the world's greatest ECR guru, but if you don't have the interpersonal skills, you're not going to make much impact." But sales professionals are as much to blame as their companies if their skills and qualifications are lagging behind. "Most sales and marketing people don't invest enough in their own training. There's a distinct dearth of MBAs, for example, in the sales arena. "In my view, people should either be funding their own training or pressing their employers for sponsorship." The frighteningly high standard of many young German, French and Scandinavian executives has not passed Simmance by. "The typical age of an assistant product manager here is 21," he continues. "In Germany it's more like 28 because people stay in higher education for much longer. "Employees on the continent take post-graduate degrees, work in different environments, learn four or five languages. Yet when they come over here for jobs, employers won't take them, either because they have the wrong accent or because they just don't understand Tesco'. Simmance urges firms to take a leaf out of the US and continental manufacturers' books, and make ongoing management development a central plank of their human resources policy. "I would hold up Bacardi-Martini as a company that really takes time out to develop its people. "It has worked closely with Southampton University to educate its managers, and formed strategic alliances with American institutions too. "That's what more fmcg firms should be doing."{{Z SUPPLEMENTS }}