The fast-growing City of Princeton, Texas jumped in population from 17,000 in the 2020 census to an estimated 28,000 in 2023 with further surges of population since then. But with tax revenue lagging behind population growth, the city staff remains small. “Our finance team is only four people right now. Everyone wears multiple hats,” says City Manager Michael Mashburn.  

The city is eager to hire specialized positions, including those in procurement, rather than relying on individuals who wear several hats. “We don’t have that experience on hand at the moment,” he says. “Adding bodies to procurement is a difficult challenge right now for just that dedicated need.”

Princeton is far from alone. Many small to medium-sized cities lack experienced procurement staff for a variety of reasons. Even larger cities that want to hire for these positions often find that recruiting and retaining experienced procurement help is difficult given competition with other governments and the private sector over salary, benefits and work flexibility.    

This can be an expensive problem for cities that spend large portions of their budgets buying goods and services and risk losing out on getting the best value out of the dollars they spend. Fortunately, while dealing with internal staff shortages, there are ways to mitigate that risk.

The Pandemic and Its Aftermath

As the pandemic began to take its toll on government staff capacity in 2020, NIGP Consulting, the business wing of NIGP: The Institute for Public Procurement, launched a “staff augmentation” service, providing paid consultants to local governments to help them deal with ever more complicated procurement issues at a time when staff shortages were blossoming.  

Marcheta Gillespie, NIGP Consulting president, anticipated that as life returned to normal, procurement staffing would normalize. That didn’t happen. 

Between the launch of NIGP Consulting in 1995 and the pandemic, its work was largely devoted to special projects – rebuilding a policy manual for a government, for example, or helping to create a strategic plan.

Today, about half of its business is focused on matching up a consultant with procurement expertise and a city or agency that needs help, according to Rick Grimm, NIGP’s Chief Executive Officer. Consultants coming into those roles provide expertise in putting together bid specification documents or helping staff to better understand and judge the merits of buying off of cooperative contracts and enhancing their ability to select the best deals. 

 “Things never seemed to settle back into place,” Gillespie says. “We knew for a period there was going to be an upward trajectory in procurement staffing needs, but we anticipated there would be some sloping off – a leveling point after we’d gotten through the big bubble of the transition.

“But it seems that we continue to see that upward trajectory.” As she tells it, some entities simply never got back positions that had been frozen and others were  unable to find workers to fill positions, particularly those at higher levels..

Brian Funderburk, who retired in 2023 from a nearly ten-year stint as city manager of Rowlett, Texas, and decades in the field with other cities in different states, agrees that some of the effects seen on staffing during the pandemic are lasting. “What I am seeing since the pandemic ended is a true paradigm shift, and it’s not going to get better.”

A Focus on Retention

In general, the problem five years after the start of the pandemic is not so much recruitment as retention. Procurement professionals just don’t seem to stay with one employer, the way they once did, says Funderburk. “For many decades, they were a lot like library folks. You got them and you kept them. That was once very true and it’s not true today.”

According to NEOGOV data, 31% more procurement clerk applications emerged per job posting in the first three quarters of 2024 than during a similar period in 2023. But that still leaves a serious gap in experienced procurement workers due to retirement, burnout, and changing attitudes about job longevity. 

Grimm is not sure that this critical current issue is fully understood. “When I go out and speak, I find people have their hair on fire about recruiting and I’ve said, ‘Your problem is retention.’ Because if you can’t retain, you’re always in this vicious cycle of having to recruit and recruit and recruit for the same positions. Vacancies are not really on the front end. They are more in the mid-to-executive level supervisor, manager and Chief Procurement Officer positions,” Grimm says.

The Growing Industry of Cooperative Contracts

In Princeton, Mashburn looks forward to the time when he can hire the internal procurement experience that he would like to have. To make up for what’s missing, he, like many government officials, makes use of artificial intelligence, third-party vendors, outside consultants, and cooperative contracting, which allow an entity to search databases of contracts that have already been bid out elsewhere.

Through cooperative contracting, cities can take advantage, with care, of the ability to utilize contracts that have already been written either by other entities or by cooperative contracting organizations that may initiate the procurement process, drafting a Request for Proposal for a commonly used commodity or less frequently a service, evaluating vendor responses and then publicizing the contracts availability to governments that can sign on to an already created contract, choose one of several vendors that have won the contract and work out specifications that align with local needs.

One advantage for a short-staffed city is speed. If most of the heavy procurement work has been done in establishing the contract, local officials “don’t have to run around and do it themselves,” says Jon Blackman, chief operations manager for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, which runs its own cooperative contracting organization, called TxShare.

 “If your staff is somewhat limited, then you’re looking to do everything in a more efficient and effective manner,” Blackman says. “If we’re able to go out and get competitively bid, competitively sourced cooperative contracts that our members need, then that’s relieving them of the extra work so they don’t have to go out and do it themselves.”

In fact, one such TxShare contract was recently awarded to address the staffing challenges that Blackman and his team have heard so much about, connecting local governments directly to expert recruitment providers for executive leadership roles. The contract allows local agencies to tailor their recruitment strategies to secure top-tier talent quickly and efficiently, all within a pre-approved, legally compliant contract.

The use of cooperative contracts has grown enormously in recent years with a multitude of players who provide information to governments on contract deals they can join. For example, Funderburk, is now vice president of agencies at Civic Marketplace, which was recently launched to act “like a matchmaker” – providing guidance, AI search capability and interplay with other cities.

Co-developed with city officials, this new business collaborates with TxShare, as well as partnering with NIGP Consulting and other organizations and uses Artificial Intelligence to help cities find existing contracts that can help to meet their needs. It provides a platform where member cities can consult with each other about their contracting needs and experiences and get help assembling back up information about the deals they’re getting to present to city councils.

For the moment, an organization like Civic Marketplace is just beginning with its capacity to provide help to communities only growing as it becomes better known As Gillespie says, “There are so many government entities out there that have no idea these resources are available to them.”

This article is sponsored by Civic Marketplace

For details on the executive search contract designed to help agencies streamline their hiring process, click here to learn more:  

#StateandLocalGovernmentManagement #StateLocalProcurementManagement #StateLocalProcurementPerformance #LocalGovernmentProcurement #CityandTownProcurement #CountyProcurement #CivicMarketplace #NorthCentralTexasCouncilOfGovernments #TxShare #CooperativeContracts #ProcurementStaffChallenge #SmallCityProcurementStaffChallenge #ProcurementRetentionChallenge #ProcurementStaffingTrouble #StateandLocalHumanResources #CityHumanResources #ProcurementHumanResources #CityCountyProcurementWorkforce #NIGP #InstituteForPublicProcurement #NIGPConsulting #NIGP #RickGrimm #MarchetaGillespie #PrincetonTx #CityManagerMikeMashburn #BarrettandGreeneInc