Procurement Pulse

Season 1 covered a lot: AI in procurement, lean manufacturing, supplier sourcing, robotics in the warehouse, reverse recruiting. 

Different guests, different corners of the industry, but the sam e question kept coming up: as the tools get smarter, what's actually left for people to do?

This episode pulls together the sharpest moments from the season. 

What We Discuss:

00:00 Why AI adoption stalls on trust, not technology

04:28 The lean manufacturing insight most companies overlook

09:07 What happens when you message 50 suppliers instead of 5

14:13 The skill that decides who stays relevant as AI takes over

16:30 Why boutique 3PLs need a different robotics strategy than Amazon

19:34 Reverse recruiting, explained

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/

Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/

Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com. 

Robots have been in warehouses for years. But rigid setups, massive upfront costs, and zero flexibility have kept automation out of reach for most 3PLs.

General-purpose robotics changes that, and it's closer than most people think.

In this episode of Procurement Pulse, host Friddy Hoegener sits down with Joe Spisak, Founder & CEO of Fulfill.com, who built and sold his own 140,000 square foot fulfillment center before launching a platform that connects brands with 3PL partners across a network of 2,800+ providers.

They dig into why current robotics still falls short for mid-market 3PLs, what makes general-purpose different, and why the next five years could bring more disruption to warehousing than the last twenty combined. Joe also shares what he actually looks for when hiring entry-level supply chain talent and why your GPA is the last thing on his mind.

What We Discuss:

00:00 Three 3PLs in 18 months: the near-disaster that started it all

02:43 How the matchmaking model works and what 100+ data points actually flag

05:11 Using the free matchmaking process as a negotiating weapon with your current 3PL

07:45 How Fulfill.com expanded from matching brands to connecting 3PLs with tech partners

10:34 Why the biggest 3PLs push back and where the real opportunity sits

13:32 General-purpose robotics: why mid-market warehouses are closer to disruption than they think

17:42 What warehouse teams actually look like when robots start entering the floor

21:49 What Joe looks for in entry-level hires (and why your GPA is irrelevant)

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/

Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/

Connect with Joe | https://www.linkedin.com/in/spisakjoe/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com.

Companies spend millions on procurement technology and walk away with almost nothing to show for it. Not because the tech failed, but because nobody planned for the hard part.

The hard part is the people.

In this episode of Procurement Pulse, host Friddy sits down with Amanda Prochaska, Founder and Chief Wonder Officer at Wonder Services, who left her dream job at MGM Resorts to fix one of procurement's most persistent problems: digital transformations that look great on paper and fall apart in practice.

Amanda makes a sharp case for why most failed implementations have nothing to do with the software, what agentic AI actually changes about adoption, and why the entry-level role decisions companies are making right now could quietly hollow out the next generation of procurement leadership.

What We Discuss:

00:00 Welcome to Procurement Pulse

00:48 From "who doesn't like buying things?" to procurement transformation

02:57 The digital implementation trap most CPOs don't see coming

05:23 What an SI told Amanda that changed everything

09:10 Why agentic AI might finally solve the adoption problem

11:07 The entry-level role question keeping Amanda up at night

13:27 Replace headcount or unlock capacity? The fork in the road ahead

18:10 Why vendor relationships matter more than category expertise now

24:51 The soft skills that will outlast every wave of automation

29:16 Full-time vs. contract talent: what's actually shifting in the market

32:34 Where to find Amanda and Wonder Services

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/ Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com.

90% of Alibaba's revenue comes from supplier advertising fees. That means page one rankings are heavily influenced by who paid the most, not just who's best for your product.

Most procurement teams contact 3 to 5 suppliers before making a decision. Not because that's enough because contacting more is too time-consuming. But better pricing and better quality might be sitting with supplier #47.

Ricky Ho, Co-founder of SourceReady, explains how AI changes sourcing. His platform has indexed 1.4M suppliers using customs data from 80 countries, including factories with no website or online presence. Instead of manually messaging 5 suppliers, their AI contacts 50 or 100 simultaneously, collects responses, and ranks suppliers by match quality rather than ad spend.

What We Discuss:

00:00 Why Alibaba's page one is dominated by who paid most

01:59 How to find 1.4 million suppliers invisible on directories

03:55 The AI tool that contacts 100 suppliers automatically

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/ Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Ricky | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricky-ho-a25a05104/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com. 

Hundreds of applications. Zero callbacks. That's the reality for a lot of senior professionals right now. And it's not because they're underqualified.

The job market has quietly shifted. More competition, more AI-generated resumes flooding the same roles, and a hiring system that was built to process candidates, not advocate for them. Something had to give.

So what does it look like when the entire model gets flipped on its head?

In this episode of Procurement Pulse, Friddy sits down with Adam Feinberg, founder of My Personal Recruiter, to unpack what reverse recruiting actually is, why it's gaining traction right now, and what it reveals about the state of hiring in 2026.

Friddy and Adam get into how the traditional recruiting model has always served the employer and left job seekers to navigate a system stacked against them. They also tackle the AI question nobody is asking out loud: as more candidates use AI to bulk-apply and auto-generate resumes, does any of it even matter anymore? And if everyone looks great on paper, what actually separates the people who get hired?

Friddy also makes a prediction about where AI in recruiting is ultimately headed that stopped Adam in his tracks.

What We Discuss:

00:00 What reverse recruiting is and why it didn't exist before

03:03 How the job search actually works when someone else is running it for you

06:11 Who the job market is hardest on right now and why

10:08 The AI resume arms race and why it may be backfiring on candidates

14:53 Friddy's counterintuitive prediction: AI will matter less, not more

23:38 What happens to entry-level jobs and the leaders who were supposed to come from them

30:32 Where the job market goes from here

Interested in My Personal Recruiter? Use code SCOPE10 for 10% off.

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/

Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/

Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Adam | https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-fineberg/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com. 

You contact 5 suppliers. Maybe 10. You pick one. Done.

But what if the best supplier for your product was never even on your list?

That's not bad luck. That's how the old system was designed. Gatekeepers with "books of vendors" who steered you toward whoever paid them the highest commission, not who was best for you.

In this clip from Procurement Pulse, Ricky Ho, Co-founder, SourceReady, explains why sourcing without AI is fundamentally a luck game,  and how the old purchasing agent model in Asia created hidden conflicts of interest that buyers are still dealing with today.

What's covered:

00:00 The purchasing agent model: gatekeepers, hidden commissions, and who really won

01:22 Why sourcing without AI means you're probably missing better suppliers

01: 58 How AI can vet 1,000 factories in minutes (what takes humans weeks)

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/

Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/

Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Ricky | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricky-ho-a25a05104/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com. 

Are you hiring for today or for 24 months from now?

In this episode, Darryl Fitzpatrick, CRO of Intellek, challenges the "plug-and-play" hiring mindset that's dominating procurement and supply chain recruiting right now.

His point: Everyone's chasing unicorns - ready-made experts who can hit the ground running on day one. But what happens when you hire someone without a development plan, clear milestones, or learning infrastructure in place?

You're not just setting them up to struggle. You're telling top talent that you haven't thought beyond their first 90 days.

The companies winning the talent war aren't just offering better comp packages. They're showing candidates a defined career path, meaningful metrics, and proof that people succeed there. That's what keeps unicorns from walking out the door six months in.

If you expect results in 6, 12, 24 months, you need to invest in getting people there, not just hope they figure it out.

What we discuss: 

00:00 Hiring with Future Intentions

02:51 The Challenge of Attracting Talent

04:43 The Importance of Learning and Development

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/ Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Daryl Fitzpatrick https://www.linkedin.com/in/darylfitzpatrick/?originalSubdomain=uk 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com.

You search for a supplier, contact the top five, pick one, and move on. But what if the absolute best manufacturer for your product never showed up on page one—and never will?

Most buyers rely on popular directories like Alibaba, assuming the top search results represent the highest quality. 

In reality, visibility on many major sourcing platforms is heavily driven by advertising revenue, meaning the first page often showcases the biggest marketing budgets, not necessarily the best capabilities.

The secret to finding the actual top-tier factories isn't better keyword searches. It's looking beyond the standard pay-to-play directories at the one thing suppliers can't fake: objective, publicly available data.

In this episode of Procurement Pulse, host and SCOPE Recruiting Co-Founder Friddy Hoegener sits down with Ricky Ho, Co-founder and CEO of SourceReady. 

Ricky has built an AI-powered discovery platform that indexes 1.4 million supplier profiles across 80 countries, specifically targeting the world-class factories that don't rely on advertising to be found.

What We Discuss:

00:00 Why this founder left a thriving company to fix sourcing

00:47 The broken system behind how most companies find suppliers

03:50 What AI is actually good at (and what it will never replace)

09:49 Why the best suppliers are invisible and how to find them

14:49 How Source Ready stays bias-free (and why that changes everything)

17:57 AI is flooding suppliers with inquiries — here's what happens next

22:48 The signals AI catches that humans miss and vice versa

28:42 The death of the entry-level role as we know it

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/

Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Ricky | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricky-ho-a25a05104/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out www.scoperecruiting.com.

When your team asks for development tools and you say "we're not ready,” what are you really saying no to?

In this episode, Darryl Fitzpatrick, CRO of Intellek, calls out the uncomfortable truth: "We're not ready for learning technology" actually means "We're not ready to invest in our people."

His take? Companies that said they weren't ready for AI 3 years ago are struggling now. The ones who committed early are thriving.

The tech is easy. It's cloud-based, simple to adopt. What's hard is admitting that without ongoing development, you're setting your team up to fail in a world that's evolving faster than ever.

So the real question: Are you building a team for today, or for what's coming?

What we discuss: 

00:00 The Readiness for Technology Adoption

02:55 The Importance of Continuous Learning and Development

04:08 Challenges with Outdated Learning Management Systems

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/ Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Daryl Fitzpatrick https://www.linkedin.com/in/darylfitzpatrick/?originalSubdomain=uk 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com.

Supply chain isn't just about moving boxes. It’s about the human experience.

For too long, our industry has been viewed as a back-office utility. A cost center that simply "makes things happen."

But as Patrick Van Hull, Supply Chain Storyteller & Strategist, explains in this week’s episode, the leaders who win in 2026 aren't just the ones with the best data. They are the ones who can tell the best story about that data.

What We Discuss:

00:00 What it means to be a "supply chain storyteller"

02:11 The pivot table mistake that shut down a mining company

05:02 Why supply chain gets blamed but never gets credit

07:48 "Do good and talk about it" — earning your seat at the table

10:29 When supply chain isn't in the room from day one

12:57 AI hype vs. AI reality in daily operations

15:49 One AI platform or ten disconnected solutions?

18:33 Automating the work that burns people out

21:27 Entry-level roles nobody knows how to define yet

23:47 The new essential skills: Prompting AI and storytelling

26:47 Where to find Patrick Van Hull

Connect with us:

SCOPE Recruiting | https://www.scoperecruiting.com/ Connect with Friddy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhoegener/ Connect with Evan | https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-cave 

Connect with Patrick | https://www.linkedin.com/in/pvanhull/ 

About Procurement Pulse: Real conversations with supply chain and procurement professionals who've been on both sides—building teams, solving problems, and staying ahead of what's coming next.

About SCOPE Recruiting: SCOPE Recruiting is a boutique supply chain recruiting firm where every recruiter is a former supply chain professional. Co-founders Friddy and Melissa, both ex-ABB global category managers, built the company after seeing how many “generalist” recruiters didn’t truly understand supply chain, procurement, or logistics roles. 

By hiring professionals first and teaching them recruiting second, SCOPE delivers better matches, higher retention rates, and faster hiring results across manufacturing, procurement, logistics, and supply chain leadership.

If you're building a supply chain team and the usual recruiting approach isn't working, check out scoperecruiting.com.