“This Is Not a Customer Service Position”

I wrote a sentence into a job posting last month telling people what the job wasn’t.

“This is not a customer service position.”

I don’t usually do that. A posting should describe the work rather than defend itself against a misreading.

But the title was Services Specialist, and without that line most of the applications would have come from people who answer phones for a living.

The Sentence I Had to Put in the Posting

A title that needs a disclaimer has already failed at its one job.

Someone scanning a job board gives a title about two seconds. “Services Specialist” reads as service desk, customer service, client services. Every one of those is a real job, and none of them is this one.

The role is procurement and commercial contracting on major capital projects. The person owns the full lifecycle for the services a project buys, from sourcing strategy through to supplier performance after the contract is signed.

Nothing in the title suggests any of that, and the person who would be excellent at it is not searching the word “services” on its own.

They are searching procurement, sourcing, contracts, category management. Those are the words that sit on their resume and in their saved job alerts, and a posting that uses none of them is effectively invisible to the people it was written for.

Titles that mislead cost employers more than they realise, which I’ve gone through in why clear job titles attract top talent.

What a Services Specialist Actually Buys

The scope surprises people, so it’s worth listing properly. On this search, the categories include:

• Engineering and consulting. The firms doing the design work and the specialist advice around it.
• Studies and environmental or permitting services. Work that has to happen before a shovel moves.
• Staffing agencies. The contingent workforce the project runs on.
• Logistics, transportation and warehousing. Moving and holding everything the project needs.

The common thread is that none of it arrives on a pallet. Every category is somebody’s time, judgement or capability, bought in advance and verified afterwards.

That distinction between buying things and buying capability is the whole job, and it’s what the title conceals.

The supplier relationship side of this has its own treatment in from referrals to advocacy: making vendor lists work.

Why Buying Services Is Harder Than Buying Equipment

Here is the core of it.

You can inspect a pump before you accept it. You can measure it, pressure test it, and send it back if it doesn’t meet the specification. The specification is a physical fact.

You cannot inspect a study. By the time you know whether the engineering firm did good work, you have paid for it and built something on top of it.

So the quality of what you receive is decided almost entirely by the quality of the scope you wrote beforehand. The scope is words, which means the commercial outcome rests on how carefully somebody wrote a document months earlier.

The failure mode is specific and it looks like success at first. A loosely scoped study comes back on time, technically competent, and missing the one section the project actually needed. Nobody breached anything. You simply bought the wrong thing precisely.

The fix is never the claim afterwards. It is the person who wrote “provide engineering support” as a defined list of deliverables instead.

It sits in the same family as the other commercial judgement roles energy companies under-specify, which I wrote about in the risk role energy companies underestimate.

Pre-Award and Post-Award Are Two Different Jobs

This posting asks for hands-on experience with both, and that combination is where the pool narrows sharply.

The full lifecycle looks like this:

• Sourcing strategy. Deciding how the package goes to market and who gets invited.
• RFPs and RFQs. Writing them, issuing them, managing the questions that come back.
• Bid evaluation and negotiation. Comparing proposals that are deliberately hard to compare, then negotiating commercial terms.
• Recommendation for award. Putting your name on the choice.
• MSAs and service agreements. Establishing the framework the relationship runs on.
• Variations, change orders and supplier performance. Managing what happens when reality arrives.

Plenty of capable people have done one half well. Pre-award specialists live in the strategy and the competition. Post-award specialists live in the agreement and the arguments.

The person who has genuinely done both tends to be better at each, because knowing how a clause behaves in a change order changes how you write it in the first place.

Asking for both is reasonable. Recognising that it halves your candidate pool is the part employers skip, and hiring strategies for hard-to-fill roles covers what to do about it.

Where This Sits Next to Contracts

Anyone who read my piece on Contract Specialists will be wondering where the boundary is, so let me be direct about it.

Procurement buys. Contracts governs what happens after. That post says the Contract Specialist role isn’t procurement, and that was accurate for the role it described.

Plenty of organisations split those cleanly. A procurement team runs the competition and hands over, and a contracts team administers the agreement for the life of the project.

Plenty of others combine them into one seat, which is what this posting does. Neither structure is wrong, and the structure a company uses tells you a great deal about how big its projects are and how mature its commercial function is.

If you’re a candidate, this is worth asking about in the first conversation rather than the third. The answer determines whether you spend your week in competitions or in change orders.

The companion piece is what a Contract Specialist actually does, and the two roles make more sense read together.

What Employers Get Wrong in the Posting

Four errors, in the order I encounter them:

• A generic “Specialist” title. It describes nothing and reaches nobody. If the role is procurement, the word procurement belongs in the title.
• Not saying services rather than goods. This is the single most important distinction in the whole posting, and it routinely appears in paragraph four if it appears at all.
• Burying the systems. SAP, Ariba and Fieldglass are the words experienced people search on. Putting them in a bullet near the bottom wastes the strongest signal you have.
• Not saying pre-award, post-award or both. Candidates self-select on this, so leaving it out means they guess, and some of them guess themselves out of applying.

The second one does the most damage. A procurement professional who buys equipment and one who buys services have genuinely different careers, and the posting is the only place that difference gets communicated.

I have watched equipment buyers apply in good faith for services roles and get screened out on the second call, which wastes their time and the client’s.

If You’ve Done This Under a Different Title

The job exists in a lot of organisations under names that don’t match.

Buyer, category manager, contracts advisor, supply chain lead, sourcing specialist. If you have run a services package from strategy through to award and then lived with the agreement afterwards, the title on your business card matters less than you think.

What matters more is how the resume presents it. Surface the scale and the categories, not the activities.

Spend under management. The specific categories you owned, named. The agreements you put in place and how long they ran. What happened when a supplier underperformed and what you did about it.

“Managed vendor relationships” is on almost every resume I see for these roles, and it tells a hiring manager nothing at all.

The staffing agency category is worth calling out separately, because people who have run contingent labour programmes often don’t think of themselves as services buyers. They are, and it is one of the harder categories to do well.

One practical note on this particular search. It can be performed remotely from Alberta or British Columbia, with occasional travel to site in northern BC, which widens the field considerably for people who can’t relocate.

If You’re Scoping One of These

If you’re writing a procurement role right now, the cheapest improvement available is the title. Put the function in it, say services rather than goods, and name the systems. That takes ten minutes and changes who sees the posting at all.

If you’ve done services procurement on capital projects and you’re wondering what the market looks like, that’s worth a conversation. I’d be happy to have it confidentially, whether or not this particular role is a fit.

Services Procurement FAQs