Procurement Buyer

Guide Dogs - Where Every Role Makes a Difference

Come and join us as an engaging and expert Procurement Buyer and be part of something life‑changing - helping people with sight loss live the life they choose.

As a Procurement Buyer at Guide Dogs, you’ll support the delivery of high-quality services by providing effective, compliant procurement activity that ensures the best use of donor funds. Working collaboratively across the organisation, you’ll manage a wide range of procurement processes, securing value for money while supporting strategic objectives. The Procurement Buyer will be an expert in procurement processes, including sourcing, tendering, contract negotiation, supplier management, and delivering value and cost savings in line with policy and best practice. Our Procurement Buyers play a huge part in ensuring everything we do enables us to deliver on our purpose and exceed expectations.

This role is [based at our Reading office]. You’ll be working 35 hours per week, worked 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. 

Key Responsibilities

• Ensure delivery of a high volume, diverse, and sometimes complex range of procurement activities to set deadlines, including requests for quotes (RFQ’s), requests for tenders (RFT’s), other types of market testing, in order to achieve best value and where appropriate, “cash savings” for Guide Dogs.
• Negotiate pricing and terms and conditions to ensure effective and compliant Contracts are in place.
• Assist the Head of Procurement and Strategic Procurement Business Partners in delivering procurement services to the business and executing the procurement pipeline for Guide Dogs. Assist colleagues with transactional activity as needed.
• Build and maintain good working relationships with all stakeholders including the Procurement team, internal customers, and Supplier representatives.
• Early identification of risks and issues that may impact delivery always aiming to resolve issues as soon as possible or escalate where appropriate.
• Working closely with the Head of Procurement, Procurement Business Partners, the wider Procurement department and organisation, including Finance, Legal, IS and the Data Protection Officer (DPO) to ensure quotes and tenders are delivered in line with the Procurement Policy and best practice and remain always remain compliant.

You

You’ll have a detail-oriented and results-driven approach to procurement and contract management. You’ll enjoy working in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with a dedicated focus on delivering value for money through effective sourcing, negotiation and supplier management, whilst being committed to ensuring compliance, mitigating risk and making the best use of donor funds. You’ll act with integrity and honesty in everything you do.

Skills and Competencies

• Achievement of 5 GCSE passes or equivalent with at least a grade C or 5 in Maths & English (QCF level 2 / SQCF level 5).
• Demonstrable knowledge through experience of a wide range of procurement activities across different categories and commodities including due diligence checking, specification review, RFQ/RFT delivery, evaluation facilitation, negotiation and finalisation of Contracts for signature.
• Demonstrable experience in delivery of best value and “cashable” savings through procurement activity.
• Demonstrable evidence of working within multidimensional teams with differing objectives.
• Demonstrable experience of working at pace, with high volumes and clear deadlines.

Benefits

We wouldn’t be able to change the lives of people with sight loss without our people. That’s why it’s important for us to provide a variety of benefits that reward our colleagues in a way that suits them and recognises the hard work and contribution that they make.

• 26 days annual leave. After three years of continuous employment, this increases to 28 days plus bank holidays.
• Real Living Wage Employer
• Flex pot - equal to a proportion of your annual salary to use on our wide variety of flexible benefits
• The option to buy and sell annual leave
• Discounts and cash-back scheme
• Excellent pension scheme (We will match your pension contributions plus 2% up to a maximum of 9% employer contribution)
• And lots more!

For high volumes of applications, we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than advertised.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Behind Every Guide Dog Is Someone Like You - We’re passionate about creating an inclusive workplace that celebrates and values diversity. Bring your whole self to work regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. We don’t want you to ‘fit’ our culture, we want you to enrich it. 

How to apply

Further details on the full role are attached below. When you are ready to apply, submit an online application form via this page.  Please note - If you are successful you will need to provide evidence of your right to work in the UK via our digital ID checking supplier.  We cannot offer visa sponsorship at this time.

As part of your application ensure you provide evidence and examples of how your skills & experience meet the criteria as set out in the attached job description. You will also be asked to complete a few job-specific questions, so please be prepared to write your answers to these questions.

If you choose to use AI tools to assist in completing your application, please use them appropriately.  We value authenticity. If you want to stand out, using a generic AI-generated response isn’t going to separate you from the crowd. This is your time to shine and showcase your unique skills, personality, and thought processes!  You can find our full statement on the use of AI to complete applications on our careers website.

If you would like to have an informal conversation about the role before applying, or require any accessibility support to apply, our friendly recruitment team is ready and waiting to help. Call them on 0118 3540345 or drop an email to [email protected].

Safer recruitment

Guide Dogs follow Safer Recruitment practices to ensure we are safeguarding the vulnerable people we work with. As part of this, we require a full work history with any gaps accounted for & a minimum of 2 professional referee details fully covering the past 5 years. If you are applying for a disclosure role, please note that you will be required to undergo an enhanced DBS check and sign up to the DBS update service.

At Guide Dogs, we believe in fair and equitable hiring practices. A criminal record will not automatically disqualify an applicant from consideration for a position. Each case will be evaluated individually. We encourage all candidates to disclose relevant information, and we assure you that it will be handled confidentially and fairly.