What ERP Job Postings Reveal About Industry Struggles

Saw a job posting this week that told a whole story in three bullet points.

ERP Architect role. $120/hour. Must have three specific cloud ERP certifications — all verifiable.

That’s not an HR posting. That’s a hiring manager who came from a Big 4 firm, knows exactly what those certifications cost on the open market, and decided to stop paying his former employer $300/hour for the same talent.

Can’t blame him.

The Big 4 markup on senior ERP talent is real. Companies have been paying it for years because they didn’t know there was another way. That’s changing.

What I’m seeing more of — practitioners going independent, companies hiring direct, and operations leaders finally asking why they’re paying consulting firm overhead for work that doesn’t require a firm’s logo on the invoice.

The logo never fixed a broken BOM. The practitioner did.

— Lee Stout, Staudt Solutions