SAP went live with SuccessFactors Recruiting Management. Pressing send on the go-live announcement was a gratifying feeling as this has been such a transformative journey. Deploying SuccessFactors Recruiting Management globally (outside Germany) marked a transition from an on-premise solution to a robust cloud-based platform. This is the first time we are running a global transactional day-to-day HR process in the cloud. This go-live also marked SAP’s rollout of one applicant tracking system (we have had a lot of recent acquisitions and were battling multiple technologies) and one process (each region and board area had their own steps or nuisances for hiring).
As someone whom has a constant checklist in her head, on her iPhone, written in a Moleskine® notebook, and again, just for safe measure, saved in Microsoft Office OneNote, I would often jot down open-ended questions related to this Recruiting Management deployment. These questions helped steer conversations and guide key decisions. I wanted to share just a few with you, in case you find yourself (considering) going through a similar experience:
- What is the current process? Visually charting down SAP’s current end-to-end process from headcount approval, to intake session, sourcing internal candidates, sourcing external candidates, asses/select, offer approval, and ultimately hiring, gave us a good picture of our “as-is” state. We take these activities for granted but when you map out who does what and what the SLAs are, you see the patterns and workflows that need to be considered when creating the desired “to-be” scenario. With recent additions to the SAP family (hybris, Fieldglass, Ariba), we also needed to document their respective processes as well as any unique items our colleagues in Japan or perhaps France are required to build into hiring due to regulatory concerns
- What are the integration points? Agencies. Background Check. Onboarding. Compensation (“Total Rewards” is our lingo). Executive Hiring. Recruiting Marketing. Assessments. External Career Website. Internal Jobs Portal. The list goes on and on but the significance of these inputs and outputs are not to be underestimated. Joining forces with our colleagues in different areas of HR and IT helped to configure a platform that would power the core functions that touch our employees. Luckily we use SuccessFactors technology across the board for HCM so we were able to blend workflows and modules with relative ease
- What is best for the end user? When we were faced with a tough decision, the guiding principle was determining the base scenario for the stakeholder in question. It helped me to picture one of our prospective candidates using their phone between classes to apply for their first-ever internship in our NYC office, or our CRM manager who sits in Singapore and hires 200 sales leaders a year, or my recruiter who goes to campus visits at Sanford and is bursting with top talent to select. Focusing on the end user allowed our project team to eliminate the noise and execute
The only question that never came up in our late-night email exchanges, early-morning workbook configurations, and onsite workshops was…… WHY?
Our project team never once questioned why we are going through this implementation. We knew that our business leaders desperately needed a simplified recruiting solution they could use on their devices to approve a candidate offer. Our recruiters were battling multiple technologies, depending on which acquisition or subsidy there were hiring for. We heard loud and clear from our HR business partners that they were tired of getting pulled into interviews without visibility and needed to be able to see candidate resumes, rate them based upon competencies, provide overall “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” and add their comments without flipping between multiple files and screens.
