Accelerating SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Implementation

A new Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) implementation, or in other words, a recruiting system, can be a daunting task, especially one like SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. A lack of readiness from the customer’s side is the main reason for this. This lack can be in terms of decisions and assets used in the implementation. Gathering information and decision-making on any technology should be made before the implementation. However, customers do not necessarily follow this. Decision-making during technology implementation introduces unnecessary risk, delays projects and increases the costs to deliver a full solution that users feel comfortable with.

There is often a debate about processes driving the design of a cloud application, or the cloud application influencing organizational processes. Regardless of this, some decisions need to be made for ATS that are standard and agnostic to any application, and in many cases, even driven by legal considerations. It is essential to understand these ahead of technology implementation engagement as rushed decision-making by CoEs often results in technology changes, which always leads to increased costs.

For any ATS implementation, there are assets like offer letter templates, or email templates that can be refined before the implementation. But reassessing and refining such tasks in the middle of a technology implementation results in distracted team members, or worse, needing more time to get them, that can result in project delays or impaired implementation quality.

This article covers the areas companies should focus on before technology implementation and reduce implementation risk and timeline delays. The areas that might serve as pre-work for a SuccessFactors recruiting implementation are discussed below.

Decisions To Be Made for SAP SuccessFactors 

Approval Workflow

Two approval workflows must be considered in the talent acquisition process: job requisition approval and offer details approval. Having alignment on the roles and sequences of the approval workflows can lead to accelerated implementation, while driving most of the security structure within the job requisition template and offer approval template.

Takeaway: Ensure that approval workflows with process owners are defined prior to starting the system design.

Candidate Pipeline Statuses

The candidate pipeline refers to the set of statuses or “buckets” used by recruiters to organize candidates in the natural sequence of the talent acquisition process. Examples include the following:

• New Application
• Recruiter Reviewed
• Short List
• Hiring Manager Reviewed
• Interview
• Offer Approval
• Offer Sent
• Offer Accepted, etc.

Determining early on which statuses make up the candidate pipeline is crucial in minimizing the time and effort needed for adjustments at a later stage.

Key considerations include:

Think global, but act local: The background check process in North America typically occurs following the extension of an offer, whereas in other countries, it must happen before an offer is generated. This is just one example of scenarios that need to be considered. It is recommended to have a globally consistent status design, except for legal-localized variances.

Balance granularity and reporting: The best practice is to have anywhere between 8 and 12 statuses for in-progress candidates, excluding disposition statuses. Clients need enough granularity for thorough reporting to be achieved while maintaining a level of simplicity that does not add additional administrative work to end users.

Email notifications

In SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, the candidate pipeline defines when and to whom the automatic email notifications are being sent. For this to work, clients must submit the timing of the event(s), in addition to enabling this feature in the candidate pipeline.

Note: This is only relevant for automatic email notifications. The system would still allow ad-hoc email notifications to be sent at any point, regardless of how the candidate pipeline is set up.

Disposition statuses

Defining every disposition status provides accountability for OFCCP reporting needs while minimizing administrative work to end users. In addition, it can serve as a great source of intelligence to understand where and why candidates are falling throughout the process.

Takeaway: in addition to the disposition statuses, define a list of statuses to be included as part of the candidate pipeline.

Email Communication Strategy

An email communication strategy details the overall communication between the involved parties including the recipients of email notifications in the talent acquisition process through automatic and manual notifications. Thus, it becomes crucial to examine this process holistically to identify the different roles involved and determine when each role should receive an email notification.

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting offers tremendous flexibility around email notifications. The following table can be used to help identify business rules:

Note: SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting supports the use of tokens, which are “placeholders” that automatically populate information on different templates. For example, the [CANDIDATE FIRST NAME] token placed in the notification template automatically replaces the candidate’s actual first name at the time of email creation.

One of the biggest pain points for hiring managers is the need for communication throughout the acquisition processes. Ideally, hiring managers should be provided with frequent updates to have full transparency over the statuses of each job requisition. At the same time, careful thought needs to be placed around the frequency and recurrence of such notifications to ensure that they are read and drive the right behavior versus becoming spam and “losing the value”. When defining different notifications, consider verifying the content and translation requirements.

Takeaway: Populate the suggested table above with all email notifications intended to be sent out throughout the talent acquisition process.

Assets To Be Collected for SAP SuccessFactors

Offer Letter Templates

An Applicant Tracking System standardizes many documents, including offer letters. However, gathering and analyzing offer letters from different offices to find standardization opportunities can be time consuming. This exercise should start early for it to be executed successfully. One major consideration around this activity has to do with countries in EMEA, LATAM, and other regions using employment contracts instead of offer letters, making it crucial to understand the legal requirements around the following:

• Process
• Content
• What needs to be signed vs. acknowledged
• Additional attachments to be delivered besides offer letters/employment contracts

Takeaway: Gather and analyze existing offer letters to identify standardization opportunities for offices across the globe.

Headers and Footers

Headers and footers are the sections consistently placed across the top and bottom of every job posting. For achieving consistency globally, it is important to have a clear message through headers and footers. Due to legal requirements, some countries must display tailored messages, making it critical to do the following:

1. Identify legal requirements
2. Align a consistent message globally
3. Find standardization opportunities

Takeaway: Document the text for headers and footers to be used globally or by different regions.

Question Library

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting offers the capability to include questions as part of a candidate application. The answers to these questions can be used for:

• Qualifying
• Sourcing
• Reporting

Some of the main considerations include:

1. Understanding the maturity level of the talent acquisition functions. Should recruiters or other roles in the organization be allowed to select questions displayed in candidate applications?
2. Legal requirements: It is essential to understand what can and cannot be asked as part of a candidate application – this is applicable around the world.
3. How the question is phrased. For example: “Do you have an authorization to work in the United States?” versus “Do you have the authorization to work in the country you are applying to?”
4. The candidate’s overall experience: How would including too many questions in the application impact the candidate’s experience?

Takeaway: If interested in leveraging questions as part of the candidate application, consider designing the question library based on the information provided above.

Reporting

Conversations related to reporting often begin at the end of a project. This can be risky as the final system design might not include key data elements to produce the reports needed. Therefore, it is recommended to identify the following up-front:

1. What are the “must-haves” talent acquisition reports (e.g., Time to Hire, Time to Fill, EEO, OFCCP, etc.)?
2. What are the “nice-to-haves” talent acquisition reports (e.g., Candidate Conversion Funnel, Open Requisitions by Location, etc.)?

Takeaway: Separate the list of system reports into “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” and document the key data elements of each report to configure them during the system design stage.

Implementing a new Applicant Tracking System such as SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting is no small task. A major component of the implementation is working on the activities described above. For a truly accelerated deployment, allowing resources to shift their time and focus on the technology and design aspects of the implementation through the above-mentioned steps can facilitate a seamless talent technology implementation.