“We want to ‘wow’ candidates!” This may not be a sentiment you often hear, but it is one of the motivational tenets at the heart of SAP’s project to transform its talent attraction strategy.
The project’s success was showcased at SuccessConnect 2021, on October 13, in the breakout session “Experience How SAP Runs SAP: Six Candidate-Listening Insights Revealed and the Actions Taken to Drive Better Results,” presented by Ilka Sagner, HR Senior Project Manager, SAP. The session was part of the Talent Acquisition track, which comprised seven sessions for “attracting the best talent in the hybrid world of work.”
Artificial intelligence (AI), a hot topic at the event, is one of the technologies that is increasingly being deployed to ensure that recruiters can meet business goals faster and at greater scale.
“Talent Attraction is no longer a back-office function – nor can it be, given the demands of today’s recruiting environment,” says Elke Manjet, Global Head of Talent Attraction, SAP. “At SAP, Talent Attraction is integrated into the company’s strategy and delivers tangible value to the company’s success. This compels us to innovate our services to be more effective using advanced technologies, like AI.”
Top Features for Talent Attraction
With 125 awards as “employer of choice” in 37 countries, SAP is in a leading position to share its insights about creating an amazing experience for its 20,000 new hires per year and the one-million-plus members of its talent communities. However, as Sagner detailed at SuccessConnect, the market leader for business software had to make a number of changes before it could achieve success. A history of business acquisitions had created an environment of outdated IT and disparate processes. In 2014, SAP launched a project to unify its approach, starting with the roll out of SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting in 2015.
SAP has added a number of features to enhance its talent attraction strategy – for example, automated interview scheduling with AI for 24×7 availability, interview central to capture feedback in a compliant way, intelligent RPA for offer packages, SAP Signature Management by DocuSign, talent pools to fill future openings, and Qualtrics surveys to enhance the candidate journey.
Candidate-Listening Insights Revealed
Using Qualtrics, SAP diligently evaluated feedback from candidates and hiring managers across multiple touchpoints, including the career site, post-application, post-interview, and post-decision. The team wanted to know how candidates perceive the hiring process and how it could be improved. As a result, SAP took action to revamp the job postings to be clearer, more attractive and more inclusive. They added interesting content about SAP’s culture that was useful to candidates. In addition, they created enablement materials for hiring managers to provide a better interview experience, assessments to improve quality of hire, and a rejection video pilot to provide candidates with personalized feedback for use in their future opportunities.
The team turned its attention to improving the candidate experience during job searches on the SAP careers page.
“We went one step further to make searching for jobs at SAP easier for the candidates,” Sagner said. Her team collaborated with Brilliant Hire by SAP to deploy Smart Job Matching, an AI-powered solution that is compatible with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting to provide candidates with personalized job recommendations. “Based on the skills that you have, the tool actually helps the candidate find open jobs that match to those skills, which has also increased the visitor-to-applicant ratio for us. Feedback from the candidates is telling us that they really appreciate that we make it easy for them to navigate through all the job openings that we have and help them find opportunities that are really fitting to what they bring to us.”
After implementing Brilliant Hire, SAP has experienced an increase in the application completion rate on its careers site, climbing from the SAP average rate of 78.8% to 85.4%. In a Qualtrics survey, 92% of candidates said Smart Job Matching improved their overall experience and rated it 4.2 on a scale up to 5.0 for overall satisfaction.
“With Brilliant Hire by SAP, we are able to leverage AI to elevate the candidate experience and help candidates find the SAP job that is best fit to their skills,” says Manjet, who is a customer as well as a member of the Board of Advisors at Brilliant Hire by SAP. “We are seeing strong results from our use of Brilliant Hire’s Smart Job Matching feature, both in terms of KPIs and qualitative feedback from candidates. Candidates really like that they can immediately see if they are a strong match for an open position or if they qualify for other positions they had not considered. We want people to have an amazing experience along their SAP journey from the start, and we do that by presenting the very best of SAP technology and innovation.”
SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting customers can experience a pilot of Brilliant Hire by SAP, available on SAP Store. For more information, members of the SuccessFactors Community can check the Brilliant Hire FAQs .
This blog originally appeared here on the SuccessFactors Community.