The latest from SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding: Enhanced experiences to boost productivity and deliver greater value to you and your employees

Onboarding is a critical factor in ensuring recently hired talent become productive and happy employees. But as we all know, the sheer volume of processes and paperwork is time consuming, both for the employee and employer. This often results in other important elements, such as people connections and new hire feedback, being pushed to the back burner.

SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding leverages the HXM suite platform to streamline the configuration, administration, and resulting experiences for your onboarding, cross-boarding, and offboarding needs. There are several key benefits to this single platform approach:

Shares common data structure with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to enable simplified data mapping, validation, and localization.
Leverages advanced capabilities of the HXM suite (Document Management Service and SAP SuccessFactors e-Signature, Business Rules Engine, Administration Center, Extension Center) to eliminate redundant functionality.
Uses Fiori-based design to deliver a simplified, responsive UI.
Provides a unified experience across Onboarding and other HXM modules (Employee Central, Recruiting, Learning, Performance and Goals, Benefits, Employee Experience Management, Work Zone) to enable the entire employee journey.
Delivers an extensible Guided Onboarding Experience through SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone supporting multi-step and multi-system workflows.
Enables comprehensive reporting and analytics across SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding and other HXM modules with People Analytics.
Improves the flexibility and extensibility for integration with third-party solutions.

Customers spanning several regions, including NA, EMEA, MEE, APJ, and GC, have implemented SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding and are reaping the benefits of this single platform approach.

Note: SAP SuccessFactors has announced the formal transformation from Onboarding 1.0 to Onboarding. Please refer to the timeline and additional details at the end of this post to learn more about this announcement.

Let’s have a look at some of the latest features available today and the value they provide:

Pre-Day One, Onboarding, Cross-boarding, Offboarding experiences: SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding supports a variety of employee experiences, which can be configured to align to your company’s specific needs.

With Home Page Engagement Cards, automated notifications and To Do alerts, employees are made aware of any required actions and guided through a prioritized, step-by-step process to ensure full completion. Along with required paperwork and compliance components, employees are welcomed with a personalized plan to help connect them to the right information (company information, recommended links), the right people (manager, teammates, new hire buddy), and the right expectations (learning tasks, 30/60/90 goal plans).  Fully mobile responsive, all tasks and information are available from any device, making it easy for participants to stay engaged and on track.

Configurable New Hire: This newly released feature allows new hires to easily provide personal details as well as customizable details all in one step. The new hire template can be configured based on the type of employment with custom MDF objects, such as a new hire’s vehicle information.

Rehiring Capabilities: When hiring an employee who left the organization and is being rehired, you can onboard a rehire when the system detects them as part of rehire verification. Details on the employment record and personal information can be automated from their previous record, and you can choose to rehire them with new employment or old employment.

Pre-Day 1 Learning Integration: New hires can now access assigned courses before their start date. The integration with SAP SuccessFactors allows you to enhance your onboarding experience with materials and courses and provides access to tools and information that new hires require to become a productive member of the team before the start date.

Guided Experience through SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone: Guided Experiences are workflow-based cards to help users perform tasks through multi-step processes across multiple systems. The Onboarding Guided Experience provides new hires with a personalized journey that spans from offer all the way through their first 90-days. This guided experience allows you to onboard new employees with pre-built tasks defined for different phases of the onboarding journey with a custom content package.

Email Notifications: Throughout the onboarding process, templated and custom email notifications can be triggered to inform new hires about various steps and information. Within emails, custom tokens can be configured to add specific details such as populating the new hire’s position within the message.

E-Signature Capabilities: Support for e-Signature, through SAP Signature Management by DocuSign or SAP SuccessFactors eSignature, is available within SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding. Policies and compliance forms requiring signature can be accessed via the Home page To Do tiles for embedded signing (with SAP SuccessFactors eSignature) or via mobile for on the go signing (with SAP SuccessFactors eSignature) or remote signing (with SAP Signature Management by DocuSign). To see additional details regarding these two options, please refer to Onboarding 2.0 Signature Management. 

SAP Employee Lifecycle by Qualtrics Email Surveys for Onboarding, Cross-boarding and Offboarding: SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding customers can use the Intelligent Services event ‘Onboarding: External User Eligible for Hire from Onboarding’ to send a survey to new hires via email as part of their onboarding experience. This helps you determine what’s working well and areas of potential improvement, based on new hire sentiment data. This also shows your new hires that you value their opinion and sets a precedent for gathering future feedback. In addition, survey touchpoints are also available during the Cross-boarding (or Internal Hire) process (Event: Internal Hire Process Completed) and Offboarding process (Event: Initiate Offboarding). This allows surveys to be automatically distributed to transitioning and exiting employees, allowing consistent gathering of feedback during these important stages of the employee lifecycle. (note: Enabling these surveys requires an SAP Employee Lifecycle by Qualtrics license).

Onboarding Dashboard: The Onboarding Dashboard gives the hiring manager and supporting team visibility into the status of tasks associated with each new hire. Filter functionality makes it easy to narrow and sort the list with a variety of options, including New Hire (by name), Start Date (From) and Start Date (To), Hiring Manager (by name), New Hire Type (internal or external hire), Process Tasks, and Task Status. From the dashboard, users can drill down into the specific tasks to view details, complete the task, or nudge another owner with a friendly reminder. Detailed compliance information can also be viewed, helping to ensure efficient tracking and timely management of this critical component.

Offboarding Dashboard: Similar to the Onboarding dashboard, the Offboarding dashboard provides a comprehensive, searchable view of tasks for both the manager and the exiting employee. One specific offboarding feature is the ability to create and assign Knowledge Transfer Plans. This capturing, storing, and sharing of knowledge is critical to minimizing knowledge gaps as employees exit.

Localization and Compliance Forms: SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding currently has core HR data available for more than 100 countries. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Centrals’ Address Validation Service is available, if rules are configured accordingly, with delivered templates for the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, and the United States (see details). To ease the management of compliance forms, there is a standard set of pre-delivered forms available for the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (Federal (W-4) and most State Withholding forms (see table of supported forms here), and US Form I-9 with support for E-Verify, remote completion, and Section 3 (Reverification)). SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll integration exists for UK Starter Checklist (integrates with ECP infotypes Tax Data 0065 and Court Orders 0070) and Australia Tax File Number (TFN). In terms of data protection and privacy, the solution supports Data Purge, Read Audit, Change Audit, and Information Report for all pre-delivered compliance forms.  It is also important to note that custom form creation and management is also available.

These forms can be used in conjunction with the SAP SuccessFactors platform capabilities, including Document Management, eSignature (SAP Signature Management by DocuSign or SAP SuccessFactors eSignature), and the E-mail services framework.

Process Variant Manager Tool for Configuration: This tool enables the configuration of multiple document flows and the ability to change the sequence of steps with permissible combinations. Custom onboarding process flows can be defined with variation in step sequence or repetition of step, including the addition of a Compliance block. There is a default onboarding process available, as well as the ability to copy an existing process and adjust as needed. Specific processes, such as No-Show Handling, Rehire on New Employment, and mass hiring (via ATS API) are supported with a variety of configuration options.

Recruit-to-Hire data Mapping: Recruit-to-Hire Data mapping supports Foundation Objects, MDF Foundation Objects (Generic Objects), and Custom Objects. This eliminates the need to create custom fields to map objects from Recruit-to-Hire mapping. In addition, the UI design helps guide administrators through this process. Mandatory Onboarding HRIS elements (fields required for successful initiation of Onboarding) and Employee Central HRIS elements (all other mandatory or non-mandatory fields based on your Business Configuration UI (BCUI) that are set in Employee Central Succession Data) are now visible in a pane on the left side of the screen. On-screen instructions and messages to display mapping errors, as well as their fixes, are available.

Automated Business Rules: Business rules can be created and applied to help automate a variety of workflows, including process flows, email notifications, documents, forms, and tasks. The flexible configuration of the Business Rule Engine helps to better align with integration specifications and business requirements, such as allowing system administrators to configure the format of the User ID and Employee ID generated during the onboarding process (using existing SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central rules or newly created rules). Additionally, users can now apply onInit rules to Onboarding pages for New Hire Data Reviews, Personal Data Collection, and Rehire Data Review.

People Analytics Story Report: A Compliance forms data schema within People Analytics allows users to create a Story Report for tracking compliance forms, using a variety of fields including Form name, Form completed on, Current status, and Due date. Two standard reports are available: I9 E-Verify Analysis and I9 Overdue Tasks.  Custom reporting of U.S. Form I-9 and E-Verify is also available for auditing purposes. In addition, as People Analytics spans data across the entire SAP SuccessFactors HXM suite, this data can be combined with additional employee data such as Location, Department, Manager, etc. to quickly determine trends and identify potential areas of improvement.

API-support for Onboarding, Cross-boarding, and Offboarding Across a Variety of Systems: We continue to extend the flexibility of SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding by enabling integration with a variety of systems, including external Human Resources Information System (HRIS) (Note: does not support offboarding and cross-boarding), Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), document handling systems, and procurement systems. Onboarding and cross-boarding can be triggered from SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting or a third party ATS, and both cross-boarding and offboarding can be triggered from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. In addition, customers can also trigger onboarding manually, without using a recruiting system.

We are excited about the continued innovation of SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding and the value it is bringing to our customers. For additional details and resources on specific topics and features, please visit the Onboarding Community. And to see what’s planned in the coming releases, please visit the SAP Road Map Explorer.

Onboarding Transformation Timeline

2H 2025: Onboarding 1.0 enters End of Maintenance
1H 2026: Deprecation of Onboarding 1.0

Additional Resources for your Onboarding Transformation:

Note: As of June 2023, this article has been updated and reposted from the SAP Customer Community page.