I just read the Jobvite 2010 Social Recruiting report. Of course it's self serving and organizations and individuals that respond to such surveys are more likely to be interested in social recruiting in the first place. The majority of respondents were in the technology/software sector, which again are early adopters of new trends such as social recruiting. Having said that, I didn't see any major surprises in the report.

Here's some quick numbers:

• 36% of respondents plan to spend less on job boards in 2010 than in 2009. Of course this means that 61% plan to spend the same or more.
• 46% plan to spend more on social recruiting.
• Linkedin still rules with 78.3% of companies using it. Facebook was a distant second at 54.6%, and Twitter was 44.8%.
• Only 58.1% of respondents said they'd successfully hired through social networking. This was a bit surprising.

Quality was a key consideration in using social networks, but isn't measured:

• Job boards ranked low in terms of candidate quality.
• Social networks rated higher than job boards.
• Referrals rated highest for quality.
• Despite the respondents rating quality higher for social networks and highest for referrals, quality of hire was not listed as a metric in measuring social recruiting impact. The usual were listed: number of applicants, number of hires, etc.

It would have been very interesting if there was additional data on who had formalized social recruiting policies and guidelines, or whether this was done on an individual recruiter basis. It would also have been good to see what percentage of respondents were federal contractors, and whether they had processes and technology in place to ensure OFCCP compliance in the context of sourcing. And of course I'd love to know what percentage of respondents had rejected applicants based on information found on Facebook.

SAP E-Recruiting Enhancement Pack 5 will allow candidates to store their social identities as part of their profile so that recruiters can link to them. Hopefully we'll see additional functionality in the future, including the pushing of recruiting campaigns through facebook pages, etc.
The support of passive candidates in the system would also be great, along with integration to sourcing tools such as TalentHook or Zoominfo.

As somebody responsible for getting SAP E-Recruiting to work with clients' sourcing strategies, I'd love to hear from people that have had successes in social recruiting. Leave a comment!

Cheers, Mark

Hi everyone,

I haven't blogged in a while. Sorry for the break. I'm back from a vacation in Mexico with great ideas on my company's direction. I look forward to sharing them. I'm also off to SAPPHIRENOW/ASUG conference in Orlando tomorrow. I'm sure I'll bring something interesting back to blog about.

I've been meaning to write a blog on where SAP E-Recruiting is in the market, and what SAP needs to do with it. I have been working almost exclusively with SAP E-Recruiting for eight years now, so I have a keen interest in it's future success.

Where We're At

This summer we'll see the Ramp-Up (or limited shipment) of SAP Enhancement Pack 5 (EhP5) to a small number of customers. There are improvements in many areas of SAP HR, including E-Recruiting. These enhancements are mostly around streamlining the online application experience and improving the application dropoff rate. There are also some improvements in the new hire interface with integration to the new talent profile. EhP4 saw a huge improvement in the usability and functionality for recruiters with a brand new user interface. In between EhP4 and EhP5 SAP delivered Support Packs with additional functionality, as well as huge performance improvements for the management of high volume requisitions. They have been busy beavers.

At the same time the market is changing rapidly. Applicant Tracking System vendors are springing up like weeds, including attractive super low priced options (http://www.catsone.com/). Taleo, SuccessFactors are expanding their footprint, iCims is becoming a threat to Taleo in recruiting technology, and everyone is talking about Workday (who for the moment are partnering with Taleo and Mr Ted for recruiting).

Why would an organization spend significant time and money implementing SAP E-Recruiting? My reasoning hasn't changed much. It's:

• Integrated and enforces company-wide compliance in the recruiting process. Recruiter's don't really care about this. HR, the OFCCP and other people are fans.
• Super scaleable and global, supporting clients such as Microsoft (85 countries), Comcast (pool of 1.2M candidates), US Postal Service.
• Extensible. Organization's can make it support whatever processes they have, integrating to any third party vendor, supporting any user interface technology, etc. This has a downside as going outside of a standard solution costs money and needs supporting.

There's also the usual valid arguments around owning your own data, the ROI of paying maintenance and internal support versus annual on demand costs, etc.

At the end of the day it may be super powerful but SAP E-Recruiting is still just an Applicant Tracking System that is integrated to HR. It's not not an end-to-end Talent Acquisition solution. Many clients don't need anything beyond what it delivers.

For those with greater functional requirements, you can integrate E-Recruiting to other solutions or build out functionality. I saw a Workday presentation where they showed traditional ERP as an old tractor with a spoiler on the back. I think they were trying to be more polite than say "lipstick on a pig". I think this analogy is a bit too self serving. SaaS solutions cannot be extended, and your organization needs to adapt to their functionality. For clients that need to extend the solution, I see E-Recruiting as a solid talent acquisition platform. My analogy would be modified street cars where the same platforms of Subaru, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi are consistently used due their ease of modification.

Now that we've outlined what I like, let's talk about what is missing.

What Needs to Happen

Specific vertical industry requirements aside, there are gaps in the existing supported processes. In addition, the solution needs to be broadened to cover the many aspects of candidate sourcing.

Assuming resources and budget are limited (otherwise E-Recruiting would be more advanced) I'd do the following:

• Focus on enhancing functionality that showcases integration. Offer management functionality integrated to Compensation, cost of hire tracking tied to time and finance, and employee referral portal integrated to Personnel Administration and Payroll are examples. Integration with Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) for contingent staffing would be huge.
• Drop the "We support open integration and vendors can certify against us" already and just build integration to a few key job boards and aggregators. The "allow others to certify against us" doesn't work when there are hundreds of applicant tracking systems integrating with these job boards. In the world of ATS, the big job boards are the 40,000 pound gorilla and SAP is a siamang.
• Buy, build, or partner with a hosted candidate sourcing provider. JobVite Source (http://recruiting.jobvite.com/products/source/) or TalentHook are two examples. The existing on premise Netweaver stack is not conducive to social networking mashups and sourcing data from web sites. I'm sure lots of ABAP developers may disagree with me.
• Build assessments integration to some key vendors and also provide an open assessments interface.
• Add some basic CRM-like functionality.
• Offer a lot more public APIs and promote mashups and extensions by third parties, without them having to go through the expensive certification process.
• Lower the price so that customers can integrate third party sourcing solutions and still get a good ROI.

I'm sure there's a lot more I'm missing. Focusing on the above would not cost a lot of development days and would have a huge impact. Let's see what SAPPHIRENOW brings. Perhaps I'm focusing too much on the current ERP offerings and SAP may be have a whole new social networking platform up it's sleeve. As always, let me know what you think.

See you at SAPPHIRENOW!

Cheers, Mark

Being at a conference a couple of weeks ago, it crossed my mind that there was a lot of industry talent in one place. Having just started using FourSquare, I got to thinking about location-based social networking and recruiting. People connect better in person, and a quick face-to-face exchange can be worth reading a dozen resumes.

How I attended the SAP Insider HR2010 conference in Orlando and even learned some stuff.<< MORE >>

Hi to my loyal reader (or are there more than one?),

I'm busy balancing supporting my SAP E-Recruiting client in their upgrade project preparation, and preparing for the SAP Insider HR2010 conference in two weeks in Orlando, FL. My current project is an upgrade of E-Recruiting from Enhancement Pack 3 (EhP3) to EhP4, along with a very ambitious set of enhancements to the SAP E-Recruiting product. The goal of my client is to have the best SAP E-Recruiting system possible. We'll be having a phased set of enhancements, with the first golive in August, and the last one March 2011.

I'm very excited about the HR2010 conference for several reasons:

• I hope to connect with clients that need support in their SAP E-Recruiting efforts.
• I want to meet potential future IngramTalent consultants. There are a lot of smart people at these conferences.
• I'm looking forward to seeing what's new in SAP HCM.
• I'm looking forward to seeing all my old friends in the industry.

This is the first time since the conference started in 2004 that I've had to do a lot of preparation work. At my previous employers I was given a branded shirt to wear and just showed up and presented.

I've decided to give away HR and business books signed by the authors to clients that talk to me about their SAP Talent Management plans. Since I won't have a booth this year, it will be interesting getting the word out. If you know anyone that has needs in the area of Talent Management please let me know.

I'm trying to get signed books by Lou Adler (Hire with Your Head), Libby Sartain (HR from the Heart), and Shari Storm (Motherhood is the new MBA). It's not an iPod or a Kindle, but seems more relevant to the audience. And it's good pool reading for when you take a break from the conference sessions!

I hope to see many familiar faces, and meet new people at the conference. Please feel free to leave comments if you are attending. Why are you attending? What excites you?

Cheers, Mark

So like everybody else, I didn't know what to write on my first blog post. I figured introducing myself and telling you why I'm blogging would make for a good start.

My Background

I'm technical person, who started out in SAP HR fourteen years ago when I joined SAP in Germany as a developer. My HR focus leaned towards recruiting in 2000, when I was developing applicant tracking system integrations and representing SAP in the development of emerging HR-XML standards. This was way cooler than the payroll development I had been doing, and I got to meet a lot of smart people in the industry.

The SAP E-Recruiting module was first released in 2002. I very much enjoyed my time being the Product Manager during a phase of product maturity and education of the market. I left SAP in 2006 and went into the world of consulting services. This was a great learning experience for me, and brought me a different market perspective.

Where I am Now and Why Blog?

Here I am in 2010. I'm still growing and learning. I am very much interested in the areas of talent management outside of SAP, and how emerging technologies such as candidate sourcing and targeted career portals can be made to work with SAP. I spend most of my time in the world of SAP deployment, but am very much in admiration of the rest of the talent acquisition market, and what they're doing.

I aim to share my thoughts on the current state of SAP, HR technologies, and game changers such as new mobile technologies. The more I learn from the smart people in this market, the more I can apply it to SAP and best practices in building out the best solutions in talent acquisition, development, and retention.

I hope to in the future add future bloggers from IngramTalent, with specializations outside of recruiting. Your input on what you'd like to see, of course, is always welcome.

Cheers, Mark

Welcome to my blog. Please check back soon for new entries.