I can say with certainty that I've never put so much effort into the SAP Insider HR conferences hosted by WIS.

This year I have two sessions. One on giving your recruiters better dashboards using the Personal Object Work List (POWL) and the other is on the candidate experience. Let's talk about the candidate experience as that was the the more interesting of the two for me to write (if you're there please check out the POWL one or at least look at the sample ABAP code on the conference CD – dashboards are super cool!).

I've found it a bit annoying that organizations often have a career site and then they have the job searching and application screens. It's as if the site vistor sees a (hopefully) rich career page experience that articulates the Employer Value Proposition and hooks the candidate. And then they search for a job and suddenly it seems like they're using an application instead of being in an immersive candidate experience. 

Switching from a career site experience to an application is exactly what they're doing. This is natural. Vendors have candidate-facing software applications that are not usually heavily tailored to the organization. This may be different if the vendor has a website generator/editor as part of their offering. In talking to friends seeking employment they tell me "I can't tell you how many Taleo applications I did today". They know it's Taleo because it looks like Taleo. I'm all for standardized application experiences. What I don't like is the lack of search and posting content that is part of the immersive career site. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and the career site are implemented and maintained by people who don't speak the same language or have the same skillsets. This is especially true of SAP where the skillsets are extremely different, the transition from career page to search is usually done by following a "Search Here" URL (thus losing the candidate warm and fuzzies) and the search and subsequent application pages look a little "enterprisey" because of the use of Web Dynpro.

I don't plan to radically change the application experience. A huge amount can be done to edit the look and feel of the SAP candidate applications and companies should invest implementation project time in doing this. I'm going to focus on how candidates get to the career site and the way content from the SAP backend can be used to make their visit more interactive and relevant to their needs. At a recruiting conference in 2010 Dr John Sullivan stated that 78% of candidates visiting career sites go straight to the postings. I say bring them that relevant content directly to the career page. Don't make the click to get to that "hook".

The first part of my presentation focuses on why the career site is important and what works in a career site. I use Bayer as an example. They do a lot of the things that I think are great practices. And the bonus part is 1) They use SAP E-Recruiting and 2) They have a great ranking in best career sites.

Next I talk about getting the candidates to the career site. It mostly talks about the lack of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with SAP. Since postings are dynamically generated using Web Dynpro and not static HTML, Google can't find them and won't see any keywords. I have some ideas for solving this and sample code to achieve this on the conference CD.

The dynamic career site content examples I give are using a combination of the SAP interface and Adobe Flex for the frontend. I've tried to make them pretty flexible. You want to pull out a subset of SAP posting data if, for example, you're showing them in a college recruiting microsite. The first example I have are a hot jobs widget which takes some parameters such as functional area and displays them in a table on the career site. The second uses the Google Maps API to search using a combination of ZIP code, mile radius, and functional area. Results are shown both on a map and a data grid. Pretty useful for retail organizations, utilities, etc. The interface is quite sloppy as it serves only as an example. Had it been for a real site I, for example, would have done a separate interface call to get branches and addressses, rather than repeat them in every posting . 

For the rest of the presentation I talk about creating a social media cycle of pushing out career information to Twitter and Facebook as well as other sites,  getting moderated feedback from Facebook and Twitter to display on the career page. It would have been nice to start tying content such as job "persona" videos, relevant employee blogs to search results, but we have to take baby steps. Maybe that's a presentation for next year.

I hope to see you there and I hope you get something out of the sessions . They're both on Wednesday 9th March. I'd love to see people people to take the code from both sessions and improve it (or take it back to the poor developer who gets to attend TechEd but not HR2011 and have them do it). A big thanks to Brandon Toombs and Richard Harrah for helping me with the code. They invested a lot of hours into supporting me.

I will be hosting a "Recruiting Summit" party on Tuesday 8th March in the MGM Grand. It's really for like minded people interested in chatting about recruiting technology, strategy, and processes. It will be very informal, with some semi-structured discussions (but of course they'll be fun). There will be a fun social networking aspect with the use of social media trading cards for everyone to make networking easier. Please email me at mark@ingramtalent.com if you are interested in attending. It really is a recruiting focused event so think about whether you really want to attend.

As always, blog comments are welcome (good and bad).

Cheers, Mark