BLOG.INGRAMTALENT.COM

On the Acquisition of Jobs2Web by SuccessFactors

Mark Ingram — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:02:56 GMT

In my own little world of recruiting, this acquisition is almost as significant as the SuccessFactors acquisition by SAP.

Jobs2Web have a recruitment marketing platform and were innovators in this space. Social referrals, custom career landing pages, search engine optimization. Founder and Chief Recruiting Geek Doug Berg has been around since the first days of online recruitment. He remembers the days of sourcing from business cards in jars at local pizza places.

The Jobs2Web solution very much complements SuccessFactors. The recruitment module of SFSF is it's weaker module and was already shored up by a partnership with Jobs2Web. At the same time SAP E-Recruiting is a very powerful and extensible Applicant Tracking System (ATS) but that's all it is. It has zero sourcing capabilities.

The cross-selling potential of these three products is huge. I don't expect SAP to start selling more E-Recruiting to Jobs2Web clients, but the reverse will be true. SAP will now also have a go-to partner to fill the gap around sourcing. This gap would have been filled by the new Talent Acquisition On Demand solution that will undoubtedly now be killed off, its IP incorporated into the next release of SuccessFactors. This has to be an early Christmas present for the SAP sales folks. Now it's just a matter of integration, untangling the sales channels, and giving clients a message of value.

The SuccessFactors Acquisition

Mark Ingram — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:37:40 GMT

I didn't see that coming. It's a ballsy move from SAP which blew me away. SAP has not been good at acquiring companies in the past. I want to focus on what it means for products, but here are a couple of general thoughts:

This is the biggest commitment SAP has ever shown to HCM since they built HR in the early 90s. $3.4bn for a company that does Talent Management. Wow.
I didn't think it would happen, but if it did, I was expecting it to be Taleo. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for the due diligence process. On the other hand, Taleo is mostly recruiting.
I'm happy to hear that SuccessFactors will be an "independent" company. Better to keep oil and water separate for now. I still wouldn't bet money on CEO Lars Dalgaard sticking around for more than 18 months. SAP culture and slow-moving machinery can takes its toll. I really hope we don't see a mass exodus of talent.
Nakisa is screwed (well partly screwed). Why would SAP continue to use Nakisa when it doesn't own them and is not aligned with the rest of the On Demand platform? SAP may just leave it alone since it's an on premise solution that is already integrated and Nakisa do the maintenance and support. Only the integration is a technology burden to SAP. They would simply not co-develop and enhance with Nakisa.

You can read many more blogs on the big picture and find a great source of info (and links to smart blogs) in the HR Technology Conference group on Linkedin. In the meantime, I have a couple of points on product:

Career On Demand is dead. The performance management solution was scheduled for Q1 2012 release. SuccessFactors has a (good) product it already needs to support. The innovations from On Demand will be incorporated into future release of SuccessFactors.
Any work done to date on an on demand recruiting solution will be channeled to the SuccessFactors product. The customer and partner feedback, mockups, and design work done to date will be leveraged to improve the SuccessFactors product. And currently, the SuccessFactors product looks like it has room for improvement.
SuccessFactors Recruiting and Learning will be integrated into on premise SAP ERP HCM. SAP needs to have a very clear message to its ERP customers as to value differentiators of old SAP vs new SuccessFactors.
It sounds like a channel mess from a sales commission perspective. Would SAP sales reps be incentivized to have on premise core HR customers integrate to on demand talent management solution? I think the simple answer is a lot of deals are lost because of implementation time, maintenance cost, and functionality. It's a simple matter of not losing core HR to Workday. This is a bigger problem for net-new deals.
The CloudConnect infrastructure looks to be relevant for integrating existing third-party solutions to SuccessFactors, including services such as background and drug checks. I don't see a development platform that would enable the SAP ecosystem to build out new products from scratch. It will be interesting to see how SAP handles this if SuccessFactors is the new platform.

Let's get onto my favorite topic: SAP E-Recruiting (The same arguments go partly for other existing TM modules such as learning). This is my real interest:

For recruiting not much has changed in terms of product future. Development resources had already been largely transitioned away from on premise E-Recruiting. Whereas before, clients would be waiting for the new shiny on-demand solution, now SuccessFactors recruiting is an option for clients that have on premise ERP HCM for their core HR.
E-Recruiting was never a great fit for SMBs. The implementation and support requirements only pay off when you really need it to be SAP. It shouldn't be a default choice. It is ideal for large or complicated customers that find no single SaaS vendor that is an idea fit for their processes. SAP allows for enhancements to meet specific client and industry needs.

That is my brain dump for now. I look forward to reading what everyone else has to say in their blogs and LinkedIn comments. I'm still only starting to grasp the opportunities and risks here.

Cheers, Mark

Quick tip that could save you 100s of hours on SAP Smart forms

Mark Ingram — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:03:09 GMT

Yesterday I was working on a Requisition Overview Smartform to do with an E-Recruiting upgrade to Enhancement Pack 4.

The client had copied the standard SAP Smartform that showed requisition information and added their custom fields, etc. This is pretty normal.

With EhP4 the Requisition History (e.g. when was it put on hold) was moved from the immediate user interface to the Requisition Overview (an overview PDF generated using a Smartform).

Because the Requisition Overview was now a custom version, it didn't have the updated one from SAP. I had to copy the additions SAP had made for the Requisition History back into the customer version. This involves a lot of Smartform nodes, a table with cells, etc. It's not difficult but is a pain in the bum. To shorten what could be hours of work into about two minutes here's what I did:

1) Select the relevant node (in this case it's a Folder called REQUISITION_HISTORY).

2) Click Utilities -> Download -> Individual Node.

3) Save as XML on your PC.

4) Click Utilities Upload. Select file.

5) Select where you want to put the copy.

6) Right click and select Paste.

I was doing a happy dance when I found that one. I hope you find that one useful.

Cheers, Mark

“Change is Bad” and Creating Custom Worklists in SAP E-Recruiting

Kim Lessley — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:07:02 GMT

Often SAP products are prejudged as being too complex and hard to use even before users get a chance to really try them out. Sure, there is room for improvement, but there is with any product. SAP has come a long way in improving the user experience of it’s products. It’s like I often joke when talking about how users feel when told they have to change from one software product for another – “change is bad”.

Some end users assume that changing to SAP products is a bad thing. But you could argue that changing to any new software can be difficult, especially if you’ve used a product for years. Take myself, for example, after years and years of using PCs, I’ve recently switched over to a Mac. I know so many people swear by Macs and applaud how useable they are and how they are just the bees’ knees. I’m still not totally sold. Even after months of using a Mac, I still get frustrated by the Mac navigation and long for my old PC. User experience is so subjective.

One way SAP has made SAP E-Recruiting more usable is to make it easy it is to create custom worklists. This means recruiters are able to define worklists with the information they want to see in case it’s not already pushed to them in one of the many standard delivered dashboards. Below is a video tutorial I recorded on how you can easily take the My New Applications dashboard worklist and set up a filter to only show new employee referrals. But remember, this is just an example and you can create custom queries or worklists based on any of the worklists in SAP E-Recruiting. Try it out and have fun!

You can this and more videos on our Resources page as well as our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/kimlessley. If you subscribe to the channel you will be automatically notified when I post new content.

Cheers, Kim

kim@ingramtalent.com

Twitter: @KimLessley

Personalizing the Layout of Worklists in SAP E-Recruiting Part II

Kim Lessley — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:19:38 GMT

As mentioned in my last post, today I want to talk about how you (the end user) can create a custom view of the New Applications worklist so that you can be alerted to applications that come in from employees of specific companies. Recruiters worth their salt know the companies that their own organization competes against and who the leaders are in their industry. It goes to reckon that they want to pay special attention when employees of those companies apply for jobs they are recruiting for, especially in very specialized industries and positions.

This is just an example of how SAP E-Recruiting allows recruiters to create their own custom views of worklists. I recorded the video below to show how to create a custom view of the New Applications Worklist filtered by the applicants’ last employer, but know that you can create custom views of any worklist.

Cheers, Kim

kim@ingramtalent.com

Twitter: @KimLessley

Personalizing the Layout of Worklists in SAP E-Recruiting Part I

Kim Lessley — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:06:30 GMT

In a previous blog post I talked about the introduction of dashboard worklists in Enhancement Package 4. One of the coolest features introduced for end-users was the amount of personalization enabled in Enhancement Package 4. Users can control what columns of information they see in worklists and how it is presented to them.

I recorded the video below to walk through how users can tailor the columns shown in worklists to meet their needs, how they can create their own custom views for lists and how easy it is to toggle between their own views and the standard views. This is just another example of how easily the solution can be tailored to end-user’s needs.

In my next post I will talk about how you (the end user) can create a custom view of the New Applications worklist so that you can be alerted to applications that come in from employees of specific companies.

Cheers, Kim

kim@ingramtalent.com

Twitter: @KimLessley

The Evolution of SAP E-Recruiting Dashboards

Kim Lessley — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:35:00 GMT

In Enhancement Package 4, SAP rewrote the user interface of SAP E-Recruiting from Business Server Pages (BSPs) to WebDynpro for ABAP. This technical rewrite was accompanied by a large initiative to revamp usability and process flows. I was part of a multi-disciplinary team of product managers, developers and user experience specialists that visited prospects and existing SAP E-Recruiting customers in multiple countries to gain better insight into how recruiters really work. We all learned a lot by sitting with recruiters and watching how they work with applicant tracking software, whether it was SAP software or something else. I highly recommend this approach to anyone developing software products, or any product for that matter. Sit with end users and watch how they use it. When you ask end users about how they work, they will generally tell you the party line of how the process is supposed to go, but when you actually watch them work, they generally take shortcuts and “streamline” the process. You can use these insights to improve your own products.

All of this research fed into the rewrite of SAP E-Recruiting in Enhancement Package 4. One of the key elements introduced was the concept of dashboard for recruiters. The dashboard contains worklists (or queries) grouped into categories that push relevant information to recruiters. SAP delivers five categories of worklists – Requisitions, Postings, Applications, Tasks and TRM. Customers, and even end users, can rename and create their own categories and queries. I will cover this in upcoming video tutorials.

For now, have a look at how you can navigate the dashboard and personalize the layout in SAP E-Recruiting.

Cheers, Kim

New Video Series for Tips on Using SAP E-Recruiting

Kim Lessley — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:08:29 GMT

As part of my campaign to get the message out about SAP E-Recruiting (see my related my blog post from July 18,), I have set up a new YouTube channel where I will be publishing video tips on how to use SAP E-Recruiting more effectively. You can find the YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/kimlessley. If you subscribe to the channel you will be automatically notified when I post new content.

The first published video is on how to use the filter row that is available in most queries in SAP E-Recruiting. I cannot tell you the number of times prospects or even existing users have gotten excited by this feature during a demo. It’s one of those really useful features that not everyone is aware of. I’ll be posting more video tips as time goes on. Feel free to send me a request too if there is something you’ve always wondered about and I’ll see what I can do.

For now, have a look at how you can use the filter row in SAP E-Recruiting.

Cheers, Kim

Twitter: @KimLessley

E-mail: kim@ingramtalent.com

SAP E-Recruiting tip / fact of the day challenge

Kim Lessley — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:25:07 GMT

This past week I was reflecting on how many questions I’ve answered about SAP E-Recruiting over the years. As product manager and solution owner at SAP I received daily inquiries about the solution and it’s capabilities. I certainly did my share of conference presentations and sales demos too. So I decided to challenge myself to tweet a tip / fact about SAP E-Recruiting each work day and to see how long I can keep this going without repeating a tip or fact. Some days the information may be trivial and others more obscure. I hope you enjoy and learn something along the way. Feel free to share your own facts or tips with me and I’ll retweet them and give credit.

Let the games begin!

Cheers, Kim

Twitter: @KimLessley

Why I Joined Ingram Talent

Kim Lessley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:36:00 GMT

I jumped the gun with my first blog post and neglected to properly introduce myself. I’m just so excited to get going! So here is a brief note on who I am and why I joined the company. First let me start with the fact that I am a die-hard SAP fan. I worked at SAP for 20 years (since I was 6 years old I like to joke). If that is not a testament to SAP as a good employer I don’t know what is. Prior to joining Ingram Talent I was the Solution Owner in the HR Line of Business responsible for SAP’s recruiting products. A fancy title meaning I was responsible for the strategy and direction of SAP’s recruiting products. I was part of the SAP E-Recruiting product from the time it was conceived as an idea until the current product. I also held a number of other positions in the company along the way, both in Walldorf, Germany and Palo Alto, CA.

So why leave if I love the company so much? Because I need to experience what it’s like for our customers from outside the organization and because I know I can have a direct positive impact on our recruiting customers at Ingram Talent. I truly believe that Ingram Talent has the best skills for advising around and implementing SAP’s recruiting products and that they have the customers’ best interests at heart. And finally I joined Ingram Talent because I want to be able to spend more time with my kids while they still want to spend time with me – remember my other work-life balance post? I imagine I’ll still work crazy hours, but with more flexibility.

I have lots of exciting plans for Ingram Talent – including kicking off more regular newsletters, creating some video tutorials to help customers understand the power of SAP’s recruiting products as well as some other tricks I have up my sleeve. Watch this space...

Cheers, Kim

Twitter: @KimLessley

Work-Life Balance and Recruiting

Kim Lessley — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:38:45 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life balance recently and what it means to me. Perhaps it’s the stage my life is in right now. I feel I’ve achieved a lot in my career, but sometimes I wonder if my kids are getting the short end of the stick. I know that a busy, fulfilled mom is better than an unhappily employed mom, but sometimes it’s good to take a step back and examine where you stand with your work-life balance. And that is where it struck me – if companies were better at recruiting then maybe there would be more fulfilled moms and dads out there in the workforce – who could, in turn perhaps raise better children too! It sounds like I’m saying that good recruiting could solve a lot of problems around not only worker engagement, but also help raise better kids.

Let’s look at it this way – if kids see their parents struggling and unhappy at work, this often translates into struggles and unhappiness at home. Unless, of course, you are really good at separating work and home life (not one of my fortes, but something to work on!). If a parent is fulfilled in his or her work, then chances are he or she can focus more positive energy on their kids.

So what do I mean by good recruiting? I mean not just getting more bodies in the door quickly, but making the whole process more transparent to both the job seeker and the employer. The job seeker is better off if they know just what to expect from a position, including who they will be working with and what the company’s culture is like. Just as the employer is better off knowing what the potential employee is like.

I’m sure I’ll touch on this subject again in the future, but let me end by saying that work-life balance differs from person to person and at different life stages. It’s something everyone needs to decide personally what’s right for them – regardless of whether they are a parent or not. And recruiting is just the beginning – companies need to continue to engage their employees once they are on board. But don’t you think if you knew better what to expect from a job before you accepted the offer that you’d have a better chance of balancing your work and home life?

Cheers, Kim

Twitter: @KimLessley

HR2011 Conference Prep: Career sites and E-Recruting

Mark Ingram — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:40:00 GMT

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!).

Why I Chose to Talk about Career Sites

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".

What I'll Talk About

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.

E-Recruiting Networking Event

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

Crowdphanthropy? ThreeSquare? Ideas For Social Philanthropy Site

Mark Ingram — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 15:57:00 GMT

Yesterday I committed to my company donating a fixed amount to charity every month. I aim to tweet a link to the chosen cause(s) at the end of each month, to keep me honest and committed.

It tweeted my intent. Though I donate regularly, I don't think people need to share every time they donate. So why did I do it? I want to set an example and it have it as a call to arms for people to do the same.

I got to thinking that if people spent as much effort tracking donations and giving of free time as they do where they eat and play (FourSquare, Gowalla) then perhaps people would be motivated to donate more often. I certainly don't think people don't donate due to lack of funds or good intentions. Sometimes it's a matter of getting around to it. Receiving achievements (either privately or posted on facebook) such as "Mark achieved the Susan G Bronze" for donating three times to Susan G Komen For The Cure, or "Steve Received +5 points for first donation to The YMCA." ThreeSquare.com might be a good name (taken).

Another motivator may be the online action of a group to achieve a result in a certain timeframe. People already do this TeamInTraining, Aids Run and Walk, grassroots organizations that sell Tupperware and decide where to donate proceeds. If such a theme of collectively achieving goals could be applied to social media, the results could be huge. The snowball affect would be huge as more people jumped on the online bandwagon.

Some of this has been done before. I still think it might be fun and rewarding to build a site that combines the achievement system of Xbox Live, FourSquare with "Crowdphanthropy" to meet a short term fundraising goal that is determined by the users.

Cheers, Mark

On Premise Schizophrenia Part 3: Musings on the future of our industry

Mark Ingram — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:35:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I wish you and your families a healthy and successful 2011.

Go get a cup of coffee. This blog is more long winded than I intended.

It's a great time for SAP E-Recruiting (as well as the rest of Talent Management). Despite the suffering we still see with friends and family that have lost their jobs and homes, the SAP industry stands as an oasis of opportunity. I can only imagine that this is the same for the rest of the enterprise technology industry. Judging by the demand for E-Recruiting consulting, the market is hot. Clients are once again investing in recruiting technology and in some cases this technology is SAP.

Will my colleagues and I have jobs five years from now, and will we be doing something completely different is an entirely different question. Of course we'll have jobs, but they may be very different. My guesses on the future may be right, but timelines are usually wrong. Instead of five years, think two to ten.

To think what we as HR IT professionals will be doing, we have to look at the products that organizations will be using, and the expectations and needs our clients will have.

Where We're At

The on premise software market is shrinking. The first solution areas in this seismic shift are CRM and HR. The leading area of Software as a Service (Saas) has been recruiting. People have been using hosted recruiting since the late 90s so it's no surprise. The rest of talent management is following suit.

This trend will continue and will accelerate as 1) SaaS talent management suite vendors such as Taleo and Success Factors focus on using a core domain and a data model that represents the core enterprise, rather than being an afterthought. 2) The same vendors add core HR administrative functions, and 3) Core HR moves to the cloud - e.g. Workday.

Though the pace of talent management innovation in the SaaS market has accelerated, the suite talent management vendors have slowed in the recruiting space so they can broaden into other areas.

What Will SAP Do?

My prediction is that SAP will move to SaaS in all areas of Talent Management, leaving traditional on premise SAP to 1) The existing customer base 2) Complex organizations who cannot make their processes meet the SaaS technology and 3) Niche industries that SaaS vendors don't support and that have to extend SAP to meet their needs. Recruiting seems to be the area in need of heavy integration with third parties (job boards, background checks, assessments, niche sourcing technology providers) and would benefit from a hosted open API solution. In the short term, anything with standardized processes, the need for heavy web integration, such as social media and mobile, benefit from a cloud-based solution.

Business ByDesign will extend into all of Talent Management unless SAP have some magical secret new platform. SAP hasn't shown a track record of rapid innovation in this area. Acquisitions of suite vendors or standalone vendors may be an option but is not the SAP way. In some ways SAP is better at building strong enterprise platforms than actual solutions that end-users love. I think the best thing for SAP would be to build a super strong core in the area of Talent Management, driven by a strong business knowledge domain model (i.e. not a developer data model) with every piece of it supported by open web services. This is nothing without a couple of things: 1) A strong community that is supported by SAP (already have that) and 2) A model for partner development that is open (think Apple) with a low barrier to entry. When an industry of HR enablers and home office tinkerers can support you, you can take on the world. To continue the Apple example, Apple itself isn't known to create be-all-end-all applications, but the range of applications supported on iOS is second to none.

In a worse case scenario SAP will repeat the mistakes of E-Recruiting and try to re-invent the wheel (though they did it in a turbocharged highly scalable and flexible way) and fall behind. In a world where SaaS integration to core HR becomes the norm, enterprise integration itself will not be a selling point that can counteract lack of innovation.

What About The Consultants?

So what will HR IT professionals be doing in a few years. I think the market will have a greater need for HR practitioners that also have the analytical skills to support implementations. I hope that clients end up using consultants that combine deep process expertise with a knowledge of technology solutions, rather than those with deep vendor technical expertise but an inability to push for better practices. Customers will more frequently save money and support implementations themselves in a shorter timeframe. There may for a while be a greater need for technical middleware specialists to support the clients who still have on premise core HR and want to integrate it.

There are still a huge number of benefits of E-Recruiting over SaaS vendors. I'd like to see SAP step in the direction of a hybrid approach: supporting extensible solutions and innovation while lowering the cost of implementation and ownership. I myself am looking at ways I can reach into other recruiting process areas while staying true to the SAP roots that have brought me here. It will be interesting to read this blog post in five years.

The forecast is "Cloudy with a Strong Chance of Disruption".

Here's to the future. It looks bright, just different.

Cheers, Mark

On Premise Schizophrenia Part 2: Why I like E-Recruiting (mostly)

Mark Ingram — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:09:00 GMT

Some recent project work and discussions have brought into focus why I like (but still sometimes dislike) SAP E-Recruiting. If you're with me on the integrated, extensible ATS platform bandwagon that can go to 11 with enough time and money, you might yawn and say "Sure, got it, move on." You may want to stop reading.

In recent discussions around automated process support, the conversations have been around process compliance. We're not talking 500 person companies or even 5000 here. How do I ensure my recruiters have followed these steps before hiring? Have my approvals gone up the right chain? How do I ensure the process is done right when we're not a centralized recruiting organization? At the detailed level the often infrequent users of the system literally need to be reminded the next steps based on the type of job they're hiring against. The conversation becomes not "The system can't do that" (though sometimes I think I should lie to simplify life) but "That can be done, but it's better if we simplify." Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes complexity is necessary, particularly in government and regulated industries, other times it's a bandaid for complex process and unwillingness to change. The point is you can support any process, period. It comes with a price tag, during the implementation but even more so as a support cost.

The missing part here is that any large organization should have internal and external process compliance driven from HR. You know which jobs need drug tests, which ones need three versus two levels of approval, etc.

I was recently using a popular ATS that wasn't from SAP or another enterprise vendor. I was kind of flummoxed when I created a requisition and was asked first of all for data such as exempt, non-exempt, pay grade, job descriptions, etc. Shouldn't this have flowed from HR? Requisition libraries or templates are sold as a feature for consistency, but are a band aid for poor enterprise integration. Never mind. I was also astounded when asked who I'd like to approve the requisition. Wait, isn't that the next three people up the chain? Chain? Oh never mind. My buddy in the next cube can approve it. The same goes for the nice enterprise structure you created in HR. You need it for reporting. Let's not even start about the need to integrate existing employee talent data into an ATS to reuse the valuable people you already have. Especially in this economy! We love data duplication.

Now here's the thing I sometimes hate about SAP. All the getting SAP to do exactly what you need takes time, energy, and money. I know, that sounds weird if I say it aloud. If it was zero effort I would be out of a job. Another issue is that SAP doesn't do a lot of cutting edge stuff such as fancy sourcing of candidates on the internet that have not expressed interest. Not all organizations need this functionality. Those that do need it can integrate to tools that do that. You can extend functionality and integrate anything with enough time and money.

How would SAP versus "best of breed" play out in a beauty pageant? As a non-SAP solution I'd say "I'm pretty and do lots of things. Who the heck are you, dinosaur ERP?" As SAP I'd say "I can get pretty and do more things through extensions and integration, but you can never get integrated data! Bite me!"

The fun part is often where this plays out in a sales cycle. The very people that aren't concerned with or simply don't want enterprise controls and compliance are often those holding the purse strings. The lack of consistent processes creates problems after go-live when a system that supports flexibility but not consistency is used.

Have you experienced any similar issues? Maybe you completely disagree with me. Please comment.

Cheers, Mark

On Premise Schizophrenia Part 1: On Premise Erosion

Mark Ingram — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 06:15:00 GMT

This is the first of a three part blog on why I like SAP E-Recruiting as an on premise solution or not. Though my livelihood currently depends on them, I have mixed feelings about on premise software solutions. In the first blog let's start with integration as a double edged sword for SAP. In the next blog I will extol the virtues of E-Recruiting and enterprise integration. In the third blog I will give my opinion on the industry and what we consultants will be doing in the future.

Burger King runs SAP, and SAP software is somewhat like Burger King. In terms of the functionality, the external vendors that you can integrate with, the look and feel of the system, you can have it your way. To a large extent this involves going into the kitchen and cooking it yourself. It's an awesome kitchen with the best possible culinary technology, but you still have to make decisions and do the chopping and sautéing. Okay I'm bad with analogies.

In the next blog I'll get into the often overlooked virtue of integration between HR and recruiting. For now I'll say the following that have always been true:
When integrating with external vendors such as background check vendors, SAP clients have to do it themselves (with the exception of HireRight who are certified against background check interface and some resumé parsing vendors). The good news is that clients can choose which vendors they work with.
The business owners (in this case recruitment) don't usually care about HR integration. These are issues that affect HR or compliance.
Now I'll tell you why the value proposition of on premise recruiting technology is being eroded (this excludes super sophisticated large organizations that want it their way):
As more technology solutions outside of core applicant tracking enter the fray, the need to integrate with them increases. Examples are at a minimum job boards and background check vendors. Also include social media recruiting, assessments, online interview solutions.
More of talent management is being provided as Software as a Service (SaaS).
Recruiting technology as an operating cost rather than a capital purchase is currently more palatable. This makes it harder for IT to say "We use X platform, and by the way it will cost $900K to implement."
Integration needs of the outside world (social media, third party assessment tools, job boards, etc.) exceed the internal integration needs (at least in terms of recruiter priority, which counts for a lot).
Sometimes people (namely recruiters) just want a burger with fries. They want it fast, and they want it cheap. Most burgers don't need software requirements documents written by clients.
I hope this post has at least been entertaining and you can see example of it in your own professional IT or HR life. Next up, we'll talk about the value of integration.

Cheers, Mark

The blog that was supposed to be on ER Social Media Summit but got sidetracked

Mark Ingram — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:53:15 GMT

This post started as one on the Social Media Recruiting Summit but went and did it's own thing. I'll cover the summit on my next post........

On Monday I stepped out of my daily consulting activities which revolve around Applicant Tracking and SAP and spent the day listening and talking to people about sourcing candidates through social media. So Alice here headed down to the Microsoft campus in Redmond and jumped head first down the rabbit hole that is the Social Media Recruiting Summit (run by ERE).

I survived and may have come out of it smarter. I'm going to give some main findings over the next two blogs, but you can also watch the recorded videos at http://socialrecruitingsummit.com/sea2010/agenda/. If you like them and want to tweet about them don't forget to use #socialrecruiting tag.

Everybody is learning social media together and though some recruiting successes are emerging, it's not yet reached its true potential, and is not something has had a huge measurable impact on traditional recruiting metrics. More on metrics and stuff in my next blog post. Today is about where it all starts: Your defining mission, your people, your workplace.

Your employees are your best advocates, and have much greater credibility than a carefully crafted message that was created by marketing. To that end get your own house in order as much as possible before spreading the word to the outside world.

Richard Cho from Facebook used Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to illustrate why we need an emotional connection to our work and workplace (the top two levels of the pyramid) after we get everything else. Richard mentioned sex quite a lot. Hopefully he doesn't work too long hours at Facebook.

A lot of my current reading and thinking leads me down the same path (not about sex, but the company purpose stuff). I've been reading "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek. The premise of his book (and he probably wouldn't disagree if you called it a movement) is that the reason why you do what you do, your beliefs, sends a stronger message to your audience than product details and pricing.

This is visualized through the Golden Circle. You start with a clear reason for why you were doing something, translate it into how you achieve it, and in turn translate what you actually do. I believe in what Sinek says. I think it's not a marketing message but something you should figure out before you start any new company, product, hire, or any major decision.

For Facebook the Why would be "We want to connect people", the How might be "We let people express themselves and share news, connect using the internet" (I'm sure FB would have a better “How” defined than that). So that sounds exciting. What's the "What"? Well Facebook has a hugely successful social networking site.

Having the biggest social networking site on the planet with 500M+ users is cool and all but "Connecting people" is still a stronger message and evokes the kind of emotions in the workplace that get people through 16 hour workdays and weekends. When you have such a strong core raison d'être, your external audience (your customers, candidates) have the same beliefs as your employees. I think in the case of Facebook they're not there yet. Facebook doesn't itself evoke strong emotions other than privacy concerns. The site is cool, but I use it and don't have an emotional connection. Being a recent convert to Apple fanboy-dom, I'd say Apple builds a stronger connection. Other brands would be Southwest Airlines, and in the HR world I'd say Workday. Workday are not just a company. They're a movement.

Give your employees some basic guidelines (not a canned message to repeat), some tools, and a reason to work at your company beyond money, and they'll be your best mouthpieces. And their friends are probably the kind of people you want to hire.

Jobvite releases 2010 Social Recruiting Report

Mark Ingram — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:57:00 GMT

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

SAP E-Recruiting State of The Union

Mark Ingram — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:26:00 GMT

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

Location-based data and recruiting

Mark Ingram — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:23:41 GMT

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.

I've been pondering for some time how mobile devices like the Blackberry, iPhone, iPad and Windows 7 Phone can enhance recruiter effectiveness beyond what can be done with a phone and a laptop. The always-on instant notifications are a large part of it. Pushing of location-contextual data on candidates can be another value driver.

Real-time location-based social networking may be the killer apps for recruiters on the road (outside of real-time alerts and the ability to call a hot candidate within seconds of them applying). Real-time notifications to a recruiter of relevant, high-value talent in the same location could lead to a great connection, or an embarrassing and/or awkward moment.

Enter FourSquare (or Gowalla, Rummble, etc.)

My exciting social agenda! Now you know where I shop!

FourSquare is a location-based social networking tool. It can be used for declaring your location at a venue, checking in, seeing which other Foursquare members are there, and sharing tips on locations. There's also a "bragging rights" based points systsem. Points are awarded for new location check-ins, etc. It has been around for about a year. FourSquare currently has approximately 400,000 checkins a day, which is four times as meany as the Tweets on Twitter when Twitter was a year old (from Scobleizer at http://www.cinchcast.com/scobleizer).

The current FourSquare API doesn't support the "hey if there's a Disney recruiter here let's meet!" model. Individual's need to connect to individual's. Authentication ensures access to location data of friends. Other people in the same location as you are listed, but they are partially anonymized, and there is no contact information. This is a good thing; There are privacy concerns. We shouldn't know where everybody in the talent pool is drinking and eating. If we had the equivalent of a facebook "Fan Page" where you could meet people of similar interests, or meet recruiters representing that fan page, that would be neat.This would be especially relevant at industry events and career fairs.

Hopefully someone will create a new location-based social networking tool where you as a member or candidate can declare yourself available to meet with people with networking groups (ala LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Fan Pages or recruiting organizations) for a specific period of time. Maybe I work at Microsoft in Redmond and I'm meeting partners in Cupertino and I'm open to meeting people from Apple; Oh yes that introduces more privacy concerns. And maybe when you meet those people, bumping iPhones together will transfer candidate information ("Oh was that a data privacy statement flashed on your phone as we bumped? No? Never mind"), and start a new relationship.

Speaking of privacy and compliance, I wonder where the OFCCP would fit into all of this? Below is a an example of the talent courtship process using location-based social networking and how it would fit into the traditional recruitment process.

Before using FourSquare I had some ideas for the iPhone or iPad, but were a bit outdated compared to what could be done with a location-based social networking tool:

An app that gave you alerts when you were in a location that was within X miles of candidates that were sought after. In SAP E-Recruiting this could be based on the address of candidates assigned to a high value Talent Group.
An app to analyze clustering of candidate locations, based on candidate attributes. This could, for example, be used to determine where to hold college career fairs for specific disciplines. This could just as easily be done on a PC, of course. It would just look way cooler on an iPad.

These are not terrible ideas but don't compare to applications where candidates opt-in in real-time to be found. The rate at which things are going, this could be very soon.

Let me know what you think. Am I nuts?

Cheers, Mark