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October 2016

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SAP’S BIG BANG THEORY

TO ATTRACT TALENT

THE BIG STORY SAP

To compete with the sexy

tech firms, SAP decided to

overhaul its employer brand

in a quest to find out what

great looks like. Sue Weekes

discovered how SAP went

about it

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SAP, WHICH EMPLOYS ALMOST 80,000 EMPLOYEES in more than 130 countries, has always been open about the challenges it faces: as an unsexy, business-to-business German software company, it doesn’t have a brand that attracts the top tech talent in the same way Apple, Google or Facebook has.

For the past two years, it has been on a path to reversing this and its 99 top employer, HR and recruitment awards (including Recruiter’s Most Effective Employer Brand Development award earlier this year) are testimony to its efforts. It has also seen its Glassdoor rating grow from 3.7 to 4.1 in the past year, ahead of consumer brands like Apple, Cisco, Disney and Nike.

So job done? Far from it. “We felt we had the foundations in place but didn’t yet have an attractive house,” says Matthew Jeffery, vice president and global head of sourcing and employment brand. “It is a big year for us. SAP is moving to the cloud. We are no longer an on-premise, static software business. We need that talent that is going the big consumer brands.”

The employment brand “big bang”, as SAP calls the overhaul, includes a new employee value proposition (EVP), real-time candidate feedback assessments, innovative Facebook assessment tool, recruitment game, careers site, global photo competitions, talent mapping initiative, candidate insight pack and Recruiter Playbook to train recruiters, plus a weekly cartoon designed to inject fun into the process. Oh, and SAP has also published a book to share their experience with others, called Revealed.

Among the stand-out developments is a feature that takes an individual’s Facebook profile (with permission) and, in less than a second, returns a personality profile and suggestion of opportunities where a person may ‘be brilliant’ within SAP. Meanwhile, the game ultimately aims to alert SAP of a player, with no experience or knowledge of the company, who may be a great

recruit. And when it comes to assessment, in future candidates will receive real-time feedback from online assessments and find out if they are being called for an interview.

Aside from external specialists, such as people consultancy The Chemistry Group, and games platform developer GameSparks, everything has been generated by the in-house employment branding team. The homegrown approach underpins the central aim of the EVP: to humanise SAP and bring it to life. “SAP is out of sight to everyday consumers and its software is hard to understand,” says Robin Dagostino, head of creative media team. “But while code is abstract and cold, SAP and its employee’s contributions are really warm, inspiring, real and authentic.”

The new EVP, therefore, includes the use of highly visual mosaic posters encouraging employees to bring “everything you are” to work. “This is the dominant message,” says Dagostino, who works alongside employment brand marketing manager Andrea Woolley.

Across all the initiatives, Jeffery and his team have

THE BIG STORY SAP

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managed to achieve an approach that is simultaneously human and data-driven. Indeed, big data underpins many of the initiatives that make up SAP’s talent acquisition and management strategy and is central to the work done by Chemistry.

SAP previously worked with the consultancy on assessment for its sales academy and it wanted to take this work to the next level. Its wish-list included: the ability to provide the candidate with an immediate response and let them know if they are right for the company; to help the hiring manager ask the right questions; and to take the subjectivity and bias out of recruiting.

Chemistry’s aim is to definitively predict performance by designing ‘What Great Looks Like’ (WGLL). So using its unique methodology and software it embedded WGLL at the top of the recruitment funnel for SAP, and consistent assessment and selection methods in the other two stages of attraction and screening and selection.

SAP has also benefited from the work of the Chemistry ‘Lab’, set up to develop “frictionless” ways of assessing a person. “It is about making the candidate experience better but also finding

more talent,” says Gareth Jones, chief technology officer at Chemistry. “The lab specifically looks at ways of using data to profile an individual as opposed to them taking an assessment test.”

For SAP, it has built two mechanisms for obtaining this data: the Facebook app that returns a personality profile, and also gameplay. The approach is all about finding the “latent talent” within an individual, which might not otherwise surface. “The game will identify people with the potential to perform in a role even if they have no prior experience of a similar role or knowledge of SAP,” says Jones.

It isn’t just the game score that is relevant but also how the person plays the game, says Griff Parry, co-founder and CEO, GameSparks. “Some people play a game to win, whereas others play to socialise and feel connected, and some to explore,” he says. “Games are good at two things: behavioural science and analytics as they consume huge amounts of data, process it and respond to it quickly.”

Obviously SAP isn’t relying solely

THE BIG STORY SAP

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THE BIG STORY SAMANTHA RAMSAY

costs. “But even the high cost ones are significantly less than they would pay if they went to a third-party agency,” says Woolley. “And this has really started to resonate with hiring managers.”

Because SAP is able to collect data on its recruitment activity, the menu also makes the hiring managers more accountable for their decisions. “If what they do fails, their manager can hold them accountable, not us,” says Jeffery. “But it is down to us to provide that data whether it be on number of responses or cost and time to hire.”

GAME

The Get Home menu shows four divisions of sport, entertainment, viral defence and recruitment. For entertainment, for instance, players have to move and dock buses that transport attendees home from a concert. “Having got a high score, the player will tend to be in a heightened emotional state and it’s at that point we reach out and say, ‘you’re awesome’ and provide a link to the SAP talent community,” says Parry. Players start as a rookie and progress to becoming a senior VP. As you achieve things you get ‘new toys’ (ie the buses get funkier) and you can unlock new divisions. You can also compare performance with friends.

“How you interact as you progress through – what I call the metagame --

THE BIG STORY SAP

on Facebook and gameplay data to find its talent but data of all sorts is likely to inform its recruiting decisions going forward. “One of the exciting things about the partnership with SAP is the multiple things we can try,” says Roger Philby, CEO of The Chemistry Group. “In the US market we may explore using data such as shopping habits. What we’re interested in is, where is the data from which we can start to think about how you behave, how you interact with the world and other people?”

Jeffery believes the raft of initiatives being put in place will deliver major savings in terms of cost and time to hire, quality of hire, cultural fit and reduced attrition. As well as the immediate benefits to candidates and hiring managers, the data-driven approach is popular with the onboarding and learning & development teams as the insight helps to inform induction reports and training plans. “It means they can hit the ground running with the individual,” says Jeffery.

SAP’s employer branding ‘big bang’ is likely to turn a few heads in the recruiting world, especially among those who fear technology is removing the human aspect. But detractors be warned, this could just be the start. Philby envisions a future where there would be no need for recruitment companies at all. “What would be really disruptive is to get to a point where you log on to a platform, put in the postcode of where you are hiring, and see a list of the top 100 people for the role by house number,” he says. “We know that data is out there. If you understand what great looks like and how the data out there relates to that, you could do it.”

FACEBOOK APP

Facebook users click a button and are asked if they give permission for SAP to take their data. In under a second, it returns a personality profile as well as information on their opportunity “to be brilliant at SAP”. SAP believes that the value-add of an instant personality profile will help to encourage individuals to buy into the process and give permission to access their data. “We’re not forcing users to do anything,” says Jones.

ASSESSMENTS

Individuals are streamed into an online assessment. The first one is designed to find out the cultural environment that suits them and explores their values and motivations. The second is a behavioural assessment and finds out how a person would react in a particular scenario in the SAP environment. “Once complete, the pay-back for the person is that they are given instant feedback,” says Jones.

EVP

This shows an exclusive draft example of one of the mosaics that will depict all aspects of a SAP employee’s life and is designed to humanise SAP’s by sharing employee stories. “It is about fulfilment,” says Dagostino. “It shows you having fun at work; giving back to the community; you have career advancement and development; and you have a purpose and mission.” The message of the EVP is: “Bring everything you are. Become everything you want.”

EMPLOYMENT BRAND MENU

When the centralised marketing team was set up some hiring managers expected work done for a ridiculously low budget or even for free. The menu lists the services on offer with their

can tell us more about you,” Parry adds.Jeffery describes the game, which will

be featured on the website across social media and at events and also features some of the cartoon characters, as the perfect representation of what SAP does. “We try and make the world run better.”

LIFE AT SAP CARTOON

The weekly Wednesday cartoon has been running since April on the company’s Facebook and Instagram pages and features a group of co-workers. It aims to showcase some of the unique features of SAP with “a cartoony spin”, says Dagostino. “We’ve tried to humanise and provide insight into life at SAP,” says Jeffery. Topics covered have included being assigned a buddy and ‘coffee corners’ which SAP holds between employees and the senior leadership team. “It’s really tapped into the zeitgeist,” says Dagostino, adding that they regularly get 500-600 likes and sometimes more than 1,000.

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