1. INCORPORATING
Recruitment
• Matters•
Business intelligence for recruitment and resourcing professionals
www.recruiter.co.uk
October 2016
EMERGING TECHNOLOGY
Future visions join
the present tense
OLYMPIC CAREER
Ex-Team GB hockey
star James Tindell
THE LAST WORD
Matt Churchward asks
why can’t we keep staff?

2. WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK 2120 RECRUITER OCTOBER 2016
SAP’SBIG
BANGTHEORY
TOATTRACT
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

3. 22 RECRUITER JULY 2016
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

4. 24 RECRUITER OCTOBER 2016
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

5. 26 RECRUITER JULY 2016
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.
WWW.RECRUITER.CO.UK 27