Brand Matters: Solving Recruiting Challenges with Creativity and Candidate Relationship Management

SAP is an SAP SuccessFactors customer. The Talent Acquisition team recently found a unique solution to a recruiting challenge that combined creative thinking with new candidate relationship management functionality.

Each May, our Talent Acquisition team is tasked with hiring dozens of young people to fill vacancies for the SAP Internship Experience Project program. Attracting young leaders in Vancouver's 'sea of cool' is a formidable challenge. Out-of-the box thinking is a must.

To tackle the challenge, we harmonized our brand as an employer, our gender diversity initiatives, and social media marketing as well as held a fun event with inspirational leadership and networking opportunities. We used candidate relationship management technology from the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution to tie it all together.

To highlight two of our hallmarks as a company and employer, we launched a series of Women Who Rock events and accompanying messaging, which displayed our commitment to diversity initiatives as well as our recent Glassdoor global recognition as a Best Place to Work. Then, we used new candidate relationship management functionality in SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and traditional recruiting and social media marketing to attract, nurture, and track potential intern candidates.

By all measures, the inaugural January event was a talent acquisition success:

• In just 30 days, more than 12,000 candidates reviewed networking advertisements that positioned SAP as a cool and unique company in the Vancouver area. We extended this central theme broadly through social media marketing.
• Four hundred candidates completed applications for the SAP Internship Experience Project, and an additional 217 were sourced directly from SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting.
• More than 600 candidate profiles were managed in three distinct talent pools in candidate relationship management.
• Those in candidate relationship management talent pools received branded Women Who Rock invitations using mass digital marketing.
• Email correspondence was successfully tracked in each candidate's account.
• More than 800 young leaders attended the event and gave very positive feedback.

Brand matters in recruiting. At the Women Who Rock event, which featured guest host KT Tunstall, we were able to reinforce the SAP brand as both cool and committed to diversity. Using SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting to manage it all was a tremendous hiring success for SAP. We plan to host our next Women Who Rock event in March.

To learn more about the Women Who Rock events, this talent acquisition campaign, and SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, you can email me at [e-mail].

Brent Ellis is global vice president of the Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence (COE) and Solution Advisory for SAP SuccessFactors.