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Using SAP HR Recruitment“Nearly 300 human resources professionals commiserated over the battles they wage to get and keep good workers during the recruitment conference “The war for talent – winning strategies” Sept. 27-29 in Washington DC” (HR News magazine, November 2000). As a study by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) indicates, three out of every 10 computer-related vacancies now take six months or longer to fill. Indeed, as the Information Age morphs into the “Information Economy,” human resource leaders and professionals struggle with finding the right people at an increasingly faster pace. There is no shortage of labor - the challenge HR managers are faced with is to find people with high-end specific IT skills. However, this often translates into lottery-like odds of successfully matching the range of technology skills demanded by IT hiring managers with the skills that show up on candidate resumes. HR managers need to ensure that the right people, with the right skills and in the right numbers, are in place at the right time. In order to find and hire those applicants having the specific skills needed by the organization, HR professionals need to have a clear recruitment strategy and a highly efficient IT system facilitating and supporting the recruitment process. This article examines the capabilities of the SAP recruitment
module that can be used to implement an effective – and
largely automated – recruitment strategy, and how these
functions can help to ease and manage the whole recruitment
cycle from creating a vacancy until hiring successful applicants. VACANCIES AND JOB DESCRIPTIONS The need to hire an employee can arise from various events such as new projects, terminations, increased workload, or restructuring of a department or position, which results in the need for additional skills and/or abilities, which current employees do not possess. Therefore, the first step in the recruitment process should be to evaluate the need to hire a new employee. Once that need is established, a vacancy becomes available in the organization. A vacancy in SAP is a description of a position that must be staffed, either completely or partially. The recruitment process is actually triggered by the creation of a vacancy and its purpose is to fill vacancies. If the recruitment component is used in conjunction with Organizational Management, this vacancy is created as an unoccupied position within the organizational hierarchy. All positions marked vacant in Organizational Management are available in the Recruitment system for further processing and evaluation. This allows HR managers to see exactly where the vacancy is created within the organization and the reporting structure. At this point, when creating the vacancy, the necessary skills
to perform the tasks associated with this position can be
attached to the position in the form of “requirements”.
If the Personnel Development component is used, these requirements
can be selected directly from the Qualifications Catalogue.
These requirements can be used later to select suitable applicants
by comparing applicant qualifications to vacancy requirements
and they also provide an excellent basis for creating job
descriptions. In addition, having a written description will
allow an employer to point to the qualifications, which a
candidate failed to meet, thus avoiding any questions regarding
the employer's motivation for elimination of the candidate. The next step is to advertise the vacancy. Any means used to advertise a vacancy is represented in SAP by Recruitment instruments. Below is a sample list of the type of recruitment instruments companies might use: Internal Postings If you are posting the job internally and using SAP Personnel
Development – Career and Succession Planning, it is possible
to identify not only the most suitable candidates but also
the training needs for those who lack qualifications for advancement.
Monitoring transfer applications can help to isolate problem
areas within the company. If employees from a particular department
are constantly applying for the posted positions, it may be
a sign that the department's working conditions, job requirements,
and/or supervisory staff may be a problem. Employees are valuable resources for filling job opening
and can be an effective and cost efficient way of attracting
qualified candidates. When logging applicant data, which have
been provided through a referral, it is possible to log who
referred the applicant for future reference. Most companies use classified advertisements in the newspaper
in order to recruit external applicants. An effective ad would
contain enticing language that outlines the qualifications
for the position and specific job duties, which will attract
qualified candidates. These ads can be recorded in the system
and if requirements and job descriptions have been created,
these can be used at this point to create the ad. Employment agencies are typically used by employers to assist
in the recruitment of qualified candidates and are paid a
fee for their services. It is possible to store the costs
of using agencies (as well as storing the costs for any other
recruitment instrument used) and compare these costs to other
advertising means and the number of responses received. This
allows you to not only monitor how much money is spent on
advertising but also to identify the most effective way of
attracting applicants. The state employment services and unemployment provide prescreening
and testing of prospective job candidates at no fee to the
employer. Industry associations, consulting and search firms often
hold job fairs which allow a wide range employers and prospective
employees to have an opportunity to meet in one place. In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the amount of online recruiting. This includes local newspapers, industry-related websites, corporate websites and job and resume sites. HR professionals have recognized that the World Wide Web allows them to enlarge their pool of prospective employees and that the web's inherent interactivity allows them to create highly personalized and responsive web recruiting domains. The most important recruiting tools on the web are web-site search engines, interactive job application forms, e-mail autoresponders and e-mail mailing lists allowing HR departments to link their company databases with the web site. Compared to newspapers and specialized journals, the Internet is an inexpensive medium for advertising vacancies and allows to reach out to a much broader audience. It is also a quick and easy way for applicants and employees to search for employment opportunities and to submit their applications immediately. Within SAP, Recruitment Internet Application Components (IACs) can be used for both for external applicants and for employees. They allow you to place job advertisements on the Internet/Intranet, process on-line applications, process unsolicited applications to a company via the Internet/Intranet and have applicants monitor the processing status of their own applications. Costs can be saved here because companies have fewer telephone inquiries to answer, and they do not need to create and send letters of confirmation. Applicants can find out the status of their applications quickly and easily on the Internet. Another advantage is that they are not restricted to normal company opening hours. Recording advertisements in SAP – whether these are classified ads or via the Internet - allows you to record and manage all advertisements and to evaluate the advertising strategy by comparing costs and effectiveness of all the different recruitment instruments used. Advertisements are recorded for vacancies and therefore each advertisement is linked to one or more vacancies.
RECORD KEEPING Once applications have been received in response to the advertisement,
all the received applications need to be processed. Record
keeping is an important element of the recruitment process.
It is not only critical to maintain accurate job descriptions
but also log details such as the recruitment methods used,
applications received, candidates interviewed, candidate selected
and reasons for selection. In the event that a claim is filed
against a company for discriminatory hiring practices, the
records mentioned above will provide evidence of the valid
selection criteria used by the company. The key issue which
arises out of these regulations, and which will ultimately
determine an employer's compliance with the record-keeping
requirement, is whether a particular candidate is an "applicant". The Applicant Administration component within SAP Recruitment allows you to record all applicant related data and to coordinate and monitor all the steps involved in applicant administration. The two-tiered data entry concept provides a fast and easy way to enter and structure both unsolicited applications (applications received on an ad-hoc basis, not in response to a specific ad) and applications in response to a specific advertisement. Initial entry of applicant data takes place using fast data entry and is performed for every applicant. This is because it contains data (such as the name, address and organizational assignment of the applicant) that is required later for printing letters, and for statistical purposes. The “Enter additional data” activity is only carried out for applicants who are of further interest to the company. This action enables you to assign an applicant to one or more vacancies, as well as entering data on an applicant’s education, training, qualifications and previous employer. This has the following advantages: Entry of applications in the system can be divided - so that more than one person is responsible for it; large numbers of applications can be processed quickly and a minimum of time wasted on entering data on unsuitable applicants. (If an applicant is to be hired, his or her data can be transferred directly to Personnel Administration, which further reduces data entry) In all these cases, the applicant’s data is compared with existing information. This means that the same data does not need to be entered twice, or stored in two different locations. It also helps reduce data entry errors. For external applicants, all data need to be keyed in manually whereas when dealing with internal applicants, data such as name and address can be imported simply by specifying the candidate's personnel number. All applicants are assigned to applicant groups used to group together applicants on the basis of the type of work for which they have applied (i.e. a permanent contract versus a temporary contract) and to an applicant range classifying applicants on the basis of either hierarchical (i.e. executives, workers) or functional criteria (i.e. marketing, production, sales). All application documents and resumes can also be scanned
so that they can be made available to several employees at
any one time. However, implementing SAP Archive can be quite
a lengthy process but helps speed up processing, and protects
the originals against damage and loss.
Once all resumes and job applications have been received, the SAP system will handle all applicant related correspondence. Depending on the status of the applicant within the recruitment process, (resume received, applicant rejected, applicant to be invited for an interview, etc.) different standard letters can be printed out using the mail merge function. The advantages of automatic correspondence are that there is no need to type individual letters for each applicant since standard letters can be edited in an easy fashion and letters can be sent in the form of faxes and e-mails directly from the R/3 System. Applicant correspondence is created using applicant activities. These activities represent the administrative stages through which an applicant passes during the course of the application procedure. Using SAP Business Workflow further enables you to coordinate tasks by distributing work and automatically forward it to the persons responsible for certain tasks. Letters can be displayed or printed directly and the system
inserts the applicant's personal data automatically into the
standard letter. Letters or documents for applicants can either
be printed out individually via the connected activity, or
together with other letters using bulk processing. SELECTING THE RIGHT CANDIDATE The most challenging and time-consuming task within the recruitment cycle is the successful selection of suitable candidates. Again, a very good practice for HR professionals would be to start with a current job description focused on the skills, knowledge and experience relevant to performing the essential functions of the position. Such a description should be comprehensive. In addition to job title, salary and location, and requirements — such as education, skills, abilities and experience — the description should include the reporting relationships and duties and responsibilities defined as essential to the position. From the job description, HR professionals can determine the skills and attributes they seek in applicants for a particular position and set the parameters for the search within SAP recruitment. Using terms that are strictly linked to the essential qualifications for performing the job helps avoid consideration of factors that are irrelevant to an applicant's ability to succeed in the position. Applicants within SAP participate in two types of selection procedures: an overall procedure considering them for any suitable vacancy within the organization and an individual selection procedure for a specific vacancy to which the applicant has been assigned. This allows considering all applicants for more than just one vacancy and enables applicants, which were rejected for a particular position to be considered for alternative vacancies. The selection procedure is completed when all participating applicants have been assigned either the status Rejected or To be hired. As mentioned above, when using Recruitment in conjunction with Personnel Development, the system can also compare qualifications of an applicant to the requirements of the vacancy, enabling to find suitable vacancies for each applicant or suitable applicants for each vacancy. So called “Profile matchups “ help determine whether a person is suitable for a position and whether qualification deficits exist and filters out those candidates who have one or all of the qualifications needed to perform the job and the result can be displayed graphically. Alternatively, the system also allows searching for applicants or existing employees possessing specific qualifications without comparing them to requirements. It is also possible to list applicants assigned to a particular vacancy and check their suitability by means of a short profile and archived facsimiles of the application documentation. These methods are highly effective and fair. Indeed, the selection tools are designed to filter out skills on a neutral basis without having any race or gender awareness. If used in conjunction with efficient interviewing techniques, organizations are in a position to staff their vacancies with the most suitable candidates. SAP Recruitment also offers a range of standard reports, which allow retrieving data related to applicants (skills, status, activities carried out etc), vacancies, advertisements, costs and so on. The SAP Recruitment component was designed to automate most of the processes relieving the HR Department of administrative burden and enabling HR Professionals to focus on the successful selection of the right candidate(s). In order to make full use of it, use it in conjunction with the complementary components Personnel Administration and Personnel Development. Although this technology has taken some of the chores related to sorting, categorizing and filing resumes, editing correspondence and comparing skill sets, HR professionals still remain responsible for implementing recruitment policies that keep the company on the right side of the law and they also still need to master the art of interviewing applicants who – on paper – seem to be suitable for a particular position. Correct use of the Recruitment module can greatly reduce the lottery-like odds of successfully matching applicants’ skills to the open positions in an organization. At its best, it enables HR managers to ensure that the right people, with the right skills and in the right numbers, are in place at the right time. And that is one of the most critical success factors of any growing business. |
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