Best of both worlds: SAP SuccessFactors and LiveHire experience layer

Most large organisations will have a Human Capital Management (HCM) software platform as their central HR technology. For organisations wishing to blend a best-of-breed with an all-in-one technology strategy, using a HCM platform such as SAP SuccessFactors with a talent acquisition, mobility and engagement software such as LiveHire, has many company-wide benefits. Streamlining HR processes can be an issue for a lot of businesses. Managing talent, particularly high volume talent, in a suite that also provides support and optimises performance, can be a difficult task. Solutions rarely offer a complete package which provides best-in-class experience for candidates, recruiters and HR managers alike.

At its heart, LiveHire’s talent acquisition, mobility & engagement software provides a deeply integrated experience layer for SAP SuccessFactors that creates a world-class candidate and recruiter experience that is intuitive and easy to use.

Why LiveHire?

At LiveHire, we know recruitment is more than just source, hire, repeat. LiveHire’s cloud based platform is designed with user experience at its center – the experience of candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. This focus on user experience delivers rapid improvements in time to source and hire candidates, while generating a positive candidate experience.  At LiveHire, candidates access a mobile enabled application process with easy resume upload, and recruiters experience an intuitive drag and drop talent pipelining with easy-to-read, real time hiring dashboards. LiveHire customers enjoy the benefits of cloud-based recruiting software with global connectivity.

Why SAP SuccessFactors and LiveHire?

1. Aligning best-of-breed (LiveHire) with all-in-one (SAP SuccessFactors)

As Josh Bersin recommends, savvy, modern HR leaders create their HR tech stack using both all-in-one and best-of-breed technologies. And it makes sense, especially for large organisations. The SAP SuccessFactors-LiveHire integration is a deep bi-directional integration (more on that later) which means HR Directors have a single source of people data via SAP SuccessFactors, and the best candidate and hiring team experience via LiveHire.

 

By integrating your SAP ERP & HRIS systems with LiveHire, you can build a community of engaged candidates who will experience humanised and authentic connection. Further, your HR team will have the ability to build a live and flowing database of talent across the whole recruitment process. The API integration between SuccessFactors RCM and LiveHire is one of the deepest in the market. Our integration uses the latest OData APIs which are backwards compatible.

2. Why do the best organisations use LiveHire with SAP SuccessFactors for their Talent Management?

HR Directors augment their HR Technology Strategy by using LiveHire. LiveHire at the front-end, enables organisations to reduce their time-to-hire by up to 75% and deliver proactive recruitment strategies such as: candidate sourcing (from multiple channels such as job boards, careers pages, internal referrals, alumni, social pages and database candidates), mobile enabled applications, talent pooling (using internal, alumni and external talent) and instant SMS candidate communication. Then, depending on the organisation’s unique recruitment process, SAP SuccessFactors can step in to manage the rest of the recruitment process and HCM updates such as: job requisition, job offer, new hire onboarding and if internal, transfer/promotion. This outlines just one way of integrating these platforms. We know that organisations each have unique hiring processes, and so we have designed the LiveHire / SuccessFactors integration to be customised to fit each organization’s needs.

The result of this HR Tech strategy is that organisations achieve significant improvements in their hiring metrics: 17 days median time-to-hire, improved diversity metrics (when using Talent Communities, 56% of hires are female) and fast candidate response times with candidates responding to SMS messages in under one hour.

LiveHire is for organisations dedicated to sourcing the best talent, and HR Directors seeking to outperform on their hiring metrics and enhance organisational employer and consumer brand. Using LiveHire with SuccessFactors means that organisations get all the benefits of a best-in-class platform (like LiveHire) with the scale of an all-in-one platform (like SuccessFactors).

Victorian organisation, Alfred Health, uses LiveHire / SuccessFactors to source, hire  and onboard hundreds of healthcare workers from within thousands of resumes. Hiring at Alfred Health has risen by 15% over the past 5 years driven by an increase in the delivery of services and the COVID-19 pandemic response. SuccessFactors / LiveHire was implemented to meet these demands. Alfred Health describes their SuccessFactors/LiveHire integration as “the best of both worlds, with a smooth, streamlined candidate experience as well as a dedicated HRIS system”. A critical element was to ensure data flowed seamlessly, freeing up teams to focus on finding candidates quickly, managing candidate relationships and improving the quality of hire. With a total workforce of ~10,000 employees, Alfred Health is a great example of how to deliver a great best-of-breed (LiveHire) and all-in-one (SAP Successfactors) HR Technology Strategy. Watch here from Alfred Heath about their LiveHire/SuccessFactors deep integration.

3. What is a deep integration and how does it work between SAP and LiveHire?

Technology integrations – “Does X integrate with Y?” is such a simple question on the surface. It’s similar to asking a chef to combine ingredients together. While the ingredients may technically mix, they may or may not taste great. It’s the same with technology integrations.

Two questions HR Directors should ask regarding deep technology integrations:

• How is data shared between platforms? Is it bi-directional?
• How smooth is the workflow and user experience between platforms?
• What is the user experience? For candidates? For Recruiters? For hiring managers?

The SuccessFactors/LiveHire integration is a deep integration. This means that recruitment data does two important things: (1) data flows 2-way (bi-directional) between the two platforms (i.e. SuccessFactors speaks to LiveHire, and LiveHire speaks to SuccessFactors), and (2) the data communication updates and flows real time. This means that when Recruiters or HR Directors enter either system, workflows are not interrupted and reporting is real time.

Real time data updates to create real time reporting is critical for HR Directors. All-in-one systems may seem attractive on the surface because of the perception that reporting will be more reliable if everything is done in a single system. LiveHire overcomes this challenge with the deep integration built with SuccessFactors. This means SuccessFactors remains the single “source of truth” with relevant hiring data up-to-date in both systems, which in turn facilitates real time reporting in SuccessFactors.

4. As a candidate, how do LiveHire and SuccessFactors work together for me?

In organisations using the LiveHire platform, candidates apply for (1) current open roles or (2) expressions of interest (future roles). The LiveHire platform is designed to be candidate friendly. It’s mobile-enabled and allows fast upload of resumes (only minutes to complete) from a range of sources (e.g. word documents, LinkedIn etc) so it’s quick and easy to apply.

Candidates communicate directly with recruiters through the platform, and because LiveHire is enabled with two-way SMS messaging, this results in median candidate response times of less than one hour.

Recruiters engage with candidates at scale using bulk communication technology (just one click) and can easily share important updates such as hiring status, role information and role rejection while keeping candidates within the organisation’s Talent Community.

Diversity hiring is also improved. As an example, female candidates are also more likely to respond to Expressions of Interest rather than specific roles. The reasons women hesitate to apply include: (1) they are unsure if they meet all the criteria, (2) they are less likely to apply to a job at an organisation who has rejected them for another role, and (3) they are deterred by long application processes. In contrast, men are more likely to reapply for roles, regardless of prior application status. Application processes that are rejection centric, are too long or offer very little chance of receiving a response from the organisation, are barriers to women.

LiveHire solves this by recruiters building a branded Talent Community, rather than relying solely on job advertisements. Then, recruiters can invite candidates to express interest in the organisation and alleviate the pressure to apply for a specific role that may not be fully suitable to the candidate. The net result is more gender diversity and a positive candidate experience, even when candidates are not successful for their initial role. Enhancing the traditional hiring model with Talent Communities, LiveHire helps companies achieve 15% better diversity outcomes than the industry standard. Read more about Diversity Hiring best practices here.

How SAP SuccessFactors and LiveHire are integrated:

• Deep dual synchronised integration with RCM – job, application, status, candidate data
• Seamless recruiter experience with no disruption to the Hiring Manager experience
• Best practice careers site experience – top job widgets, mobile optimised experience, embedded referrals, embedded video
• Mobile optimised candidate experience and live profiles
• AL-powered talent matching and talent suggestions for proactive and rapid hiring
• Two-way SMS and email messaging

5. As a recruiter, how do LiveHire and SuccessFactors work together for me?

Recruiters benefit a lot from the LiveHire / SuccessFactors integration. Recruitment processes are often unique to each organisation. The LiveHire / SuccessFactors integration can be configured to each organisation’s preferred hiring process. As an example, organisations may choose to use LiveHire up to the point of shortlist, whereas others may decide to use LiveHire all the way up to the point of offer.

This decision hinges on how they want recruiters to collaborate with hiring managers to fill open positions. If the organization only wants their hiring managers to work in SuccessFactors, they can choose to work with LiveHire up to the point of shortlist.

In this example, recruiters can use LiveHire to perform the sourcing and engagement stages of hiring: Sourcing, Application Screening, Talent Pooling and Candidate Communication. Then, because data flows with the deep integration between LiveHire and SuccessFactors, recruiters workflow across to SuccessFactors to match candidates to Hiring Requisition, offer the role and onboard new candidates. See how Alfred Health integrated their hiring process with SuccessFactors/LiveHire.

In addition to this, clever features like CRM (customer relationship management), Intelligent Matching, Candidate Ownership and Pipeline Velocity, save recruiters time and reduce time-to-fill.

Intelligent Matching suggests well-matched database candidates for roles while the intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes talent pooling dynamic and easy for recruiters.

Candidate Ownership enables stakeholder tagging which creates ownership as recruiters review personalised talent pools for their internal client group.

Pipeline Velocity is a new feature and has 2 key elements. Firstly, organisations can customise timeframes for candidate status at each recruitment stage (for example, if they are interviewing then they should not be sitting in the same status for 4 weeks). Secondly, Pipeline Velocity creates system-generated actions or nudges to remind recruiters of which candidates should be progressed or rejected when they are sitting in a stage too long. Relying on recruiter memory or to-do lists of actions for every candidate is not reliable. Using technology to remind recruiters in advance of actions they need to take, speeds up hiring and improves candidate experience. Importantly it also frees up the mind of recruiters to focus on candidate experience and engagement.

The combination of Intelligent Matching, Candidate Ownership and Pipeline Velocity means that hiring teams can quickly curate applications into simple, streamlined talent pools, ready for interview, assessment and offer while creating an outstanding, personalised candidate experience.

6. As a HR director, how do LiveHire and SuccessFactors work together for me?

HR Directors leveraging both LiveHire and SuccessFactors deliver their HR and organisational value proposition on all three dimensions: candidates, employees and consumers.

Candidates have a great experience due to the tech-enhanced engagement (two-way SMS / mobile-friendly) and recruiters are freed up to deliver a great service (via Pipeline Velocity, Intelligent Matching and Candidate Ownership).

Employees have a great internal mobility experience as the LiveHire platform handles all internal vacancy processes using the same white-glove experience as external candidates.

Consumer experience is fulfilled with low candidate rejection and increased candidate engagement, meaning those candidates who apply and are unsuccessful retain an affinity for the organisation’s consumer brand.

Lastly, due to the real time, bi-directional data, HR reporting is a breeze as Successfactors retains its status as the single source of data truth.

Conclusion

It’s clear that HR technology integrations are here to stay. While the process of aligning platforms may seem daunting, deep integrations already built between software platforms actually make integrations easy. HR Directors can leverage best-of-breed technology like LiveHire, coupled with large scale HCMs like SAP SuccessFactors and achieve outstanding results in sourcing, hiring and onboarding talent.