Renew HR — HR transformation, electrified.

How to hire great employees for SMB

Posted on August 1, 2020 by

How to hire great employees for SMBs

“At a cost of nearly $4,000 on average to fill an open position, U.S. companies are spending nearly three times the amount spent on training per employee,” said Karen O’Leonard, vice president, Benchmarking & Analytics Research, Bersin by Deloitte.

Recruitment is an exhaustive process; ask any talent acquisition executive — there is a lot of investment, both in the form of time and money, to hire. So if you are spending so much money on recruitment, naturally you must ensure you get the industry’s best talent and retain that talent.

Larger and established businesses have several selling points, such as benefits and brand value, that help them attract the best talent. When it comes to SMBs, they may not attract a talent pool as large as big businesses, but some defining characteristics may help you attract your industry’s best talent. Here are a few small-business recruiting strategies you can use.

1. Know your candidate persona

Before you start working on your sourcing channels, work on the candidate persona. Define what your ‘ideal candidate’ profile is. A candidate persona helps you create accurate job descriptions, measure the effectiveness of sourcing channels, and focus on the right talent that fits your culture. Conduct interviews of existing employees and stakeholders to define characteristics of the persona — job title, work experience, job-specific skills, communication skills, professional life goals, and so on. Create a candidate persona for each job role you post and keep refining it throughout the recruitment process.

2. Write an attractive job description

Once you know what persona you are looking for, write a detailed job description. Use the JD to differentiate yourself from competitors; it should give an idea about the exact job responsibilities and skill set, to attract the right candidates. Sit with your hiring manager to discuss the exact requirement — you may waste productive time if you don’t know what your hiring manager is looking for. Create a brand story that will make candidates want to be part of the organization’s journey, and paint a clear picture of your office culture and the benefits you offer, such as work-from-home or flexible-hours options.

As SMBs grow, you may need to hire more people for specific tasks, so keep updating job descriptions with the changing needs of jobs. Talk to your existing employees to understand responsibilities and omit tasks that are no longer necessary.

3. Creative ways to attract employees

A majority of SMBs (84%) agree that finding enough candidates is their #1 hiring challenge, according to a 2019 report by LinkedIn. As an SMB recruiter, you should know how to attract the best employees while keeping your hiring costs low. The most effective sourcing channels that work wonders for SMBs are social media, referrals, company career pages, personal networks, and job boards.

Social media has changed the way businesses recruit today. For SMBs, it provides access to a larger pool of candidates in an organic way. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are some of the most used platforms; choose the one most suitable for your business and where your target candidates spend time. Maintain an online presence, use your employees’ networks to spread the word about open positions, and spend on social media ads if it fits your budget.

Referrals are the most efficient way for SMBs in recruitment. You can reduce hiring time and costs by implementing a referral program that is easy to use for both employees and hiring managers. Write clear rules defining which positions are open to referrals, the benefits, and how employees can apply. Keep both monetary and non-monetary incentives, with slightly higher incentives for hard-to-fill positions, and create easily shareable messages. Always measure the effectiveness of the program — referral-to-hire ratio, cost, and number of employees engaged.

Your company career page is where you make the first impression on potential candidates. Showcase your culture, product offerings, and employee benefits. Design the page to reflect the company’s personality, add testimonial videos of current employees for credibility, include a ‘why you should join us’ section, and show diversity so anyone who visits feels welcomed.

4. Screen candidates to get the right fit

If you are using the right sources, you will get a flood of applications. It consumes a lot of hiring time to screen them all manually, and SMB recruiters wear multiple hats. With more digital tools entering the recruitment process, it’s wise to go for automated tools — they reduce screening time and costs and improve hire quality. There are plenty of automated tools for application tracking (ATS), resume screening, skills assessment, and even online interviewing, helping you screen candidates faster and surface the right-fit candidates.

5. Follow an effective interview process

Following an effective interview process is integral to hiring. Once you shortlist qualified candidates, schedule interviews. Be prepared in advance: create a list of questions for each candidate and determine the number of rounds in a day. Keep the same core questions for everyone, but be ready to ask follow-ups based on their responses. Observe whether candidates are prepared for the role and will fit the culture, start with lighter questions so they relax, and include open questions that promote discussion. Keep notes for each candidate, invite a teammate or hiring manager for another perspective, and follow all legal guidelines to keep the interview unbiased — avoid questions that discriminate based on gender, race, color, religion, age, or national origin.

A few interview questions that provide valuable insight:

Why are you looking for a new position?
Explain any conflict you had with past team members, and how you resolved it.
Describe a situation where you were asked to perform a task out of your comfort zone, and how you achieved it.
How does your past work experience relate to this position?
What would you consider your strengths and weaknesses?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Conclusion

Expanding a team is an excellent sign for SMBs — it directly reflects that your organization is doing well. There is no perfect strategy for hiring great employees, but following a few techniques like referral hiring, social media, candidate screening, and a structured interview will help attract the right talent. Hiring a great employee is hard, but if you are ready to take extra effort and streamline your recruitment strategy, you will benefit in the long run.

Talent management and succession planning challenges for SMBs

Posted on July 1, 2020July 13, 2026 by

Succession planning is an integral part of talent management

Talent management is all about fulfilling the organization’s business objective by acquiring, developing, and deploying the employees with the highest potential. The responsibility of HR is to create an environment where these high-potential employees can learn, develop, gain on-the-job experience, and progress in their careers, with the expectation that some of them are destined to play a significant role in the future growth of the organization.

Succession planning is a process for identifying and developing new leaders who can replace old leaders when they leave or retire. It increases the availability of experienced and capable employees prepared to assume these roles as they become available. Those organizations that can nurture and manage their talent well are the ones that can identify and develop future leaders. Succession planning forces an organization to introspect carefully on its available talent, build constructive appraisal processes, and ensure they are applied fairly across the organization.

Most small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) very rarely have formal talent management and succession management processes. Even though these are prevalent among large enterprises, SMBs lag behind in this respect — and even those that have incorporated succession planning find that getting an effective business outcome and doing it right remains a challenge. In the last few years we have seen increasing interest among SMBs in recognizing the importance of talent management and succession planning; however, there appears to be a substantial gap between intention and reality. It is one thing to have these processes implemented, but the real question is: do they deliver?

Implementing a succession planning process usually involves significant cultural change, and SMBs find it harder to embrace such change, as some have grown over the years without any formal process. Sometimes they face challenges from traditional mindsets that prevent the modern performance-based appraisal processes necessary for creating a fair system — and a modern performance process is the backbone of talent management and succession planning. Finding potential successors who are ready to take up new responsibilities when their time comes requires discipline, consistent processes, and organizational commitment, mainly from senior leadership. Succession planning is a top-down approach at first, even though the actual realization happens at the grassroots level.

Approaches to succession planning and talent management

At times succession planning is misunderstood as a procedure in place only for the highest level of executives. This is a flawed concept. Succession planning must be driven from the top, but its primary purpose is to ensure that a pipeline of talented (high-potential) individuals is always ready and in place.

As resources are scarce among SMBs, proper coordination among the talent acquisition team, training team, and succession planning team will ensure that you get your internal employees ready to take up newly available opportunities. Organizations should go to external candidates only when no internal candidates are available — this is where succession planning saves the organization thousands of dollars in onboarding, training, and making a new employee productive.

The most progressive SMBs focus on continuity and sustainability, so most of their succession planning programs reach right down through the organization — identifying promising talent from managers, middle managers, and senior managers to recent graduates, and seeking opportunities to develop that talent. A typical approach uses organization and development reviews to identify the areas in which the organization needs to excel, what the implications are for leadership, and where those leaders could be found.

Once the requirements are clear, the next step is to capture a range of information about the successors — such as year-on-year performance rating, internal and external career moves to date, perceived strengths and weaknesses, language ability, and mobility. Some organizations “force-rank” successors based on a range of criteria. The next step is to categorize people by timeframes and readiness for positions in 0–2 years, 2–4 years, and 4–7 years, which helps create relevant career planning steps so the successor is ready within the stipulated timeframe. Ultimately the business strategy will determine what kind of skill set the company needs in the future and where people with those skills can be found. Leadership is not a fixed concept — and especially with all the changes around us, new management skills will be needed — so flexibility is essential to ensure your talent management practices keep evolving as the business changes.

The role of competencies and competency models

Competencies and competency models have become very sophisticated over the last decade or so. Some are specific to internal processes like leadership or talent acquisition, and some are specific to a particular industry segment. Large organizations usually spend much time and effort building these for themselves, but most SMBs cannot build something on their own and may end up with homegrown competencies across various talent management processes.

To be successful, SMBs should pay attention to competency models that are uniform across all talent management areas and explicitly link performance and succession together. They should look at building or acquiring competency models aligned with their overall business strategy. Competency models designed to evaluate performance appraisals tend to be reasonably mature and consistently applied, but not so much in other areas. Depending on maturity, organizations may use traditional annual appraisals, 360-degree reviews, or continuous performance management (CPM) practices — most often with the same competency model. Increasingly, organizations link appraisals to bonuses, connecting compensation models more closely with competency and performance issues; that said, succession planning is not always related to the competency model, and organizations should pay attention to connecting the two.

Building a global talent pool

These days it is not uncommon for smaller SMBs to diversify outside their country boundaries, and depending on the industry, they may have teams based in offshore or nearshore locations. The post-COVID-19 environment will force SMBs to recognize the importance of developing an all-inclusive global talent pool capable of meeting the post-pandemic situation as well as future challenges of organizational expansion and diversification. A structured succession planning process keeps track of who may be suitable to take up international opportunities, helping organizations plan better by understanding the availability of talent across the globe.

Is your succession planning in line with your diversity policy?

On paper, all companies have a diversity policy. Still, implementing it consistently across hiring, promotion, job rotation, and succession planning is certainly not done systematically. In most US-based organizations, race and religious diversity are generally less advanced than gender diversity. The lack of women’s representation in senior roles has already created much bad press in the last few years, and movements highlighting racial justice will push organizations to be more proactive — not only maintaining a healthy diversity policy but applying it to all areas of HR, specifically the future succession planning process.

Most SMBs do not pay much attention to job rotation

Once the organization finds the right candidates, it should put programs in place to make them ready in the stipulated time. It is an excellent opportunity for SMBs to consider job rotation or secondments as a positive, desirable thing — some companies even make this a prerequisite for taking on senior roles. This is also an excellent way to give experience to high-potential candidates.

Conclusion

SMBs can look to the many strong talent management and succession planning programs in place across large enterprises and adopt some of the best practices. Many modern-day HR and talent solutions like SAP SuccessFactors are based on industry best practices, which can certainly help kick-start the succession planning initiative for your organization.

How SMB businesses can build a game-changing talent management strategy

Posted on June 21, 2020 by

Talent management challenges for SMBs

Building a talent management strategy is challenging for small and medium-sized businesses because of many factors like limited resources, branding issues, and lack of technology usage. This article highlights a few such challenges that SMB businesses face in talent management strategy, and the strategies that can be implemented to tackle them.

Critical challenges for SMBs

1) Attracting the right candidates. Small businesses find it difficult to attract the right candidates and always have a limited pool to choose from compared to large companies. These challenges are due to insufficient recruitment budget, lack of efficient recruitment processes, less use of technology in the recruitment function, and ignorance of brand building.

2) Lack of operational efficiency in HR administration. An SMB’s HR administration team is very small and must handle multiple responsibilities — recruitment, onboarding, employee performance management, employee benefits, training, and engagement. Due to a lack of technology adoption for the HR function, these responsibilities might not be accomplished with maximum efficiency.

3) Retaining talent. Even if the HR function can hire new talent, retaining it for longer periods is a tough task. SMBs often don’t have a dedicated team to manage and develop talent. If employees are not getting enough opportunities to grow their capabilities, they might feel lost, resulting in higher turnover that affects the morale of the HR function and other employees.

4) Developing employees and future leaders for succession. The HR function of SMBs may not have enough resources for employee development, performance management, and succession planning. Measuring employee performance and aligning it to business goals is essential, and without appropriate processes or tools, the HR team may not be able to manage performance.

Strategies to solve these challenges

1) Identify organization goals and align them with the talent management strategy. Before designing any strategy, understand the business goals. Talk to organization leaders to understand the company’s vision; these goals are the foundational element for deciding the type of talent needed. Create strategies aligned with the business goals — the HR function becomes a key strategic contributor when it is more engaged with business leaders to support their objectives.

2) Talent planning and recruitment. As small businesses often deal with a limited pool of candidates, they might face “the warm body syndrome” — when desperate for talent who can join immediately, you may end up hiring someone less qualified. Avoid this and never settle for less than the best talent. Your strategy must include both recruiting new hires and managing existing employees.

For recruiting new talent on a limited budget and timeline, focus on creating a brand story, talent pool development, and effective sourcing channels like social media, a career page, and referral programs. Around 92% of recruiters use social media to cast a wider net, so leverage LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to access a large talent pool at no cost. A career page should include every perk and benefit and some employee reviews to gain trust. Referral hiring has the highest applicant-to-hire rate and is cheaper, faster, and effective — design simple rules and attractive rewards to turn your workforce into your best recruiters. Also develop a talent pool (past employees, rejected applicants, near-misses) and keep it engaged with newsletters and updates.

For managing and developing existing talent, recognize that the skill matrix is changing fast and finding people with the right digital skills remains a challenge. Recruiting new talent isn’t always feasible due to budgets, so consider upskilling/reskilling. Perform a skills-gap analysis of your existing workforce, design training programs based on employees’ interests and potential, motivate employees to take the training, assess effectiveness, and make changes to achieve the training goals.

3) Embrace digital technology. Automating recruiting processes with digital tools improves time-to-hire, reduces costs, and removes biases that happen in manual processes. SMBs can save hundreds of hours by using advanced HR tools at each step — sourcing, pre-employment skills testing, video interviewing, and onboarding. If you buy HR software, look for options that integrate several products in one platform to reduce the cost of purchasing special software.

4) Create a high-performance culture. The work environment drives how people behave and perform, and performance management helps engage and retain employees and improve overall performance. Performance management should be more than appraisals — it should be a culture. To drive it: set clear goals so employees can deliver; focus on each employee’s strengths and allocate work accordingly; identify and develop potential skills; develop a self-learning culture and incentivize new skill learning; and measure the progress of each training initiative and act to improve effectiveness.

5) Focus on employee engagement. Disengaged workers cause massive losses in productivity. To enhance engagement and work satisfaction and decrease turnover: provide the right applications and tools so employees can improve productivity; make employees feel they are climbing the ladder of success through training programs; reward their efforts with monetary and non-monetary benefits; and form committees based on employees’ interests and values, empowering them to build relationships.

Conclusion

Implementing an effective talent management strategy in this digital era can put you ahead of the competition. If growing organizations can connect employees to the purpose of the business, it will drive strong business growth and create a competitive advantage.

How SMBs should prepare for a SuccessFactors implementation — Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2019July 13, 2026 by

Overview

Sabya Mitra

Process standardization is not a BPR (Business Process Reengineering) exercise

Business processes will play a key role in your implementation plan. How much effort you need to put in there will be based on what approach of implementation you embraced in the first place — an integrated approach or a hybrid approach.

Please pay attention to the fact that SAP SuccessFactors is not an old ERP solution where Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was a term used very frequently, and a lot of time and effort used to be spent on it by every organization to mold the ERP solution to behave as a customized solution that mimics your existing business processes. To read more on the difference between “Business Process Standardization” vs. “BPR”, please check our website.

That is not what is needed for SAP SuccessFactors, as it is a solution that is configurable and extensible but not customizable. You can read more on this in our blog titled SAP SuccessFactors for the Small & Midsize Business (SMB) Market.

Build a team

Whether you are implementing one single business process or multiple business processes, please do yourself a favor and build a good and strong team. At a minimum, this team should contain a business process owner for each process, a technical team lead, and your executive sponsor(s).

Involving key stakeholders from the preparatory phase has its share of advantages. The key employees who will be part of the implementation later become your key change agents among their colleagues and reports inside the organization. Information flows more laterally than vertically.

The team starts working — and more importantly starts thinking — about the upcoming implementation, which helps instill a sense of ownership. The core members of the team should be involved with the project from preparatory work through finalizing and signing off on the workbook requirements. They should also be the ones who sign off on the solution once it is built, and they play an important role in UAT before go-live. Call these committed stakeholders “Super users” or by any other name — they are the key resources for your project.

Project sponsors getting involved early means they will be much more aware of the higher-level decisions being made and their impact on the overall organization.

Last but not least, involve business process owners from other non-HR streams who are mainly the receivers of employee data, such as expense, payroll, and finance. They are important people to have on the team on a part-time basis so they are aware of the change coming with SAP SuccessFactors and how it will impact them. People outside HR also play the role of good change agents — so do not ignore them.

What should you do about the existing and future process?

Let us elaborate on what we mean by “Process Standardization.” When you are doing preparatory work, you should first focus on documenting your current HR processes. This is essential when you start discussing the workbooks with your implementation partner. Process maps are very useful to have, but if you don’t have them, do not try to create them from scratch — just document the process flows you have, or what you desire to have in the new system.

Accurately defining or documenting the process helps in designing the data flow between processes and, subsequently, identifying the integration between HR processes (if you have taken a “hybrid” approach) or with other non-HR applications. When documenting the processes, also remember to document any business-specific rules or workflows you would like in the new system. Early creation of these helps prevent longer workbook cycles and easier solution walkthroughs.

A few suggestions to keep in mind while documenting the processes:

Identify and pay attention to known pain points in your current processes.
Document those processes that are working well, and why.
Understand which processes are broken, and why.
Identify all manual processes and document why they are manual — is it because your current system can’t do that, or because there are too many exceptions? The answers will help you find out what you would like to do going forward.
Find out all business rules, associated tasks, workflow requirements, and critical decision points.

Data Migration

While you look at process integration, you should also look at data integration. One common issue we see across industries is that adequate knowledge and information is not available regarding how to migrate data from the legacy system, or any data you are taking out of a SuccessFactors module to another part of a third-party HR system. This has the potential to delay the data migration process during implementation. Connect with the vendor and your technical consultant well in advance and plan this out.

What you need to do will depend on the approach you have taken — integrated or hybrid. The three more data-centric modules in SuccessFactors are Employee Central (Core HR or HRIS), Recruiting, and Learning. As you map the data across the systems (mostly in a hybrid setup), document the data conversions necessary to transfer information into SuccessFactors or vice versa.

Implementing SuccessFactors — or any new system — gives you the opportunity to re-look at your data and find out how clean it is and how much time and effort it will take to correct it. Effective decision-making can only happen if users have confidence in the data in the system. Depending on the volume and state of the data, you can either clean it manually or use one of the many cost-effective ETL tools available to help clean large data sets.

An interface is where two or more separate software products communicate under limited capacity; data is maintained in multiple locations, requiring more administration. You will mostly build interfaces in a hybrid approach. An integration is when two or more products work closely together to combine different functionalities into one product, with data maintained in one location — the case when you go for the SuccessFactors HCM suite. When documenting your processes, also document the existing interfaces between third-party systems and what would be needed in the future state, paying special attention to manual interfaces you would like to convert into automatic ones as part of the new implementation.

DOWNLOAD

The HR business-case template — A one-page cost/benefit structure you can take into your next budget conversation. Download

How SMBs should prepare for a SuccessFactors implementation — Part 3

Posted on June 25, 2019July 13, 2026 by

Overview

Sabya Mitra

User Adaptation and Change Management

We understand that SMB organizations might not have a lot of money or resources to spare for an elaborate change management process. But let us just break it down and understand what is required and why for a successful SuccessFactors implementation.

Most SMB organizations have seen rapid growth in some form or other. The growth could be in the diversity of the workforce in regard to country, types of jobs, region, or even geography. That is why many SMBs have a very diverse culture and a dynamic approach, unlike larger organizations where a lot of work goes into creating a unique work and company culture. This dynamism in the work and company culture is one of the principal reasons that brings about an easy acceptance of new HR systems like SuccessFactors.

Depending on the integrated or hybrid system approach, your user adaptability will be different. But irrespective of the approach you take, make sure everyone in the organization understands why user adaptation is crucial for the success of the project. You cannot achieve true transformation unless and until all your employees embrace the new platform.

We strongly recommend user participation from a cross-section of the company during the preparation phase. The goal is to design the new system keeping the end users in mind. Treat your employees like your customers and start planning a comprehensive change management, communication, and marketing plan for the upcoming project.

Create a core group of change agents drawn from your user community and ask for their input at the preparation planning stage. This group can prove to be your biggest champions. Keep them informed about why the system is being implemented, the benefits of the new way of working, and most importantly, what their role will be during planning and execution.

We always recommend interweaving change management activities with your SuccessFactors project plan. Identify each step of the change management process that can be performed independently of the other project activities without negatively affecting the phase in question. In the earlier segment of the blog we discussed documenting your current and future processes — this is the best time to start thinking about change management. Identify what needs to change in each process area, who will be affected, and what would be required to make them comfortable in the new environment.

Effectively Train your Employees

SuccessFactors is an intuitive system, and the interface is consumer-grade; hence it takes much less time for users to get trained. Having said that, moving from one technology to another still involves a learning curve.

During the preparation phase, start analyzing your training requirements for each module you plan to implement. Training needs analysis is a critical element within your change management strategy and should not be neglected at any cost. SAP SuccessFactors offers training materials to help with this, while partners like Renew HR also offer more customizable training services.

SAP Enable Now is available for the SAP SuccessFactors solution, which allows you to support your end users in adopting software faster and helps them with their daily work. It enables you to create guided tours, context help, and new content directly within the application. Additionally, existing formal and informal learning content can easily be offered directly within the application in a context-sensitive way.

The challenge with most organizations using a digital HR transformation strategy is how to encourage employees to fully utilize the new SuccessFactors system and be self-reliant for their process needs. The true business case of value and cost savings can only be achieved through more effective use of the system. The quality and ease of access to training and help resources is the key to success when implementing any module of SuccessFactors.

Business Insights and HR Analytics

One of the main benefits of a SuccessFactors-led digital HR transformation is to encourage and support managerial decision-making.

SAP SuccessFactors out-of-the-box provides plenty of useful HR dashboards, high-level reports, and real-time data related to the most critical measures of HR success. By linking the data on the dashboard to key organizational metrics, managers can extract essential insights into the business that tie HR outcomes to corporate goals.

Based on the approach you take to implement SAP SuccessFactors modules (including a hybrid approach), you may also need to consider true HR analytics that combine data from all sources. Modern data warehousing, data mining, and analytics products provide a centralized repository of selected HR data managed separately from live data.

To take advantage of HR analytics and reporting, a lot of preparation is required in the form of building KPIs, taking measures, and considering dashboard requirements. We have seen from experience that these activities are very time-consuming and need dedicated involvement from stakeholders before the start of the implementation. Big data and HR analytics are changing the way organizations do business; as the use of technology to support HR decision-making continues to evolve, organizations must take advantage of these tools to enhance HR effectiveness. You can also read our blog on big-data HR analytics.

In Conclusion

We have discussed various aspects of project preparation and planning that are essential to your success. Remember that cloud implementations are much shorter in duration compared to on-premise implementations; hence a lot of project-related activities that used to happen during the implementation now occur during the preparatory planning phase. There are SuccessFactors partners like Renew HR who provide services to prepare you for your upcoming projects.

How SMB organizations prepare for SuccessFactors Implementation – Part 1

Posted on April 16, 2019July 13, 2026 by

A journey, not a destination

SuccessFactors SAP implementations, just like HR transformation, are a journey, not a destination, and the start and end, unfortunately, don’t happen with the beginning and end of the project implementation.

You start preparing for a SuccessFactors project immediately after you sign the contract with SAP.

We recommend that you consider taking these steps before you sit down with your SuccessFactors implementation partner; they will help prepare you for a successful implementation. Careful preparation and planning will lower implementation costs, reduce your risks, and prevent delays.

Future planning
Adapt to the SuccessFactors process
Look at the entire HR ecosystem and beyond

Why preparation is required for a SuccessFactors implementation

Before you begin, ask yourself a few diagnostic questions — the same ones covered in our HR Health Check & Roadmap piece: do you understand your current-state processes well enough to describe them to an implementation partner? Do you know which parts of your process are policy versus habit? Have you quantified what success looks like? Do you have executive sponsorship secured?

When to start the preparatory work?

For an SMB, expect 3–6 weeks of preparation per module. Employee Central and Recruiting typically need more time than smaller point modules, since they touch the most current-state process and data.

Technology-enabled HR transformation

SuccessFactors is not just a system swap — it is the technology layer of a broader HR transformation. Preparation work should be framed that way from the outset, not as an IT project with HR as a stakeholder.

All-integrated solution within SuccessFactors, or a “hybrid” approach?

With SAP SuccessFactors, unlike other HR solutions in the market, you have multiple options. Although it is possible to implement everything at once using the integrated solution approach, you can also decide to go for a “hybrid approach.” Each of these approaches has its share of strengths and weaknesses that must be considered when preparing for a project. Based on the approach you choose, your project preparation can be different — so weigh the strengths against the weaknesses for your situation before you commit.

Packaged solutions make happy customers successful

Posted on December 19, 2018 by

Overview

Sabya Mitra

Packaged Solutions Make Happy Customers: Happy Customers Make Successful Partners

When Sabya Mitra founded SAP partner Renew HR in 2016, he knew he wanted to focus the business on SMB clients and on cloud solutions since the two seemed a perfect match.

“I always thought the large enterprises have the money to get the best solutions they want, but because they didn’t have the resources to get a world-class solution, SMBs always needed to sacrifice. Cloud helped them reach there; it has leveled the playing field,” Mitra said.

The problem was that while SMBs could do cloud, they didn’t necessarily flock to SAP at the time, which was seen by many smaller companies as too expensive and too big. Renew HR executives studied competitive HR solutions, not only the technologies but also how those companies went to market. They surmised that to compete with SAP SuccessFactors’ competitors, they would need something that was cost-effective, quick to implement, and solved problems that SMBs were facing. Packaged solutions fit the bill.

“For the last three years, we were telling companies that they could go with the world-class SAP SuccessFactors software with an affordable budget. We found a way to bundle the cost of the application, implementation, and scope into a package that could go live in 8 to 10 weeks. Initially, they didn’t believe us, but we did it,” Mitra said. “We put everything in front of them and told them they wouldn’t have to pay for anything that was not right in front of them during the sales cycle.”

Initially, customers were hesitant to believe him, feeding off the perception of SAP being an enterprise-only software company. But Renew HR’s strategy combined with its ability to understand customer needs helped the company build several packaged solutions to bring to market. Today, Renew HR has four branded SAP qualified partner-packaged solutions.

“We tell them what we can do for them now—and what we can do for them when they grow to 1,000+ employees in the future. Our solutions and approach allow them to start where they want to start and then expand,” Mitra said. “We tell them that they’re using the same software that an American Airlines or Microsoft is using. You also have the same bells and whistles that they have. But building off a cloud platform allows us to make it more affordable.”

One prospect might want to start with SAP SuccessFactors Performance and Goals, while another wants to start with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. The key, Mitra said, is to achieve one goal at a time, in small chunks that are easier for a customer to consume. “They may not have a 360-degree Performance appraisal now, but next year they can. If they need more as they grow, we tell them this is what it’s going to cost. That visibility and predictability is extremely valuable to a growing business.”

Customers Don’t Like Surprises

The worst thing a partner can do is to not tell the whole truth to a customer, Mitra said. Eventually, the truth comes out, and you are likely to lose either their respect or the trust you’ve built with the customer, or worse, the customer itself, he said.

“We try to keep it simple. We tell people exactly what they will get, the time it takes, and the cost associated with it,” he said.

That straightforward approach has translated to more wins, but also quicker close rates, Mitra said. “One example, we only had two calls. On the first, we presented the solution. On the second, we did a demo, negotiated the cost and arrived at a number,” he said.

“If you get to a third or fourth round, you’ve lost the deal. They’re talking to someone else. You have to make sure they see a complete picture in the first meeting—how much it costs, how much time you’ll spend on it, how much time they’ll spend on it, what type of resources that they will need.”

In a traditional sales cycle, you would do discovery and analysis and then customers wouldn’t get back to you for a month or two. The faster you can answer all their questions, the less likely they are comparing your solution to other software vendors or trying to match a price, Mitra said.

“We don’t want to compete on price. We want to compete on value. If you tell them they’re getting a solution that they can still use when they get to 500 or 1,000+ employees, that’s great news for them.”

Packaged solutions have helped open SMB doors to SAP, but they’ve also helped open technology-enabled HR transformation doors to SMBs, Mitra said.

“They could never afford a complete HR solution back in the day. And enterprise-grade software? Out of the question,” Mitra said. “The market is challenging. But if we do it well, we can penetrate that market. We have done everything we can to help the SMB customers achieve their HR transformation goals. I’m of the belief that if you try to understand their problem and pain points and come out with a solution which helps them in a short period of time, you make your customers happy and then you are happy. Packaged solutions make us happy.”

For a complete list of SAP Qualified Partner Packaged Solutions please visit SAP Partner Package Finder.

SAP SuccessFactors for the SMB market — Part 2

Posted on December 5, 2018July 13, 2026 by

Overview

Sabya Mitra

Increase user adaptability with a great user experience

One of the main objectives of HR Transformation is to improve the effectiveness of the process — and processes can only be effective if a number of people use them. We have seen in the past that great processes remain largely underutilized because wider user adaptation hasn’t happened.

For SMB organizations, it is essential that they have great user acceptance, and that the process or product they are using is highly adaptable without much user training and change management effort. These organizations simply don’t have those additional dollars to spend here.

Extensibility

You may have often heard that cloud-based solutions are configurable but not customizable. Customization is a feature, extension, or modification of a software feature that requires custom coding and/or some form of implementation. A configuration is where you use native tools in the system to change its behavior or characteristics.

With the advent of SaaS/cloud-based products, there has been a far-reaching and important shift in how we fundamentally think about purchased software. Purchased software tends to be based on the industry’s best practices and is suitable for very large to very small companies. SAP SuccessFactors is a SaaS product and is highly configurable to fit your business-specific requirements.

Not all functionality can be delivered out-of-the-box, and most innovations aren’t delivered through a single vendor. Customers also need to evolve with the changing and demanding needs of their business. Hence SAP SuccessFactors has taken extensibility — a core design principle in software development — very seriously. Extensibility enables customers to deliver new and differentiating capabilities in their organizations.

The Metadata Framework (which we also refer to as MDF) is SAP SuccessFactors’ robust extensibility framework that enables customers to extend HR cloud functionality and create company-specific objects that support their unique business processes, without the need to code. Often, a single screen, field, or UI — such as requesting time off, managing pay structures, or company assets — can be a differentiating business process in an organization. The Metadata Framework enables customers to deliver differentiating capabilities without extensive customization or integration with third-party applications. This also helps SMB organizations future-proof their HR solution.

Integration – Why should you worry about it?

As we discuss why flexibility and extensibility are important for all SMB organizations looking for their next HR system, it is crucial that the solution they purchase coexists with their existing and future Core HR, Talent, Finance, or any other internal or external systems. We have also discussed an organization’s ability to purchase and deploy SAP SuccessFactors as per their business needs (start anywhere, go everywhere), so there is no denying that integration in the cloud world is crucial for business continuity and success.

The ultimate goal of cloud integration is to avoid silos among processes and systems within the organization. Users should be able to access and manage applications, data, services, and systems seamlessly across the organization. Cloud integration also saves a lot of maintenance hours for your IT team.

As a customer, you have multiple choices. You can use the “Integration Center (IC),” a functionality offered by SAP SuccessFactors that comes with the product, or use SAP Cloud Platform Integration (SCI), which is also complimentary when you purchase Employee Central (SuccessFactors Core HR or HRIS). The Integration Center enables HR business analysts to build, run, schedule, and monitor simple file-based inbound and outbound integrations quickly and easily through a guided workflow, with predefined templates available and the ability to create your own.

Depending on the size of the organization and the type of business or industry, they may need a more robust and sophisticated integration platform such as SAP Cloud Platform Integration (SCI). SCI lets you easily exchange data in real time between cloud apps, third-party applications, and on-premises solutions. Key benefits include:

Accessing a deep catalog of integration flows.
Integrating both processes and data through unified technology engineered for the cloud.
An integration service that is secure, reliable, and delivered and managed by SAP in SAP’s secure data centers across the globe.
Lower TCO with an affordable, pay-as-you-go function.

Cloud integration, or integration platform as a service (iPaaS), is not restricted to only IC or SCI — you also have a wide choice of third-party integration tools, such as MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Dell Boomi, IBM App Connect, Cleo Integration Cloud, and Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services. We recommend SAP’s tools, as a lot of investment has been made to make them incorporate all you need in an inbound or outbound integration from SAP SuccessFactors; they also offer pre-built templates, which save costs and help keep the implementation cost down.

Superior and large partner community

Unlike its competitors, SAP’s strategy is to go to market exclusively with its partners, based on market, product expertise, and industry knowledge. Hence the partner ecosystem is extremely important to them, and the value and knowledge these partners have about specific industries is the key to success in the SMB market.

You have a choice of many SAP SuccessFactors partners who are completely focused and dedicated to the SMB market. The more extensive selection of partners gives you the ability to choose the right one for your business, and it makes partner offerings very competitive. SAP SuccessFactors has more partners in almost all geographies compared to its competitors.

Data-based decision-making with SAP Analytics Cloud

Most SMB organizations decide to implement an HR system when their employee base grows, they add locations, or the business gets more complicated. SAP SuccessFactors offers embedded insights and analytics out of the box, with the option of using the powerful all-in-one (BI, planning, and predictive) SAP Analytics Cloud. This offers SMB organizations a means to get a higher level of business analytics than previously available. For more, see our blog on big-data HR analytics, which highlights the advantages of SAP Analytics Cloud for SMB customers.

Post-implementation support

In the world of cloud computing, the HR transformation journey does not start and stop with the implementation process; it continues through the life cycle of HR processes throughout the year. SAP SuccessFactors offers four quarterly updates, which more often than not bring market-leading innovations — the distinctive advantage cloud software has over on-premise software. Most importantly, everything comes as part of your subscription cost, so SMB organizations can enjoy the benefits of SAP’s R&D investments.

It comes with a big challenge: how to maintain the system post go-live. SMB organizations typically don’t have a large IT team, so most support has to be managed by business users or administrators themselves. SAP SuccessFactors offers two types of support — Enterprise Support, cloud editions (foundational engagement support with a focus on customer interaction and issue resolution), and SAP Preferred Care (billable), an add-on to SAP Enterprise Support. These include strategic guidance and customer-specific best practices to help drive user adoption and value realization. There are also regional and national user groups and annual SuccessConnect events, and SAP partners offer innovative, affordable support options that can coexist with what SAP offers and what the client has internally.

A great user experience drives adoption

This is where a great UI can help, with distinguishable and predictable actions — crucial when offering a great product experience. A great UI’s job is to simplify things so users can easily interact with the product. As users become more acquainted and become regular users, they begin to trust the product more and use it more willingly. The end goal is to provide users with a consumer-like UI that needs no explanation.

SAP SuccessFactors’ design-thinking-based approach enables you to deliver an exceptional experience to all your people, no matter who they are or where they work. Its user-focused design is people-centric (built around how people best engage with technology across mobile and web), flexible (intelligent and adaptable to each of your people), and holistic and connected (continuous, connected, and tied to key business outcomes). SAP SuccessFactors leverages user research, partnership with consumer brands such as Apple, and powerful SAP technologies infused across the suite to help ensure your people’s experiences are at the heart of your business transformation.

Digital buying experience

Large enterprise customers with complex requirements, previous enterprise buying experience, larger teams, and bigger pockets are used to a long, drawn-out process of buying HR software. The same is not true for SMB organizations — they want the digital buying process to be faster, cheaper, and better.

SAP has streamlined its digital buying experience to match something we are all familiar with: going on Amazon and purchasing what we want, when we want it. With SAP’s store and SAP App Center, business users can buy existing and new digital technology and services on their own — all without the help of SAP or one of its partners. The SAP App Center provides customers with real-time access to nearly 1,500 innovative partner solutions that complement and extend their SAP solutions, enabling digital transformation. App Center customers can buy solutions directly from partners and centrally manage purchases, billing, and vendor communications.

SAP SuccessFactors for the SMB market — Part 1

Posted on November 8, 2018 by

Overview

Sabya Mitra

How do we define a small and midsize business (SMB)?

It is crucial that before we start our exploration of HR on cloud and its applicability for SMBs, we first have a common understanding of what we consider a small and midsize business (SMB).

Gartner defines SMBs by the number of employees and the amount of annual revenue they have. The attribute used most often is the organization’s employees. Small businesses are usually defined as organizations with fewer than 100 employees, while midsize enterprises are those having 100 to 999 employees. The second most popular attribute used to define the SMB market is annual revenue. Small business is usually defined as organizations with less than $50 million in annual revenue; a midsize enterprise is defined as organizations that make more than $50 million but less than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Do SMBs face similar HR challenges as large enterprises?

SMB enterprises have different types of HR and HRIS challenges compared to large enterprises. This is due to their size, lack of resources (number and types of resources, turnover), the skill set of resources, and above all, the lack of budget.

Most SMBs would have started off being very small. They would have picked various off-the-shelf, disjointed software along their journey. Hence it becomes a real challenge for these organizations to determine the right HR software to run HR and talent management processes.

These organizations need an HR system that is best in class, easy to implement, flexible, and able to grow with the organization — and we should add affordable and easy-to-maintain to the mix as well. Unlike other ERPs, where you have various solutions for different sizes of organizations, HR on cloud (SAP SuccessFactors) fits a small organization with 50 employees as easily as it would a large organization with more than 200k employees.

A growing presence in the SMB HR-on-cloud market

Although SAP is known as the provider of ERP systems that cater to vast global enterprises, SAP SuccessFactors is making its presence felt in the crowded SMB HR-on-cloud market as well.

SuccessFactors has been around for more than 15 years in the talent management space. SAP acquired the software in 2011, and since then it has become the fastest-growing cloud product within SAP’s wide range of cloud products and services. As of today, it has 6500+ customers across the globe.

According to SAP, SMBs make up 80% of the company’s customer base. That is also the place in the market that offers the most greenfield opportunities and is growing rapidly compared to the large enterprise space. SAP is committed to packaging and pricing SAP SuccessFactors to suit the SMB market. Finally, with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP proves that there is undoubtedly an HR system that is the right one for every organization.

10 reasons SAP SuccessFactors is the best HR-on-cloud software for SMBs

In the earlier part of the blog, we discussed the market situation and where SAP SuccessFactors falls in the scheme of things. But as an SMB customer, all you would like to know is how this can help you, how much time it will take to implement, how much training is required, the flexibility of the tool, support, cost, and other such aspects. Below are the compelling reasons to consider SAP SuccessFactors for your business.

Size Does Matter

In 2017, SAP’s revenue amounted to about 23.5 billion euros — a significantly large amount compared to its competitors in the SMB marketplace. Why does that matter? It matters because SAP has significant leverage over its HR-on-cloud competitors in regard to the R&D dollars invested in SAP SuccessFactors products. They can do so not only because they have more revenue but also because they sell the same software for the large enterprise market. So as an SMB enterprise, you are taking advantage of this investment coming your way at a fraction of the cost.

Today you may or may not care about the underlying technology. Still, as you grow, it becomes increasingly important that the underlying technology is stable, safe, reliable, and scalable. One such example is the use of the in-memory database HANA in SAP SuccessFactors — the same database used by multi-billion-dollar organizations to run their entire business globally. So upfront, you know you are in safe hands. SAP’s purchases like Fieldglass and Concur enhance the ability for your organization to grow in the future and still use these products seamlessly within the SAP ecosystem. Another aspect worth highlighting is the embedded HR analytics: SAP Analytics Cloud is an enterprise-grade analytics tool capable of business intelligence, business planning, and predictive analytics, available to you for reporting purposes.

Global Presence and Compliance

In today’s business climate, rapid change is inevitable. Throughout various business changes and globalization, organizations are constantly under pressure to be compliant. When we talk about HR compliance, there are four main key areas: Payroll, Benefits, Risk & Safety, and Recruiting.

The regulatory landscape has changed, with an increasing number of workforce laws, regulations, and agency rules applying to labor forces around the globe. SAP has issued a significant number of regulatory changes across the more than 90 countries it actively monitors. Having tracked directly related core-HR legal changes throughout the world, SAP has seen a 22% increase over the last four years. These changes span wage-and-hour regulations, a multitude of reporting requirements, and anti-discrimination and union laws and amendments.

This surge in regulation has surpassed the ability of most SMB organizations to track, manage, and comply using their existing resources. The cost of non-compliance is too high a price for an organization’s reputation and finances. Hence you need an HR-on-cloud system that comes fully compliant out of the box. SAP SuccessFactors’ out-of-the-box solution complies with existing regulations as well as international laws like GDPR and Turkey’s data protection law, helping SMB organizations save cost and mitigate the risk of non-compliance.

Flexibility – Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere

What SMBs most want is not a lot of features and functionalities but a way to grow their business by leveraging new capabilities while minimizing risk. The mantra here is that digital HR transformation doesn’t happen in a day but occurs at the organization’s own pace and ability. So there is no ripping and replacing of existing software and infrastructure or retraining of staff, but rather the replacement of what is needed, when it is needed. You are the boss, and it is your call. This is one significant difference between SAP SuccessFactors and its competitors: SuccessFactors allows you to start anywhere (where there is an immediate need) and go everywhere (grow with the business).

SAP SuccessFactors’ phenomenal growth has been primarily spurred because it has a set of comprehensive tools that appeal to a broad set of HR functions from hire to retire, and because of its ability to address the HR needs of a variety of industries within the same software. This distinguishes SAP SuccessFactors from competitors that focus on one HR function like Core HR or Talent Acquisition. A large number of partners are also adding various extensions to the standard product, including apps readily available in the SAP App Center for purchase, with out-of-the-box integration with the core SAP SuccessFactors product.