What I Like about SuccessFactors b1311 - Recruiting Management

[Former Member]

*** My first blog post on SCN. Originally posted at http://blog.ingramtalent.com/ and re-posting here to more feedback and discussion ***

Every three months, SuccessFactors releases a build with new enhancements and features. The nomenclature is bYYMM = build/year/month, so this release is b1311 (build November 2013). b1311 will be pushed to client systems on November 15, but is made available in demo systems a week early. I took advantage of this to try out some of the new features. This post is not meant to be an exhaustive explanation of new recruiting features and enhancements in b1311 of SuccessFactors. I’ll focus on just a few.

Resume Parsing – super simple to set up, with no separate license fees. All you need to do is turn the feature on and map the standard fields from your recruiting instance to those of the resume parsing service. No complex tools or knowledge required. Contact information is automatically mapped and you can map the standard background elements of Work Experience, Education, Languages, Certifications and Professional Memberships. Figure 1 below shows configuration for resume parsing field mapping.

Figure 1: Mapping of fields for resume parsing

Managing recruiting templates in Admin Tools (beta).  Up to now, customers have had to engage with professional services for any edits to templates used in recruiting, e.g. requisitions, offers, the candidate profile and application forms. Moving this to Admin Tools is a huge plus for customers, as they won’t have to rely so heavily on professional services post go-live to tweak the templates they use. This feature is still in beta and should be released more widely once there is more robust documentation and it's been implemented by a few select customers.

Enhanced branding for external career sites. Customers will now be able to use the theme manager to create and apply multiple brands across external career sites and microsites. Customers have long asked for the ability to tailor the branding of the external career sites and now it will be possible – change the colors, fonts, logos, etc. to have a more seamless transition from the corporate website to the career site. The theme even carries over to private postings. Integration to Recruiting Marketing should mean that candidates navigating from Recruiting Marketing (RMK) career site to Recruiting Management would have no change in theme or branding. This will allow a seamless branding experience.

Figure 2: External career site before theme branding

Although the instructions seem simple, I ran into issues in my demo instance setting this up. The top-level navigation disappeared, and my navigation changes did not transfer. Promising functionality and I’m sure they’ll work out the kinks.

Figure 3: Theme manager for defining career site themes. Note the custom navigation colors

Figure 4: External career site after theme branding – only background image rendered properly

Automation enhancements. A couple of nice enhancements this release include the ability to automatically close job requisitions once all openings on the requisition have been filled as well as the ability to disposition a hired candidate on all other requisitions when a job requisition is closed.

Other enhancements. A number of email tokens have been added, including attachment tokens for a candidate’s cover letter and resume, as well as new standard email tokens, like career site URL, company name and login URL. This will make it easier to define standard emails and require less manual editing.

Onboarding. Although not directly recruiting, SuccessFactors Onboarding now has direct integration to send new hire data to Employee Central, thus closing the process loop between Recruiting -> Onboarding -> Employee Central for companies using Onboarding and Recruiting. Note: If you are not using SuccessFactors Onboarding, you can still send new hire data directly from Recruiting to Employee Central.

Summary: While some of these features may be catch-up to other recruiting solutions, it shows that there is constant ongoing innovation with SuccessFactors Recruiting and that they truly listen to customers.