Integration Center within SAP SuccessFactors allows customers to read from and write to SAP SuccessFactors data using common integration methods and messaging protocols. It has many recruiting uses for integration with services such as background check vendors but can do so much more…
Recruiting implementation projects often require things from the client that are on the surface not possible or are officially not possible. For me this is a fun challenge, sometimes still resulting in a frustrating dead end. Oh well. Below are some examples of challenges I’ve faced in recruiting and how to overcome them.
Historical Employee Applications
Data Migration
Clients sometimes want to bring existing employee applications into SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. This is not supported in the standard data migration tool.
Solution
Import flat files into Integration Center. Note that the employee identifier userid has to be first exported from SuccessFactors and matched to the old applications.
Historical Application Questions
Data Migration
Other recruiting solutions have an equivalent of requisition-specific questions using questionnaire libraries. This can be valuable pre-screening information that clients want to migrate.
Solution
Questions need to first be imported against the migrated requisition. Then questions and answers can be imported for applications.
Fix Data Issues
Data Correction
Sometimes during migration or even in live systems incorrect data can be created for multiple candidates.
Solution
The offending candidate or application data can be exported to flat file and a find and replace can be done to correct data. The data is then reimported to correct the mistakes.
Employee Resumes
Data Migration
Migration of internal candidates is not supported in standard migration.
Solution
Documents can be imported and attached to candidate profiles using Integration Center. The same for any candidate data such as education, work history.
Be careful to not overwrite anything that is mapped to the Employee Profile.
Some Words of Caution
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should AND always test, test, test.
- You may run into issues extracting the data from your legacy system, though it’s often in the contract that they must provide one or more extract and what the terms of that extract are. This is the same issue for standard data migration.
- Test extensively in the test system as early as possible. It’s also a good idea to start with a smaller batch of data in production.
- The Integration Center import into SuccessFactors still obeys the laws of required fields being required. It’s not a sneaky workaround.
- The application question import is particularly tricky and will require some Excel mapping.
Example Of Mass Requisition Updates
I recently found an SAP Knowledge Base Article (KBA) on mass updating of requisitions that ties in perfectly with this post. You can find it here.
