Job Profile Builder: An Introduction

Lately, in a variety of customer engagements for various SAP SuccessFactors modules, I’ve had to bring up the topic of the Job Profile Builder. As a relatively new feature that touches every module, it’s really no wonder! But there’s still a lot of customers who aren’t quite familiar with it. This blog should give you an understanding of what the Job Profile builder is, why you would want to use it, and an overview of what it takes to go about setting it up.

What is the Job Profile Builder?

The Job Profile Builder is an important SuccessFactors Platform feature that enables customers to build and organize a catalog of well-formed jobs. So what exactly is a “job”? If you are familiar with position management in HRIS systems, you’ll know to traditionally think of positions as a seat. One person sites in one seat (I know there’s some exceptions, but let’t not get complicated here). Jobs are an abstraction above positions. So where there might be a Maintenance Tech I position who services a building in San Francisco, there’s also a Maintenance Tech I position in Seattle that does the same thing but is a unique instantiation of a position from the San Francisco position. The job describes the common tasks, required skills, education, & competencies, etc. for these positions. If you’d like an idea of what kinds of information companies associate with a job regardless of the system they use, Mercer has a great article here.

What Benefit Does it Provide?

Quite a few benefits are to be had with a well maintained job catalog. From a business process perspective, it will help you categorize and regulate your positions. For example, standardizing pay bands, required competency levels, government classifications, etc. On the Successfactors side, the Job Profile Builder integrates across all modules and can greatly reduce redundant data entry while helping facilitate the business process benefits. The following integrations are available with the job profile builder:

• Employee Central: Direct association with positions in Position Management
• Performance Management: Automatic Assignment of Competencies
• Succession Management: Successor suggestions based on competency assessments
• Compensation: Derive compa-ratio based on link with job grade
• Recruiting: Automatic population of job posting description from job profile
• Career Development: Competencies pulled into Career Worksheet and Career Paths showing job progression
• Workforce Analytics: Planning based on required job Competencies
• LMS: Assigning learning content based on job

In the example screenshot below, we can see how the recruiting integration automatically pulls the job description from the job profile for internal and external requisition postings. This can save your recruiters a great amount of time having to re-type job descriptions for each posting.

How does Job Profile Builder work?

There are 3 major components and corresponding configuration screens of the Job Profile builder:

Job Profile Templates: define what types of content go on a profile and where and how they are presented.  E.g. you might have physical requirements for some types of roles but not for others. It is basically the layout of what the profile will look like. An example is shown below.  For more info see the link here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/70097a1a469d47a0ae08809e4a240f98/2005/en-US/0ac7427e15cc467eb9a50178c06b53ed.html

Job Profile Content: Define the options (e.g. drop-downs) that show on the profile.  For example what skills or competencies or education types will exist in the system that can be placed on a profile. An example of configuring what degree types will exist for selection in creating a job profile in the system is shown below. There’s also a lot of helpful pre-built content from SAP available for download from the SuccessStore that pops up as you build your content.  For more info, see the link here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/70097a1a469d47a0ae08809e4a240f98/2005/en-US/99856fa2c4944001ab5991e92c9454eb.html

Job Roles: Roles are what you build the profile around.  They represent a specific set of skills, competencies, description, etc.  Roles can be associated with job codes which in turn associate to positions. Job roles can also be grouped into similar categories called Job Families.  You setup the Job roles within the Job Profile Content screen. See the example below. For more info, see the link here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/70097a1a469d47a0ae08809e4a240f98/2005/en-US/aa2d3d5b1027403bbcffa8b29f70196d.html

This still doesn’t tell us what the Job profile is….well, when you create a Job Profile you are associating it to a specific Job Role and filling in a specific template with the specific content relevant for that role. So to answer the question of what is a Job Profile?–It is the marriage of these 3 components. You can see in the screenshot below where a specific template is being filled in with the content we have setup in the system to define a particular role.

How does the Job Profile Integrate with Employee Central Position Management?

You will notice when you start creating a Job Profile, there’s a screen asking you to associate the profile with a Job Role:

When you edit roles, the system will ask you to map Job Codes. Those Job codes sit between the job Role and the Positions. Thus while there’s a 1:1 relationship between the Profile and the Role, there can be many codes associated to a role. Since there’s many codes across many positions, thus there are many positions that can be associated to one job role and profile.

This provides us with many benefits! For example, whenever you create a requisition from a position with an associated Job Profile, the requisition will automatically pull in the Job Profile as well and activate this integration seamlessly!

Furthermore, the Job Profile builder can utilize Employee Central workflows as well! This can be beneficial as you manage you job catalog as a variety of resources all using the profiles across the modules may want to make edits. In the screenshot below we can see when one of these interested parties modifies the Job Profile it will trigger a workflow.

Conclusion

Hopefully you now have a good understanding of the Job Profile Builder and are excited to start using it! Setting up a job catalog can be a tremendous undertaking, but hopefully now that you understand how the tool works, it can make the task a little easier. If you have an existing job catalog you’d like to import, there are also import screens available for you. As I mentioned before, there’s also a lot of helpful pre-built content available from the SuccessStore.

For more information about the Job Profile Builder and other talent management modules in SAP SuccessFactors, check out our book here!

Do you need help with integrating or setting up the Job Profile Builder? Contact us at: info@worklogix.com