Introduction
The Job Profile Builder is a valuable tool that helps companies categorize their positions into groups of jobs. Each job profile contains descriptions of what functions that job performs, qualifications needed to perform the job, etc. For more information on the Job Profile Builder in general, see our article Job Profile Builder: An Introduction.
In this article, we go into further detail on how to catalog skills within job profiles. As a company explores what jobs to create and how to catalog their jobs, one of the most important distinguishing characteristics to identify those jobs are the skills and qualifications needed for the job.
Adding Skills in Manage Job Profile Content
The list of available skills for jobs in SAP SuccessFactors are defined in the “Manage Job Profile Content” screen (just type “Manage Job Profile Content” in the search bar and if you have admin access and the screen name will come up for you to select). You can see in the screenshot below the list of available types of content SAP allows you to create slot populate on a job profile.
You can edit the list of available items within each of the categories shown above. Some of these categories are pretty obvious on how to populate with options. For example “Education – Degree” and “Education – Major” would pretty obviously contain lists of degrees and majors that are relevant to the company. The same can be said for certifications and interview questions. Interview questions you create here will show to recruiters. Certifications is where you would list of the certifications relevant to your company’s industry. However, some of these other items can be a little more difficult to understand. A prime examples is “Skill”. This is a very broad term. So how do we go about creating a list of available skills?
If you click “Skill” from the drop down shown above, you will see a list of the skills currently cataloged in your system as shown below.
Now, we will take a look at how to add a skill from the library as a demonstration of what makes for a good skill in the SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder. From the screen shown above, we can click the “Add Skills from SuccessStore” link. The screen will update as shown below.
There are two ways to browse through the catalog of skills. The first way shown above is through families and roles. This method associates the skills to a particular role within the standard SuccessStore catalog. You can learn more about job families and roles in Job Profile Builder: An Introduction. We recommend that if you want to add skills for a standard role within the catalog, that you add them from the “Set up Families and Roles” screen instead as shown below. This will actually add the role and family itself along with the skills instead of just the skill with no role.
The second way to add skills is shown below is to browse through skills that are not assigned to a particular job role but are organized through categories and groups by choosing “Unassigned Skills Browsed by Category” in the drop down in the upper left corner of the screen. You can simply think of categories and groups as two levels of organization to catalog your skills: categories being the highest level which contain groups and groups containing the individual skills. To choose a skill, click a category and then a group, and then click the name of skill(s) you want to add and click “add” as shown below. It might seem a little confusing as to why SAP created both a role taxonomy and a skill category taxonomy to search through skills, but when you consider that not everyone uses the standard roles library from the SuccessStore it makes sense to have another way to categorize skills.
When you return to the main screen as shown below, you will see the skill added to your local catalog of skills. You can then click the gear icon and choose “Edit” to look at the specific contents of the skill.
Here in the “Edit: Skill” screen shown below you can see all the predefined content for the skill from the SuccessStore. SAP SuccessFactors skills consist of a skill name, a library name, a category, and a group to help organize the skill into a taxonomy. Getting into the detail of the specific skill, we see the definition and then 5 different proficiency levels (1 being the most basic and 5 being the most advanced – this scale is pre-set and cannot be changed). Looking at the fields and values on this screen, you can start to get an idea of how skills can be useful to define exactly what skills are required and at what specific level and what criteria define that level when interviewing someone for a job posting or guiding someone towards promotion or working with someone to remediate job performance. Now that you have a good understanding of what a skill looks like, you can continue to add or edit skills in the screen shown above. To add a skill from scratch, click the “Create Skill” link in the upper right corner of the screen. This will also take you to the screen shown below but with all the fields blank.
Adding Skills to Job Profiles
Once we have a list of skills defined, we can start to add them to our individual job profiles (or if you downloaded the predefined skills when you downloaded the SuccessStore job family and role, the skill will already be there when you create the profile). For info on how to create a job profile see Job Profile Builder: An Introduction. You can see in the screenshot below, when we look at an existing job profile or create a new one in the “Manage Job Profiles” screen, the skills show up in the area specified for Skills in the job profile template. You can mouse over the skills section to add or edit skills. For each skill added you will also need to specify the proficiency level expected for the job. So for example we have added the “Account Manager” role and all associated skills to our library in one of our earlier screenshots. When we create a new profile for the role, the skill “Account Management” is automatically added at level 3 proficiency, “Building and Managing Teams” at level 3, etc.
Conclusion
By now you should have a good understanding of what Job Profile Builder Skills are and how to create them on your own, pull standard skills from the SuccessStore library, and add them to a profile. With some good examples shown here and available on the SuccessStore, you should be able to start building your own library of skills specific to your company needs and associate them to your job profiles and roles. Adding these skills can be valuable for recruiters looking for guidance on what to look for in a candidate, or for employees looking to develop themselves for their next role.
For more information on the job profile builder and other talent management modules, check out our book here!
Do you need help setting up your Job Profile Builder? Contact us at info@worklogix.com.
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