SAP SuccessFactors Platform H1 2022 Release Updates

Photo by Kyle Tran on Unsplash

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the first half of 2022.

Preview release was on April 15 and production will be released May 20. You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog.

For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new in the 1H 2022 Platform release below.

Overview

SAP continues to invest in numerous updates into the platform, topping most of the other modules for the past few releases. Due to the large number of updates (89 in this release!), we’ve highlighted only some of the most significant changes below. We’ve categorized the updates based on who the affected audience for each change: User Experience Updates, Admin Updates, and System Updates.

User Experience

SAP continues to remind customers that the Universal release of the Latest Homepage will be in June 3rd for preview and June 24th for production environments. If you haven’t reviewed the changes and opted-in, you should do so now and plan your communication strategy so your users aren’t caught wondering why their homepage changed!

SAP also continues to add more quick actions to the latest homepage, thus increase its usefulness as a quick way to access needed areas of the system without having to click through navigation. The actions added include “Candidate Talent Pools”, “Learning Administration”, “Mobile Activation”, “View Company Documents”, and “View Tile Reports”. The homepage also now allows for grouping of custom cards within the Organizational Updates section as seen in the screenshot below:

Screenshot of Card Groupings within the Organizational Updates Section

You can also see an example of the new half sized custom cards in the screenshot above.

There are also various updates to the opportunity marketplace including allowing Assignment offer approvals, allowing assignment owners to see descriptions of capabilities including proficiency levels when creating assignments and applicants to see their own capability details. The capability picker also got updates you can read about in our blog here: https://worklogix.blog/2022/04/17/sap-successfactors-1h-2022-whats-new-in-succession-and-career-development/

The org chart also got a nice update where you can change the order of direct reports below a manager. Check out the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/780a0273693342c79ded9930b9057110.html

You can also now turn on a data privacy consent form for uploading photos that is shown to users as in the example screenshot below:

Screenshot of data privacy consent message for employee photos

Also related to photos- you can now have just one photo for a person on global assignment with multiple employments.

After many years of service, quickcards have finally got an upgrade across the system. This gives a better look and feel consistent across the platform. An example is shown below:

Updated Quickcard

Admin Updates

Do you still love to use the old admin page like me? I’m sorry to say the nostalgic use of the OneAdmin page will end on May 20th this year. Time to start using the NextGen admin page.

SAP also continues to increase the list of jobs available to monitor in the Scheduled Job Manager. You can check out the list of jobs here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/55e3deb65bf14190b102ff7ad1f803fc.html

Are you an admin that loves unstucking stuck workflows or resolving HR data issues? You might be interested in the new custom fields you can add to admin alerts! Check out the list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/055e9cd78d2543d283fd556cbca2132d.html You can also now see the name of the current approver for stalled workflows within admin alerts.

If you are a security or compliance admin, you’ll be happy to know you can now perform read and change audit reports on multiple users for up to 30 days now. The storage limit has also been increased from 1GB to 10GB.

The still evolving transport system in SuccessFactors also got an enhancement in the form of Bundle Management in Configuration Center. You can now create bundles, edit them, and even share them with others! Checkout the screenshot below:

New Bundle Management Feature Screenshot

There’s also now a handy import history report available for download in the Configuration Center as well!

The Check tool has now been integrated into the instance refresh too. Admins will now get an email that includes a summary of check tool results when a refresh is processed and can also download an error log. The list of items the check tool checks has also been updated. The detailed list can be found here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/354e3d1428d8493d89dfb7487e5dcedf.html

Security admins will also be glad there’s a new potentially neck-saving notification when they change a role that impacts a large number of users. Don’t worry – you can select the threshold of users so you aren’t getting unwanted pop-ups! Checkout the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/c7b923c87ca3494c8416349431fa8a49.html

The RBP admin screen also got a new facelift! You have the option to turn this one on by selecting the option on the old screen. Check it out below!

New RBP Admin Screen

System Updates

Access to APIs based on HTTP Basic Authentication will no longer be supported on November 17 2023. This gives customers about a year and a half to adapt any existing interfaces that log on to the APIs directly to OAuth 2.0.

The APIs will now also start to be throttled. Probably a smart move on the part of SAP to keep system stability, but but news if you have interfaces that make lots of calls. Don’t worry – the limit is now 40 requests per second so you’d have to be doing A LOT of calls to be affected.

The APIs have also been enhanced with more linking between a variety of entities. Check the main What’s New Viewer page for specifics.

Wrap Up

We have now covered the Platform update highlights for 1H 2022! SAP continues to invest greatly in the platform to expand the overall capabilities of the system, concentrating on consistent and enhanced user experience while giving admins more helpful tools.

Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles?  Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

SAP SuccessFactors Center of Capabilities: An Introduction

I’ve implemented and supported many SAP SuccessFactors systems across my 15+ year career. One repeated issue I’ve come across throughout these years is how to catalog skills, competencies, and the like in a systematic way that allows employers to record, categorize, evaluate and search through employees who have specific skills at specific skill levels. Imagine starting a new project or opening a new plant and being able to see who out in your existing talent pool has the skills you need to success instead of hiring new full time talent or contractors. Up until recently, the only way SAP SuccessFactors customers have had to do this out of the box has been the employee profile which lacks the rigid structure needed to really properly catalog skills.

As the SAP SuccessFactors product as continued to expand, SAP has set out to solve this problem. SAP’s answer to the problem of how to record, categorize, evaluate and search through employee skills, competencies, and the like in a systematic way is the Center of Capabilities.

The Center of Capabilities provides a framework where the skills, competencies, and other similar employee attributes that matter to your organization can be cataloged and assigned to employees. The framework consists of two main components: the Capabilities Library and the Capabilities Portfolio. As you might expect, the library contains the listing of all capabilities (skills, competencies, etc.) that are important to your organization. The portfolio shows which particular skills, competencies, etc. are assigned to individuals or job roles (for more information on job roles, check out our blog Introduction to the Job Profile Builder or our book that covers this and more talent management topics). Let’s take a closer look at these two components of the Center of Capabilities.

The Capabilities Library

A Capabilities Library stores a collection of related skills / competencies / attributes. For smaller organizations you may have only one library divided into a few major categories. For larger organizations you may have multiple libraries each containing a single relevant functional area further divided into smaller categories and even groups beneath those. In addition, behaviors can also be added to competencies. Two examples are below, the first a snippet of a simple single company-wide library, and the second a snippet of a larger company collection of libraries with competencies that also contain behaviors (note that as of writing this blog, only competencies are supported in the library, but the long term plan appears to be to include more types of capabilities):

  • Library: ACME Company Library
    • Category: Finance
      • Competency: Analytical Approach
      • Competency: Financial Responsibility

  • Library: Information Technology
    • Category: IT Project Management
      • Group: Project Planning
        • Competency: Achieving Deadlines
          • Behavior: Clearly lists key/critical dates
          • Behavior: Provides consistent status reports
        • Competency: Being Adaptable to Changes in Plan
          • Behavior: Takes in New Requirements following change control procedures
          • Behavior: Adjusts project plan using proven estimation techniques
      • Group: Meeting Facilitation
        • Competency: Listening to Others
          • Behavior: Implements active listening techniques
          • Behavior: Records key group member discussion points into meeting notes
        • Competency: Guiding Others to Desired Outcomes
          • Behavior: Understands and interjects when meeting is becoming derailed
          • Behavior: Facilitates agreement between meeting participants
    • Category: Systems Administration
      • Group: Configuring Systems
        • Competency: Following Change Control Procedures
          • Behavior: Reviews change control procedure documentation
          • Behavior: Records system changes
      • Group: Developing Programs
        • Competency: Applying Software Architecture Standards
          • Behavior: Listens to and implements architectural review board feedback

The screenshot below shows a sample of what a competency with behaviors assigned looks like within the Library. You can access the library via the “Manage Center of Capabilities” screen (make sure you assign this permission first as well as end user permissions – you can find more details in the admin guide at help.sap.com).

The Capabilities Portfolio

The capabilities portfolio is what ties an individual to a set of capabilities from the library via their job role. Capabilities can be assessed via a performance form. Each capability has a proficiency rating scale assigned to them that determines what their scores can be. Before you can use the portfolio, you’ll have to use the setup wizard pictured below in the “Manage Center of Capabilities” screen to setup the rating scale / proficiency levels. You will also need to associate which performance forms will show the proficiency history.

Once your setup is complete, you can select “Capabilities Portfolio” from the main navigation to look at your capabilities. As capabilities are rated via performce forms, they are updated here. You can look at the capabilities of another by searching for their name and selecting “Go to -> Capabilities Portfolio” from the action menu.

Conclusions

As of right now, the “Center of Capabilities” is mostly a rebrand of the existing competency library. However, taking a look at the SAP release roadmap, we can see that subsequent releases should prove to have more functionality that will expand the functionality beyond the initial limits of the legacy competency library. Speaking with contacts at SAP, the vision is to have the Center of Capabilities serve as the location where HR resources can find out all kinds of information about what individuals within the organization can do for it and conversely empower individuals to seek other opportunities in the organization that need their unique capabilities.

Do you need help setting up the Center of Capabilities? Contact us at info@worklogix.com!

What’s New in the SuccessFactors Platform for H2 2021

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On October 9, 2021, SAP released documentation for the H2 2021 release.  Preview release is October 15 and production is November 19. In this article we take a quick look at the latest updates for SAP SuccessFactors Platform. It’s a huge list for Platform this release – so we’ve tried to summarize the most interesting items.   You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here.  Let’s get started! We’ve categorized the enhancements below for you starting with the most compelling in our opinion!

Of Special Interest

What stood out to me as the most interesting part of this release is the introduction of a Digital Assistant! As with most digital assistants, the feature is basically a natural language processing program that appears in the form of a chat window. Right now SAP is reporting they have over 250 scenarios programmed on the web version and over 20 on the mobile app. This feature is currently only available to early adopters.

The latest home page showing the Digital Assistant chatbot in action.

What Everyone Needs to Know

In this release, SAP announced a Tenant Preferred Time Zone feature. SAP is migrating servers to the UTC timezone. If you want to keep your server time zone where it is today, check out the link here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/d5e86fa8bb564058820592217d3a21d4.html

The Center of Capabilities continues to expand its functionality. There is now a proficiency rating scale available that allows you to quantify the skill level of employees in the skills within the Center of Capabilities. There are also a new Center of Capabilities Library Reports for Stories in People Analytics.

The settings, such as providing a unique name to the rating scale, defining the number of proficiency levels, and assigning the numerical value as 0 or 1 for the lowest proficiency level are available on the Rating Scale page of the Capabilities Portfolio Settings wizard.

There have also been some general UI Enhancements to the center of capabilities functionality overall. In addition, the capabilities portfolio is now available which is the main experience that shows the list of capabilities for a worker.

The Capabilities Portfolio page provides information about the capabilities assigned to a user. This page also provides users the option to navigate to the Opportunities Marketplace.

There are a large number of new To-Do Tasks across all modules available on the latest home page. Examples are shown below. Check out the full list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/34c3515e0de14431b35d76525dfb00df.html

Example of the home page showing several pending tasks: approve job offers, approve job requisitions, approve time off requests, approve time sheets, complete calibration, and complete 360 evaluation.

In addition, there are a lot more Quick Actions available on the latest homepage. For example, there is a My Team quick action for managers to review info and take actions on their team members. Clock Time lets you clock in and out. Complete Payroll tasks, Delegate Workflows, My Profile, Org Chart, View Admin Alerts, and View Team Absences all pretty much do exactly what you would expect them to do as well. You can check out the full details here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/f6d92d1c4a834f29b8b1998c7b845d1b.html

Also the header page now conforms to Fiori standards. This is always great news to me to see more and more parts of the system align with Fiori – have you notices how much better the web system looks on your mobile phone these days? That’s thanks to Fiori!

If you are still on the V12 Employee Profile, its time to move to the latest employee profile! This functionality is finally deleted.

Security

Certificate-Based authentication is now supported for standard third party integration packages for Boomi and CPI. My sources inside SAP tell me that certificate-based authentication will be the preferred method of authentication going forward for interfaces in general. Aligned to this, SAP also announced the depication of HTTP Basic Authentication for APIs. End of maintenance is November 19, 2021 and deletion will be November 1, 2022! Get your certificates ready!

You can also now Restrict API Access to Specific Users through OAuth 2.0. Additionally, you can now restrict individual user’s login to specific IP addresses. These allow for an extra layers of security in your integrations and general user access.

IP restriction can be applied to individual users.

Also of Note

There were also some minor curiosities for me in this batch of platform enhancements that I thought were pretty…pretty good! For example, you can now provide a Zip file for the job that updates employee photos en masse. Before this was a bear for anyone who suffered through putting a bunch of uncompressed photos on an SFTP server and waited for the large data transfer!

There’s also deep linking now available to go straight to someone’s employee profile. I could see this being useful for succession planners or managers talking about employees and wanting to share their profiles.

The employee import email also now includes a new troubleshooting section to help you figure out what went wrong on the import. Nice!

Conclusion

The SAP SuccessFactors product continues to grow and become increasingly more robust! This does not represent all of the enhancements in the H2 2021 release – only the highlights we found most compelling. Check out the What’s New Viewer here for the complete list of enhancements.

See this great article for useful information on how to prepare for a SAP SuccessFactors Regular Release.

Contact info@worklogix.com for any assistance supporting and implementing your SAP SuccessFactors Modules, or download our support services brochure.

SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder Talent Management Integration

SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder (JPB) is a tool used to create and maintain job profiles associated to job roles. Job profile content can be used when creating job requisitions but it can be used for much more. JPB is integrated with many HCM modules and the key that ties all of these modules to Job Profile Builder is job roles.

The job profile components can be used in many modules. These components are useful in many areas of SuccessFactors including:

  • Performance Management
  • Career Development
  • Succession
  • Employee Profile

First, let’s look at a job profile. Job Profiles are tied to job roles within a job family. The profile can include education, skills and competencies to associate with a job role. This information can get pulled into a req and the position associated with a job will inherit its properties.

An example of a job profile is shown below.

Job Profile

Competencies are a very critical component of a job role. The competencies are selected from a competency library, most notably the SuccessFactors 2.1 Competency Library. Once the job roles are created, competencies are selected to map to roles. Positions associated with a job will then have these competences that can included as requirements on a job req or a way for an employee to track progress on goals.

As you see below, for a role, a competency library is selected and then competencies can be added.

Mapping Competencies to a Job Role

Job codes, skills, competencies and talent pools can be mapped to a job role. Job codes associated with the roles will inherit the skills and competencies. An example is shown below.

The job role below has a job code, 8 competencies, 4 skills and a talent pool mapped to it.

Job Role with Mappings

This means that all positions associated with a job code will then have the associate skills and competencies.

Performance Management
Any job related competencies can be included on performance form template. This allows an employee to be rated on their job specific competencies.

When a form is generated, all competencies associated with the employee’s role will be pulled in when a performance form is generated.

Role Competencies on PM Form

Development Goal Plans

Development goals can have have competencies added. This is especially useful when using Career Worksheet which we will look at next,

Competencies on Development Goal

Career Worksheet
The Career Worksheet is a component of Career Development and is used by an employee to discover development opportunities based on roles that may wish to grow in to. The Career Worksheet is also dependent on job roles and their job role definitions, mapped competencies and expected competency proficiency ratings.

Job profiles will appear throughout the career worksheet, when browsing roles, viewing suggested roles, viewing career paths to name a few.

The employee selects future or targeted roles to view along with the job role’s associated competencies. The worksheet identifies competency gaps which highlight development areas that the employee needs to work on.   The worksheet also illustrates how ready an employee is for the targeted role based on their competency proficiency. The worksheet may also be used to view career paths and suggested future roles.

Competency mappings to roles are the sole source of competencies listed on the career worksheet. Only ratings from completed forms are displayed in the career worksheet.

A job role will require a number of competencies and each competency should have an expected proficiency level rating. An employee’s readiness for the role depends on whether the employee’s proficiency rating for the competencies meets the expected ratings.

The system uses the Career Worksheet readiness cal­culation to compute a competency match score which compares the em­ployee’s competency rating with the ex­pected rating for the role.

An employee can browse career paths and suggested roles from their Career Worksheet. Employees can proactively prepare for that next step. By discovering the competencies and skills needed to exceed in a job role, the employee can create development goals that align with a targeted role. This gives employees a sense of empowerment to develop skills, behaviors and competencies to prepare for future roles.

Suggested Roles

Suggested roles can be based on career paths or through an algorithm based on a set of criteria. The suggested roles can be a combination of competencies, targeted roles, career path and roles selected by peer. Clicking within any role will will display the job profile, Selecting a role will add it to the employee’s career worksheet in order gauge their readiness for the role.

Suggested Roles

Clicking the plus sign will add the role the employee’s career worksheet.

The employee can view job roles based on job family. Selecting any will add the role to career worksheet.

View

Career Path

Once a target role is selected, the career path for the role can be viewed. This gives the employee a chance to see the job role progression. Job profiles for the roles in the path may be viewed as well.

On the Career Worksheet, the job profile of a targeted role may be viewed.

Career Path for Target Role

All of the job roles that have been configured for a career path will display. The targeted role will be highlighted. Clicking on the information icon give the employee a view of the job profile which can be used to help them decide if that is a job they may like to grow into.

Job Profile

Role Readiness Form

The Role Readiness form is launched from the Career Worksheet by the employee and is used to rate how proficient they are in the competencies needed for any future roles that they selected.   The form is used to help employees plan their career development and identify areas of  development needed for the future roles. 

Role Readiness Form

Readiness Meter

Once the form has been completed, the readiness meter on the career worksheet will show how ready the employee is for the targeted role.

Readiness Meter

Gap Graphs

There is a gap graph for each competency comparing the last competency rating of record for the employee with the expected rating for that role. All job roles mapped to a competency will be included.  The graph shows the actual competency rating from the latest rating form against the expected rating for the competency.

For any large gaps for the competencies, the employee may decide to add a development goal to help them become more proficient. This will add the development goal to their development plan. The development goal will also show the linked competencies.

Succession

Job roles can be tied to talent pools. When a talent pool is mapped to a job role, all positions tied to the job code will then become members of the talent pool. Talent pools associated with a position display in the position card when accessed from the Succession Org Chart or Position Tile view.

An employee’s talent card will also show the talent pools their position is associated with as seen below.

Talent Pool on Talent Card

The Position card will also show talent pool successors.

Position and role information may be viewed as well. Within the Succession Org Chart, when viewing a position, the associated job role details may be viewed. Clicking ‘View Role Details’ will open the job profile associated with the role.

Role Details

Employee Profile

The skill profile is linked to JPB.

Employees can add skills whick can be used for employee development and succession planning,

Skill Profile

Conclusion

I hope you can see that Job Profile Builder can be used beyond Recruitment. The job profiles created can be extremely useful in developing the people within your organization and not just for finding new talent.

For more information on the Job Profile Builder and Talent Management Integrations, check out our book here!

Cataloging Skills in the Job Profile Builder

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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.

Types of Job Profile Content

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.

Job Profile Content Skills View

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.

Adding a SuccessStore skill based on job family and role

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.

Adding all mapped skills when adding a Job 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.

Adding a SuccessStore skill based on Category and Group

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.

Selecting a skill in your library to edit

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.

Creating and editing skills

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.

Skill assignments within a job profile

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.

Job Profile Builder: An Introduction

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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.

Example Job Profile Integration with Recruiting

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

Editing a Job Profile Template

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

Managing Job Profile Content

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

Setting up Job Roles

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.

The Manage Job Profile Screen: Editing the Content on Your Specific Job Profile

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:

Example screenshot showing organization of Job Families to Roles and Positions when creating a Job Profile

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.

Screenshot of Job Profile Builder Edits Triggering 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