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 o ur 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