Up until now, customers have been using round-about methods of adapting SuccessFactors recruiting to handle their high-volume requisitions that are always posted – commonly known as “Evergreen Requisitions”.  Recently, with the Q4 2019 release a beta version of Evergreen Requisition functionality was released.  I had the opportunity recently to work with a customer to implement this new functionality and take it for a test drive!  This article gives an overview of the functionality, its business need, key advantages to implementing the functionality, and some helpful hints in rolling it out to your instance.

Why do companies need Evergreen Requisitions?

Not every company needs Evergreen Requisitions.  Unique to some industries are so-called “high-volume” jobs where the demand for the job constantly out-weights the supply.  For example, merchandiser positions in the consumer products industry or pilots in the airline industry.  For these positions, the company is always hiring.  For recruiting systems, this often creates a problem because typically one requisition and one posting equals one position in the HRIS system.  Having multiple requisitions and postings for a multitude of positions that are all basically the same would be confusing to people looking for jobs – not to mention for recruiters to manage.  For example, one candidate could apply to essentially the same job multiple times.   To avoid this, companies use evergreen requisitions to have one long-standing posting to represent a single channel for job seekers and recruiters for several open seats of the same position in the company.

How were companies handling this situation prior to the functionality?

Prior to the release of this functionality, there was no officially agreed-upon method for creating evergreen requisitions.  In my experience a custom Evergreen Requisition solution looked like this:

1. Requisitions would be launch for each open seat (e.g. unique position number) – typically a custom field would be used to record this position number on each requisition
2. One requisition would be chosen to be the Evergreen and only that one requisition would be posted for candidates to apply
3. As candidates applied to the requisition, finalized candidates (usually those reaching a finalized offer) would be moved from the Evergreen requisition to the requisition using the late-stage application functionality

While this solution “worked” in a happy path scenario, there were still many shortfalls here.

1. There was no clear relationship between the Evergreen Requisition and the child requisitions – so often recruiters may get confused as to which requisition to transfer the candidates
2. From a compliance and reporting standpoint, it looked as if the candidates were dispositioned off of the Evergreen Requisition even though they were qualified and furthermore did not go through all of the preliminary steps a candidate normally would on the child requisition.  This left many compliance officers feeling a uneasy about how to explain the situation in the event of an audit.
3. With no clear guidance on an official way to take care of this situation, many companies may take alternate approaches, leaving SAP and partners at a loss for how to continue to implement and support long term

How does the new functionality work?

The process flow for the new functionality is as follows.

1. Requisitions can be marked as “evergreen” using a new standard field that recruiters/others can see on the requisition detail screen. The Job Requisition Type field also shows if the requisition is standard, evergreen, or child:

2. Once an Evergreen Requisition is marked as such, child requisitions can be associated to it on the requisition details screen as well:

3. These associations can also be seen from the requisition overview screen with the new fields shown below:

4. The functionality allows for a new action from the action menu when selecting candidates called “Forward as Applicant”.

What are the key advantages with the new functionality?

There are many advantages with this new functionality!

1. The new functionality release gives an agreed standard way to handle Evergreen Requisitions that partners and customers can more universally follow and support going forward.
2. Previously there was no way to identify what was an evergreen, what was a child, and what was just a standard requisition.  Now there is a field dedicated to identifying this which can help recruiters as well as those creating reports to sort out what is what.
3. Similarly, now that child requisitions are hard linked in the system with their parent Evergreen Requisition, recruiters can keep tabs on which requisitions they should move candidates to in the event one has accepted an offer.
4. The new “Forward As Applicant” has many advantages over the other forward or late-stage application action functionality.
   1. Forward as applicant copies the entire application and only runs field checks as if the person just applied.
   1. It also copies the current application data selected whereas other methods copy whatever the latest application is (which can get very frustrating).
   1. Furthermore, candidates and recruiters can view the jobs applied in candidate profile when they use this action – the other actions do not do this.
   1. Forward as applicant also now gets its own unique email trigger
   1. Forward as applicant retains the source data (e.g. google or some career site) as well as agency ownership

Are there any helpful hints or “gotcha’s” out there I should look for?

In our implementation, we ran into a couple of common snags listed below.

1. For implementation partners, permissions are always the culprit – make sure the right permissions are assigned to these new fields in the requisition templates for everyone!
2. Change management: Make sure the recruiters are using the new “Forward as Applicant” action!  It is often confusing for recruiters to understand the difference in the 3 different ways to forward and also late-stage applications.

What’s ahead?

Per the latest SAP SuccessFactors roadmap, Evergreen Requisition functionality will be available for general availability in the upcoming 1H 2020 release.  While detailed documentation is still not available, you can be sure to check out the SuccessFactors Community product update blog for the documentation release.

Worklogix partners with clients to plan, configure, develop and integrate HR products and custom applications. We have assembled a global team with years of experience implementing HCM solutions. Our team is dedicated to understanding your business challenges, helping you leverage your technology and implement solutions that deliver results.