Considering Implementing Dynamic Offer Letters in SuccessFactors? Here is Our Story

[paddykoltsaklis]

So you are considering implementing Dynamic Offer Letters? Great! This was probably one of the neatest functionalities that SAP has rolled out for Recruiting in 2024. Remember the stress of having to go through a plethora of offer letter templates to make edits and updates each year for legal and compliance changes? Some companies having upwards of 45 different offer letter templates can be quite the burden.

With SAP introducing this feature it allows you to streamline your offer with the use of business rules that help take the guess work out of the equation by drafting the correct offer letter for your new hire. I am not going to go into too much detail but here is a link to another community post that really does a nice job of breaking down the feature. There is also a video on the Recruiting Learning Journey that does a good overview of the process for those of us who are visual learners.

Our journey of going through this implementation has been a great learning experience and we hope that our learnings will help prepare you for your Dynamic Offer Letter project:

We are a global company with a footprint in 65 countries around the world. That should let you know that the offer approval process can be a cumbersome and arduous process. We have only rolled this functionality out to our US based hiring efforts as a pilot. The team had originally wanted to move all countries to this process but that would be a much larger project, so we will be moving in phases as part of continuous improvement to our platform.

While we discovered that the Offer Approval Template is good overall, we still found it lacking in the number of data fields that we would need to have configured for approvals that would ultimately be needed to aid in building out our offer letters. Having 65 countries utilizing Recruiting with different pay details, bonuses, policies, compensation packages etc limited how we could customize by country. The team had gotten creative and duplicated all of the data to the application. Our hope is that one day the limits of custom data fields on the offer approval will be raised and I am sure other companies can benefit from this as well and not have to rely on updating certain things manually which could create some issues. I have created an improvement request for this item in the hopes that this gets some visibility and traction with the SAP team if it gets enough noise. So please consider adding your vote to the improvement request..

In addition to the limitation in the data fields in the Offer Approval template and the complexities of our compensation processes, the team had come up with a unique custom external solution to right fit the feature to ensure all necessary data points are captured that the Recruiting module could not support. This is done via a custom integration where offer details are entered and routed for the necessary approvals outside of the platform and then sent back into Recruiting where that data can be used to build and populate the offer letter sections.

With the limitations on the offer approval template, the team had decided to only move the US offer letters to this new process as our pilot population. Overall the process is very straightforward with creating objects and use of tokens. But I am sure with only having 100 Dynamic Tokens available this will also need to be increased to accommodate companies that have a global presence, more complex compensation packages and details. The business rules can be as easy or difficult to build depending on what is included in the offer approval. You will need to do some planning prior to building out the rule. You will need to ensure that you have all possible variations covered, types of employees and compensation packages. From this analysis you will need to plan out the sections and tokens needed as you can only have one rule per offer letter template. Even though this process is meant to reduce the number of offer letter templates you may still need to have a few per country to account for the variables. In our case we had to create (2) separate rules one for regular employees and another for our interns. With just those two rules we had used up 20 of the 100 available tokens.

In conclusion, the Dynamic Offer Letter feature is definitely a good addition to the Recruiting module. The feedback from our Recruiters and Talent Acquisition team has been very positive. Definitely takes some of the burden off the Recruiters from selecting/editing the templates and this has led to reduction in time to get offer letters out. Before you start it is important to ensure that you have all your offer details and variations accounted for before building, pre-work will be your biggest ally in this process. Some of the downsides to consider on the Offer Approval Template fields and the number Dynamic Tokens may be difficult for large companies wanting to use this feature. I feel the decision to add this feature depends on your company’s size, global presence and the complexities of your offer and compensation packages. I hope you found this information useful and if you would like to chat further on our experience please feel free to reach out. 

Please be sure to vote on the enhancements below and help influence change. I am a big believer in the SuccessFactors community to help drive change and to help each other.

Offer Approval Templates - Need for more custom fields to be available for use

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/340578

Dynamic Offer Letters - Expand the Number of Tokens

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/340812

“ Unity is strength…when there is teamwork and collaboration wonderful things can be achieved.”                                                                                                                             - Mattie Stepanek

[Agustina_Palma]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your story with the dynamic offer tokens, super interesting! I am particularly curious about the formatting in the offer letter template when using these dynamic tokens. Did you encounter any challenges in this aspect? We are currently implementing dynamic offer tokens, and we've noticed that when a dynamic token is empty (due to null information in the offer detail template, as expected), it leaves a blank space in the template, which looks weird. 

[paddykoltsaklis]

Hello @Agustina_Palma 

Thank you for your comment! We did experience formatting issues with the offer letters as well. They did create some additional spacing issues within the letters and it did create some re-work for the team to go through and clean up. I would recommend in utilizing the source button in Offer Letters to view the  HTML and go through in editing the letter.