Since the introduction of Career Site Builder and release of Candidate Relationship Management, no doubt that the Recruiting Marketing has been progressing by leaps and bounds. But unfortunately , the topic of Brands in RMK still seems to struggle to accommodate some of the basic client requirements. This article is to highlight the Brand related issues and some of the workarounds to cater the same.
Problem Statement:
RMK facilitates Brand configuration so that Businesses that have parent company and its subsidies can have flexibility to control the Career sites to have different design , Theme, Layout, Jobs and Brands that are relevant to each entity. If the Client company has no issues of the parent -child references of brands across each other career sites then it would not pose an issue.
But if the Client company has strict control where the child cannot refer back to the parent brand for any specific reason like example owing to two different industries or owing to the media positioning then it would be good if a heads-up is provided to the client on the following Product gap/bug.
Issue 1:
There are some of the functionalities from the Child brand page which gets routed to the Parent Home Brand Main page alias the Base career site. For eg, if the Home Page Main Parent Brand is Brand 'A' and there is a stand-alone subsidy entity Brand 'B' which is a child of Parent Brand 'A', then the behavior would be whenever a Candidate access Brand B page he would get end up in Brand A page which would not be an acceptable solution to the Business.
Affected scenarios:
Scenario 1: Candidate deletes his/her profile
Scenario 2: Candidate click on Sign-out
Issue 2:
The "RMK Job Search URL link" which is maintained in the
Provisioning -> Manage Recruiting->Configure Recruiting Marketing Data center URL controls the re-direction link when Job search related functions are performed in the Career site. The KBA states that this is an expected behavior
https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/public/en/2588127 and multiple links cannot be configured at the time being as it is a Product limitation.
Affected Scenarios:
Scenario 1: After the Candidate applies for the Job the "Back to Job Listing" button
Scenario 2: "Job Search" Tab available in the Candidate Profile
Work-around Approach :
To over come the above stated issues, the following alternative can be adopted.
Solution for Issue 2:
- Create a generic career site for the Home career base site with no logo. You can get creative by indicating both the Parent and the child brand in the same page so that the URL can re-direct to its specific career sites.
- This Home career base site can be referred as the "RMK Job search URL" in provisioning. This would handle issue 2 stated above.
Solution for Issue 1:
- Secondly, treat the Parent entity also as one of the Brands in RMK unlike the conventional approach of defaulting it as the Home Brand. Because we already have a generic career site which would play as the Home career base site.
- So for eg, if your Client has Parent entity A and child entity B, translating into RMK vocabulary you would be ending up 3 career sites which are Generic Home career base site, Brand A and Brand B respectively.
- The URL s that have to be shared to the IT for tagging to existing corporate career site would be URLs of Brand A and Brand B .This would address Issue 1
Conclusion :
Though the work around does the trick but it is no secret that Clients would have to compromise with the product on this aspect because of the cons listed below
- An eyesore when it comes to the look and feel as the Candidate UI experience is taking a back step because of the workaround on Job search which can potentially lead to lose candidates
- Unfortunately the Search Engine Optimization can be facilitated only on the Home page career site and cannot be directly placed on the Brands career sites.
- SAP has currently acknowledged this idea under the Improvement Request links. So hopefully this would be addressed and rectified in the near future.
https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/220082
https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/222695