Talent Management Best Practices with SAP SuccessFactors – What I learned from the openSAP course

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Impact of Technology on Business Practices and Processes

With drastic change of technology in recent years, many of the earlier business practices have changed as well. What was required couple of years ago for a business to run successfully, is not necessarily a must now. Even in some cases, the old practices are just waste of time and produce no results.

Alignment of Business Processes with Best-Practices, including Talent Management

To ensure that a business copes with prevailing challenges, it has to align itself with best-practices. Managing today’s workforce, as well, requires different approaches than those followed few years ago. Recently open SAP team arranged and run a course on the subject - Talent Management Best Practices with SAP SuccessFactors, and described how SuccessFactors supports the latest practices of managing talent.

Processes Changes – Observations and Course

I have supported HR lines of different organizations for more than a decade, in 15 years of my SAP career, before switching to other roles (within SAP work space) and I could tell you how much change I’ve witnessed during this time in HR practice. After attending the course I learned how businesses have to change their Talent Management approach and how SAP SuccessFactors could support such processes. For details, you could attend the course, however, I’ve stated my learning for those who want a quick summary of the subject.

Talent Management Best Practices and SAP SuccessFactors

The core theme (presented by the course) of Talent Management best-practices is about assigning Right People in first place to Right Jobs and ensuring they are Doing the Right Things in Right Direction while Developing them with Right Learning to Ensure Right Output. To support the individual processes, SAP SuccessFactors provides corresponding solutions. The open SAP course explained those processes well which, if aligned with best-practices, could help organizations in managing their talent successfully and ultimately in achieving organizational goals.

The processes (described in detail at the course) included

1. Workforce Planning to take the steps required to support the above-mentioned theme,


2. Job Requirements Definition to describe what exactly is required from incumbents of specific jobs,


3. Recruiting to increase conversion rate of candidate to employees smoothly,


4. Onboarding to provide new hires better experience of getting engaged in organization,


5. Goals to set clear expectations to ensure what employees are supposed to do,


6. Continuous Performance Coaching to guide employees on desired behavior,


7. Performance Assessment and Calibration to measure, recognize and rate individuals’ progress,


8. Total Rewards to reward while maintaining balance between attracting, retaining & maintaining employees,


9. Job Training – Mastering Current Roles to support employees skills to do current jobs as well as to take future challenges if needed,


10. Building Pipelines – Succession Management to have pool of talent ready for future business requirements, and


11. Filling Talent Pipelines – Career Management to empower employees to reach their full potential while reducing potential talent gaps, and


12. Learning Experience and Technology to explain how on-job training could be ensured through available technology.

Implementation of and Transition to Talent Management Processes

On top of the Talent Management processes supported by SAP SuccessFactors, the course also explained how the latest processes could be implemented at an organization from defining transformation strategy to managing transition to best-practices as well as governing and administering the Talent Management. The course “Talent Management Best Practices with SAP SuccessFactors” is a good combination with earlier courses on SAP SuccessFactors such as “Implementation Made Simple for SAP SuccessFactors Solutions” and could give you brief yet good-enough understanding on the Talent Management processes as well as supporting SAP tools.

Side note: Record of Achievement Possible for Courses already finished

Should you like to earn Record of Achievement for both (or other such already finished courses), you may do so as the openSAP team has made reactivation of such courses available. Read more about reactivation at Claire Donelon’s blog i.e. openSAP Reactivation Codes Now on General Release!

Some Recommendations and Tips on taking the openSAP courses

It’s interesting and beneficial to learn from openSAP courses and I’m recommending everyone in my circle who are looking for authentic yet free knowledge on SAP tools and would recommend you – the reader of the blog, to take advantage of the variety of courses available at open.sap.com. I have shared some tips earlier on how to benefit from such offerings at How I benefited from openSAP course, some tips to help you in your learning and Developing learning profile with openSAP courses.

It'd be good to know your experience if you have attended the course or if you are planning to attend such courses in future. Share your comments.