Whether SAP recruitment is outsourced or managed in-house, building the perfect team of SAP professionals is often a lengthy and time-consuming practice. This is largely due to a lack of visibility into the available talent pool, as well as the processes and communication channels involved in reaching out to available SAP consultants.
To gain this visibility incurs significant time and expense. On the one hand, building a talent pool in-house requires a sizeable outreach program, manual processes and double handling. On the other hand, outsourcing to an agency both decreases visibility into the talent pool and incurs higher expenses for the sake of convenience.
In both cases, establishing visibility is only half the battle. As projects evolve and requirements change, so to do consultant availabilities. Maintaining visibility is crucial to avoiding project gaps, but is extremely challenging by traditional means.
Building a Talent Pool in-House
There are a plethora of SAP professionals out there. Finding the right personnel at the time they are needed is more challenging. An internal talent team, when building their in-house talent pool, will usually start with a two-pronged approach, via job listings and outreach:
- Project won
- Advertise job / consultant vacancies
- Manual outreach via social media, networking, headhunting
- Pool new applications with applications from prior projects
- Manually contact each applicant to screen skills and establish availability
- Select successful / available applicants
- Repeat the process for each project gap or change in availability
This process may successfully yield a visible talent pool, assuming the internal talent team has the time and resources to action the process. However, any project delay (especially in a post-COVID talent landscape) will create changes to SAP consultant availabilities, and vice versa. Maintaining visibility requires constant an ongoing contact with the entire talent pool, or minor changes can snowball into serious project gaps.
Talent Pooling through SAP Recruitment Agencies
It becomes a business decision as to whether or not an in-house talent pool is more viable than outsourcing the entire process. Depending on the quality of the agency, they may already be spending the time, energy and resources in maintaining an available talent pool. On the downside, agencies of this calibre don’t come cheap.
Engaging a 3rd party to provide available SAP professionals with the right skills does free up time for in-House HR teams, but doesn’t necessarily solve the entire problem. Along with the additional expense, there may be lingering complications:
- Double spend: non-billable HR overheads + billable SAP recruitment agency
- Double handling of shortlisted applications
- Lack of visibility into external TRP
- Reduced ability to solve project gaps in real time
While a good external SAP recruiter may save you from manually building a talent pool in-house, the problem has simply been outsourced, not solved. The same issues are simply shifted externally. Depending on how good your external recruiter is, you may reduce time and expenditure, even reduce the impact of project delays, but to truly eliminate these problems you need to reimagine your internal TRP.
Automated Talent Resource Planning
In both of the above cases, traditional TRP requires strenuous manual processes to build a view of available SAP talent, with even further manual handling to maintain your talent pool. Automating manual processes in SAP resourcing can improve visibility into availabilities and skills, allowing a strategic team build. This in turn saves the energy, time and expense in dependency on in-house or outsourced talent pooling.
Automation of manual TRP processes should:
- Show skills and availabilities in real time
- Reduce dependency on external engagement
- Eliminate double handling
- Increase agility in solving project gaps
- Lower the cost per SAP project resource
When your TRP process is automated, your internal talent team is empowered to strategically plan team building. This in turn reduces a myriad of self-perpetuating costs and potential problems in manually building a view of available talent. The question is now “How can these processes be automated?”
Access On-Demand SAP Talent Pool
The difference between an on-demand SAP talent pool and one built by an external SAP recruitment agency, or even one built in-house, is the background automation that enables complete visibility into real-time availability and SAP skills. This requires a platform that goes to where SAP people are, with UX that encourages available SAP professionals to signal their current and upcoming availability for suitable projects.
When SAP people are empowered to keep their rates, skills and availabilities up-to-date, it eliminates the need for your internal talent team or recruitment agency to continually call around the talent pool. In effect, the entire on-demand talent pool tells you what they can do, when they can do it and what it will cost you.
The benefits are compounded by the agile nature of an automated, on-demand talent pool. When project requirements or consultant availabilities change, SAP project resource managers can simply go back to the talent pool and solve project gaps in real time. Effectively, your HR team can strategically cherry-pick the best SAP professionals for an upcoming project and maintain agility through visibility into the SAP talent landscape.
Talent Resource Planning with InsideSAP Careers
InsideSAP Careers has been purpose-built to empower internal SAP project resourcing. Being the most powerful TRP platform in the SAP talent ecosystem, it automates the process of building AND maintaining your on-demand, available talent pool by smart-matching SAP skills with project requirements in real-time.
Costs and time are reduced by eliminating the manual processes of advertising, processing applications, manually contacting and contacting, then updated for each change. With InsideSAP Careers, you can:
- List projects and SAP vacancies for free
- View available talent for free
- Eliminate double-handling
- Strategically plan project resourcing by skills and availabilities
- Rapidly solve project gaps in real-time
- Significantly reduce the cost per SAP resource
Our TRP platform, while powerful, features a simple user interface that enables both HR and SAP professionals to simply log-in, find and be found. Consultants’ contracts are handled on-platform, so availabilities are frequently updated according to any projects to which they are attached. It’s as easy as registering a profile, launching a project and matching with the right SAP people.
As an alternative to outsourcing SAP recruitment, we empower your internal personnel to handle the TRP process end-to-end. As such, costs are far lower than outsourcing or building your own internal view of available SAP talent. We have hundreds of available, contract-ready, certified consultants online now, insured up to an industry-leading $20m.
Our fees are low and transparent. It’s free to register, free to post job listings, free to browse available skills and plan your projects. Even better – we plant real trees for every hire, every month.
InsideSAP Careers brings you an ongoing, on-demand view of the available SAP talent landscape at a fraction of the time and cost, so register today and start strategically resourcing for your next SAP Project!
