Corporate careers pages are the centerpiece of any effective online talent acquisition strategy. These sites give employers the opportunity to position their organizations as sought-after career destinations for those with the skills and experience needed to meet and exceed company goals. It can also be used to engage both active and passive job seekers who visit the site and create and maintain a relationship with them, allowing more opportunity to leverage that relationship when the time is right on both sides.
For years, SuccessFactors has offered an outstanding career site solution as part of the HCM Cloud Suite. Recruiting Marketing has been used by hundreds of clients to create powerful and effective career websites, all fully integrated with the SuccessFactors ATS, Recruiting Management. These sites not only allow for pinpoint employer branding and meaningful candidate engagement, they also feed a powerful analytics engine and passive seeker marketing tool that allow for analysis and refinement of the overall recruiting strategy long term.
One of the few drawbacks of this offering, however, is that the site is not at all self-administrable for the client. For even small changes, clients must submit their request to the Shared Services team at SuccessFactors. Depending on the current queue of work, clients can expect to wait several weeks or perhaps even several months for the change to be completed. This has robbed employers of their ability to agilely respond to factors in and outside the organization by changing aspects of their career site in near real time.
As a result, SuccessFactors now offers another implementation model for these sites. Career Site Builder sites are Recruiting Marketing career sites that implementation partners or customer administrators can set up and maintain with minimal engagement with SAP Support. Instead of outsourcing the development work to the shared services team, the client is able to use a set of tools that they can access directly from their BizX instance to build and maintain the sites themselves. The tools allow users to access a library of page components that can be added to various pages and then configured to meet the client’s specific needs. In this model, clients can nimbly react to the labor market, corporate influences, and other factors via the near real-time career site updates designed to best position them to their desired job seekers. No analytic or long-term passive seeker engagement functionality is lost using the Career Site Builder model.
However, as with most things in life, there is a tradeoff. As a result of having to use a set of predefined components to build and update the site, clients are often limited in some of their design and layout options. Many if not most clients are even unable to replicate their current production careers site using the Career Site Builder tool, and most are not able or willing to retreat from their current online employer profile in order to realize the benefits of the CSB implementation model.
Enter GP Strategies. Using a tool provided by the CSB Product team, custom components can be added to CSB pages in addition to the standards found in the library. This allows client-customized components to be built and incorporated into the site, expanding clients’ ability to fully realize their desired career site vision, while still enjoying the ease and long-term agility of the CSB model. GP Strategies has worked to develop our own library of custom components designed to allow clients to fully replicate their existing site quickly and easily using CSB. We have organized them into small widget-like pieces of code that are themselves very easy to work with and maintain. This ensures that customization remains in the hands of the client, rather than just shifting from SuccessFactors to GP Strategies.
So now clients have a new choice when it comes to updating or creating their new careers site. The combination of the SuccessFactors CSB tool and GP Strategies’ library of strategic custom plug-ins allows customers to realize all of the benefits CSB offers without sacrificing design and branding standards they highly value.
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