The Challenges You Face
As an SAP Leader, you have likely experienced these common challenges:
SAP Talent Acquisition is getting more expensive | Not only are salary levels increasing faster than the national average, but it’s easy to waste money on poor advertising or recruitment fees for non-performers you have to exit anyway.
The caliber of SAP leadership, business, or technical candidates aren’t up to par | SAP candidates often have robust resumes outlining their experience, but when you dig in further it turns out they don’t have the depth of experience their resume portrays, or they don’t have any relevant quantifiable accomplishments that would indicate a verified record of success.
It takes too long to fill critical SAP openings | By the time you’re ready to hire an SAP leader, your candidate of choice is either choosing between multiple offers or has already gone off the market. In our experience, top candidates stay available for an average of 10 days only before getting hired.
Project deadlines are impacted, leading to high turnover rates | A shortage of skilled SAP staff is impacting projects. Delayed project costs, increased hiring times, and increased workloads on existing staff are daily concerns for IT leaders. Due to the lack of SAP talent, organizations are having to focus on high-priority issues at the expense of training and planning, which is leading to team burnout, retention issues, and lost institutional knowledge.
Mis-hire risk within your SAP organization is on the rise | You’ve had new SAP leaders stay with the organization only briefly, but their negative impact is felt long after they leave. Decreased moral, increased turnover risk, missed project deadlines, and more stress on the current team members are all consequences felt.
Frustration with recruiters’ lack of domain knowledge | Recruiters who are not experienced in the SAP market and don’t truly understand hiring needs, role objectives, or candidate profiles are increasing your workload and wasting your time having to review unsuitable resumes and interviewing mismatched candidates.
Recruiters aren’t putting your opportunity in front of every potential candidate | Recruiters only fill 1out of 10 jobs they work on, so they lump your critical role in with all the others and only scrape the low-hanging fruit, the 18% of the candidate pool that is actively looking at any given time. They can’t afford to perform a deep-dive on a search they only have a 10% chance of filling, so they acting less like your agent and more like a candidate broker. (ever wonder why they always seem to represent the candidate instead of you, the one who foots the bill?)
Your process for recruiting top SAP Talent lacks continuity | You don’t have a passive candidate pipeline or a system in place that can give you predictable results every time, so every search has to start from scratch and feels like a game of chance (reactive vs proactive).
EVER HEARD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE GORDIAN KNOT?
The term “Gordian knot,” is used to describe an unsolvable problem, and can be traced back to a legendary chapter in the life of Alexander the Great.
As the story goes, in 333 B.C. the Macedonian conqueror marched his army into the Phrygian capital of Gordium (Turkey), and encountered the Gordian knot, described as “several knots so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.”
Phrygian tradition (and the oracle I might add) declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots would be destined to become ruler of all of Asia.
The knot was impossible to untie, and when Alexander the Great struggled to do so without success, he reasoned that it would make no difference how the knot was loosed, so he drew his sword and sliced it in half with a single stroke.
Alexander later went on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus and the Oxus, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
Untying the Gordian knot has since become a metaphor for an intractable problem solved easily by finding an alternate approach that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot.
This is called First Principles Thinking, or in other words, thinking like a scientist. This means focusing on the problem without assuming solutions, allowing you to make great leaps without being tethered to the way things have always been done.
So if you want to build a great company, you must untether yourself from the way it’s always been done.
You can’t recruit greatness marching in lockstep with your competitors.
The challenges you face in building a team of SAP Rockstars can be daunting, and directly impacts you, your team, your business operations, and ultimately your customers.
We believe First Principles Thinking is how we untie your Gordian knot.
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