The big date: one conversation is enough

More than one in two employers in Germany has already lost a preferred applicant due to the long waiting time before a personnel decision is made. This is the alarming result of a labor market study among HR managers.

This is primarily due to the increasing shortage of skilled workers: Those who can choose from several attractive job offers do not have to wait in a nerve-wracking manner for feedback from a single employer. SAP provider and user companies in particular will therefore no longer be able to avoid significantly streamlining their recruiting processes in the future.

Of the 55,000 vacant IT positions currently deplored by the IT industry association Bitkom, a high percentage are in the SAP area. If the competition snatches a top candidate away from an SAP partner at the last minute, this can have a lasting impact on the company's own growth and competitiveness.

No grueling waiting time

There is a proven way to noticeably shorten the hiring process. Instead of letting several weeks or even months pass between the initial contact with a candidate and the final personnel decision, employers should focus on a single interview for each interesting applicant.

Instead of several grueling rounds of interviews on different days, a total of four hours should be scheduled once, during which the candidate is interviewed for one hour each by four different interviewees: first by the HR manager, then by the department head and future colleagues, and finally by the managing director.

Decision in retreat

Immediately after this round of interviews, the interview partners should go into seclusion and together make a definitive decision for or against the interviewed candidate. If they are convinced of him and want to work with him, there is no need for interviews with further candidates.

Equally crucial to creating a positive application experience, the so-called candidate experience, is not keeping candidates in the dark about the personnel decision for long.

In concrete terms, this means that if an applicant is successful, he or she should receive his or her employment contract the very next day - first by e-mail, then in parallel by mail. All other candidates should be rejected immediately afterwards.

Appreciation for candidates

Numerous experiences prove that companies can noticeably increase their completion rates with a single interview. This is because the much sought-after SAP professionals in particular feel valued by short and transparent hiring processes and also conclude from this the quality of the employer and the corporate culture.

If, on the other hand, the feeling arises right at the start that one's own career is being held back by a lengthy decision-making process, many specialists and executives will drop out while the application process is still underway. This has serious consequences for companies:

Too few new hires stop projects and lower the quality of their services.

The first date must spark

In the private sphere, "the big date" refers to a meeting where two partners hit it off right away. As practice shows, this term can easily be applied to SAP recruiting as well: One meeting is enough to find out whether applicants and the company harmonize.

For this reason, SAP employers in particular should integrate "The big date" as a standard process in their recruiting and actively persuade all company representatives involved to do so, for example within the framework of workshops - starting with HR managers through the specialist departments to the management.