What’s Stopping You Hiring Talented SAP Consultants?
5 Tips to Take Your Hiring Process to the Next Level
With the objective of recruiting the most talented SAP consultants, you have put in place a hiring process to boost your SAP advantage. Yet the consultants you hire still aren’t quite up to the standard you require. What’s going wrong? What else could you be doing to ensure you hire the absolute best SAP consultants available?
Here are our five tips to take your hiring process to the next level when searching for your ideal SAP consultants.
1. Remember You Don’t Find the Perfect Candidate on Paper
Screening the resume is the first step in the candidate screening process. Many companies fall into the trap of believing they will find their perfect candidate on these pieces of paper. You won’t. The resume review is a guide to who to interview. Candidates know this, and so they tailor their resumes with the goal of securing an interview.
This is an accepted tactic. It shows you that the candidate is focused on your job and your company as an employer. Your job is to weed out those who have embellished their resume for the purpose of securing an interview. To do this you should:
- Look for inconsistencies in the resume and between it and the candidate’s LinkedIn profile
- Ensure that the technical skills you require are demonstrated by the candidate’s experience
- Google the candidate’s name and see what you find
- Seek evidence that the candidate is active in online SAP communities
- Ask people who have previously worked with the candidate for their comments
In short, for those resumes you have kept in the interview pile after a basic review, dig a little deeper and ensure that you bring only the best through to the interview stage.
2. Ensure the Candidate Has Consulting Experience
As the demand for SAP consultants is growing, so, too, is the number of inexperienced candidates. Some of these are great at what they do, but consultancy work is somewhat different to work as an employee.
You don’t have space for a consultant who needs to learn on the job. They must hit the ground running, and become the link between the business and its technology.
Don’t hire someone who looks great on paper but does not have the experience your role requires.
3. Ensure the Candidate Is a Great Communicator
Communication skills are critical in the role of SAP consultant. Your hire will need to translate a highly technical subject into language that non-tech people will be able to understand. Not all consultants have this level of communication ability.
A great SAP consultant is at ease when presenting in meetings, training others, and sharing their knowledge across a variety of communication channels.
A good way to test this skill is to have a non-tech interviewer present when you are interviewing the candidate.
4. Make the Technical Interview Count
A technical interview is a must, but how do you do this when you don’t have the SAP experience in-house to test effectively? Here are some pointers:
- Involve people from the tech and business sides of your organization
- Ensure they are briefed about the needs of the role
- Bring in a trustworthy external consultant to ask SAP specific questions
- Only ask questions to which you know and understand the answer
You must be certain that the candidate you select has the right technical skills. To do this, a technical interview is required. You must ensure that your interviewers have the required level of knowledge to assess candidates, and the interview must be designed to learn candidates’ capability to do the job.
5. Search in the Right Places
A mistake that many hiring companies make is looking in the wrong place for their SAP consultants. Free jobs boards are not the best places to find talented consultants – the best candidates are far more discerning.
You should take your search to people you trust:
- Your personal network
- Your company’s network
- The SAP community
- Industry experts
- Specialized staffing agencies
There are many ways to find the expertise, experience, and mix of hard and soft skills that you require. You should use several of them in your search for the perfect consultant for your unique needs.
It’s crucial that you hire the right consultant. When we work with our clients, we analyze every need they have and ensure we make a hand-in-glove fit. To learn how we do this, and why our placements are so successful, get in touch with us here at TotalTek. You won’t be disappointed, and your search for the best SAP consultant could be completed in just a few days.