SAP announced Fri­day the acqui­si­tion of SmartRe­cruiters, a tal­ent-acqui­si­tion soft­ware provider, to strength­en its SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors human cap­i­tal man­age­ment (HCM) suite.

As SAP cus­tomers seek to attract and retain top tal­ent in an increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive busi­ness land­scape, HR orga­ni­za­tions across all indus­tries are increas­ing­ly turn­ing to enter­prise-grade soft­ware plat­forms to help their busi­ness­es to man­age recruit­ment processes. 

Found­ed in 2010 with the mis­sion of con­nect­ing peo­ple to jobs at scale, SmartRe­cruiters sup­ports over 4,000 orga­ni­za­tions glob­al­ly through a recruit­ing soft­ware plat­form aimed at enter­prise cus­tomers. The San Fran­cis­co-based SaaS company’s focus on high-vol­ume recruit­ing and recruit­ment automa­tion, in addi­tion to AI-enabled can­di­date expe­ri­ence and engage­ment, will com­ple­ment exist­ing capa­bil­i­ties of the SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors suite and advance SAP’s vision of all-in-one HCM, per an offi­cial state­ment pub­lished Fri­day.

“We expect this acqui­si­tion to fur­ther SAP’s ambi­tion to be the no. 1. busi­ness appli­ca­tion ven­dor and busi­ness AI ven­dor in the world, to strength­en the SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors suite, and — of course — to offer our cus­tomers a more robust way to attract and retain their top tal­ent in an increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket,” said Dan Beck, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer for SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, dur­ing a sub­se­quent media round­table discussion. 

While sup­ply­ing user-friend­ly inter­faces and seam­less work­flows, SmartRe­cruiters’ AI capa­bil­i­ties opti­mize the process of sourc­ing and screen­ing can­di­dates based on fac­tors like skills, work his­to­ry, and poten­tial, ​“to find that nee­dle in the haystack,” Beck said, also afford­ing can­di­dates a more per­son­al­ized experience. 

Beck dis­cussed SAP’s inten­tion to enhance Peo­ple Intel­li­gence, with­in SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud, with SmartRe­cruiters’ ​“rich, robust recruit­ing data” to bet­ter iden­ti­fy bot­tle­necks, opti­mize sourc­ing, and sup­port more strate­gic work­force plan­ning. Intro­duced ear­li­er this year at SAP Sap­phire, Peo­ple Intel­li­gence bol­sters SAP’s orga­ni­za­tion­al peo­ple ana­lyt­ics by con­vert­ing data from SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP HCM, and oth­er sources into inter­ac­tive insights. With the acqui­si­tion of SmartRe­cruiters, which focus­es on recruit­ing, SAP extends beyond its his­tor­i­cal focus on core HR func­tion to estab­lish end-to-end HCM capabilities. 

In the same round­table dis­cus­sion, Rebec­ca Carr, CEO of SmartRe­cruiters, reflect­ed on her company’s evo­lu­tion from opti­miz­ing work­flows through flex­i­ble, inte­grat­ed inter­faces to intro­duc­ing Win­ston, its AI-pow­ered recruit­ing com­pan­ion, ear­li­er this year. With the aim of ​“remov­ing admin­is­tra­tive bur­den from the hir­ing process, allow­ing more time for recruiters and hir­ing man­agers to con­nect and have real con­ver­sa­tions with tal­ent that are going to dri­ve their busi­ness­es for­ward,” she said, SmartRe­cruiters is lever­ag­ing AI to ​“cre­ate a sys­tem, designed for hir­ing, across all stake­hold­ers in the hir­ing process.” 

One ben­e­fit for SAP cus­tomers is that SmartRe­cruiters was designed to be self-ser­vice and easy to con­fig­ure, added Carr, allow­ing for fast and effi­cient imple­men­ta­tions com­pared to oth­er lega­cy HR technologies. 

Going for­ward, SAP and SmartRe­cruiters will ​“share a com­mit­ment to rein­vent­ing how com­pa­nies attract, select, and hire great tal­ent,” she affirmed, fuel­ing ​“inno­va­tion, faster deliv­ery of fea­tures, and — most crit­i­cal­ly — the abil­i­ty for us to focus on deliv­er­ing mea­sur­able busi­ness out­comes to our cus­tomers: faster time to hire, bet­ter con­ver­sion rates, high­er-qual­i­ty hires.”

Finan­cial details of the trans­ac­tion — expect­ed to close in the fourth quar­ter — were not dis­closed, though SmartRe­cruiters achieved a $1.5 bil­lion val­u­a­tion dur­ing a Series E fund­ing round in 2021. Last year, SAP acquired WalkMe, a dig­i­tal adop­tion provider, for $1.5 bil­lion, fol­low­ing its pre­vi­ous pur­chas­es of Ger­man star­tups Sig­navio and LeanIX.