In today鈥檚 fast-changing world of work, hiring the right talent has never been more critical鈥攐r complex. HR and talent acquisition leaders are under growing pressure to deliver fast results, navigate rising uncertainty, and keep up with rapidly evolving skills needs in their business.

According to the World Economic Forum鈥檚 , 63% of employers cite skills gaps in the labor market as the primary barrier to business transformation, while 86% expect AI to significantly transform their business over the next five years. The study also reports that talent availability is declining, making it harder for organizations to find the right talent with the right capabilities needed for the future. At the same time, organizations are rethinking their approaches to hiring, embracing AI and moving toward more agile, skills-based strategies to compete for talent in a dynamic and evolving job market. 

That鈥檚 why selecting the right technology partner matters now more than ever. Organizations need a solution that can help them stay ahead of change, drive smarter hiring, and fuel growth and long-term business success. 鈥淭alent acquisition priorities are changing, leading to evolving concentrations and points of entry in an increasingly diversifying vendor space in the market,鈥� says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager, Employee Experience at IDC. 鈥淚ncreased pressures to reduce the time to place qualified talent in roles that fill persistent and evolving skills gaps are leading talent acquisition buyers to rethink their approaches to hiring and the tools that support them.鈥�

51风流SuccessFactors is proud to be named a Leader in the . 51风流SuccessFactors solutions can empower organizations of all sizes to address the ever-changing challenges of hiring in today鈥檚 complex, skills-driven world of work.

The report analyzes the expansive talent acquisition ecosystem, evaluating 22 vendors for user experience, native solution capabilities, future development pipelines, and company criteria, including size, scope, geographic reach, and future growth targets. We believe 51风流SuccessFactors鈥� position as a Leader reflects visionary product strategy, continuous innovation, comprehensive solution functionality, and demonstrated customer value and satisfaction. The IDC MarketScape states, 鈥�51风流SuccessFactors Recruiting is part of the 51风流SuccessFactors HCM suite and provides AI-enabled tools, resources, and services to support recruiters and talent teams to source and align talent to their best-fit connection points within the organization.鈥� Highlighting 51风流SuccessFactors鈥� strengths, the report mentions, 鈥�51风流SuccessFactors customers find that the solution provides them with deep insights drawn from across the existing and modeled workforce. 51风流SuccessFactors鈥� AI and analytical capabilities support clients to tie candidate-centric hiring practices into the evolving and modeled skilling and position needs of the organization.鈥�

Helping companies hire smarter and faster

Hiring today isn鈥檛 just about filling open roles. It鈥檚 about building strong talent pipelines, finding people with the right skills and potential, creating exceptional candidate experiences, and aligning every hire to overall HR and business goals. and offer comprehensive, AI-enabled solutions that can simplify global hiring to help organizations attract, engage, and hire top talent with the right skills needed today and in the future.

The IDC MarketScape notes, 鈥�51风流SuccessFactors Recruiting helps recruiters maintain fluid and flexible organizational talent pipelines that retain and progressively match high-performing talent to where they are best fit within the evolving organization.鈥� The report continues, 鈥淥verall, recruiters and talent acquisition teams find that 51风流SuccessFactors鈥� recruiting and talent acquisition capabilities are feature rich, support dynamic and evolving compliance and sourcing needs, and support custom and AI-informed workflows and candidate progression.鈥� 51风流SuccessFactors solutions can enable organizations to accelerate hiring with AI-enabled talent acquisition capabilities, including AI-enhanced job descriptions, AI-assisted applicant screening, AI-recommended interview questions, AI-driven skills-based job recommendations, AI-assisted onboarding and offboarding, AI-assisted writing, and AI-driven interview summarization.

Adopting the right AI-enabled talent acquisition strategy is what puts innovative businesses ahead. , a large and diversified holding company in Brunei turned to 51风流SuccessFactors solutions to transform HR鈥檚 impact on its business, increasing productivity and efficiency to over 30 subsidiaries across 14 industries. 鈥淲ith 51风流Business AI technology embedded in 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, we鈥檝e seen significant benefits such as reducing our overall recruitment time from months to weeks. The AI features have streamlined processes for generating and updating job descriptions and creating competency-based interview questions, making our recruitment process more efficient and standardized,鈥� shares Salehin Basir, human capital development manager at Darussalam Assets. The company has seen significant benefits, such as four-times more efficient hiring processes, a 75% reduction in recruitment time, and deeper insights into important HR metrics that improve data-driven decision-making and reduce bottlenecks.

Powering a skills-based, AI-driven talent strategy

With a talent landscape defined by continuous change, the future of hiring relies on taking a skills-based approach to identifying, securing, and growing the right talent. The reports that 70% of organizations plan to hire for emerging, in-demand skills, while 51% intend to reskill or upskill existing employees to fill growing skills needs. Whether an organization is focused on developing talent from within or bringing in new capabilities to keep their business ahead, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions can help talent teams stay agile, efficient, and aligned to business needs.

According to trusted HCM Industry Analyst Josh Bersin鈥檚 , talent acquisition leaders state a growing priority to implement skills throughout their talent functions and strategies鈥攆or both hiring and internal mobility. The factbook shares, 鈥淎I plays a key role in deploying skills in a scalable and sustainable way, particularly as in-demand and job-specific skills are constantly changing. It can help match skills to jobs, identify skill adjacencies, pinpoint where talent with specific skills is located, uncover learning opportunities, and more.鈥�

Our latest finds growing workforce confidence around the potential value of AI, with 70% of managers agreeing that using AI technology for skills-based decision-making would be somewhat or very valuable, and an overwhelming majority of employees () feeling positively about skills-based decision-making. The IDC MarketScape highlights how 51风流SuccessFactors users can quickly see value from implementing skills-based hiring strategies, noting: 鈥淪implified application processes help candidates apply from any device and leverage AI to parse skills from their resumes to match those with the company鈥檚 evolving skills architecture and talent intelligence.鈥�

Bringing these insights to life, is a powerful example of how leading organizations are building skills-based talent strategies ready for the future. Capgemini, a global business and technology partner with 340,000 employees across more than 50 countries turned to 51风流SuccessFactors solutions when looking for an HR infrastructure that would allow it to attract, retain, and grow market-leading skills. Capgemini built a skills engine to support the moments that matter across the employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, talent management, compensation and rewards, learning, and succession management. The company is implementing 51风流SuccessFactors HCM to enable skills-based people management and deliver a highly engaging people experience.

Going beyond talent acquisition, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions help align hiring to overall HR strategies, with connected, unified ; a single skills foundation; AI-enabled talent intelligence; and advanced, cross-suite capabilities. The IDC MarketScape notes, 鈥�51风流SuccessFactors Recruiting is a natural extension of the 51风流SuccessFactors environment that gives companies a fully integrated platform for insights-driven, end-to-end candidate and employee lifecycle management.鈥� The assessment further notes, 鈥淭alent acquisition teams can benefit from deep continuous workforce planning insights that guide for and optimize the balance between internal mobility and external hiring for a higher efficacy in talent placement.鈥�

As we look toward the future, organizations that embrace skills-based talent strategies and AI-driven talent acquisition will be best positioned to adapt, grow, and lead in an ever-changing world of work. Learn more about why we were named a Leader in the and discover more about and .

As organizations adapt to these changes, HR teams must lead the way in building a future-ready workforce that can meet the business demands of today while preparing for those of tomorrow.

With strong global core HR, embedded AI capabilities, and a unified skills foundation, connects HR across the organization, unearths key workforce insights, and provides the flexibility organizations need to succeed in a world that never stands still. 

In the first half 2025 (1H 2025) product release, we鈥檙e excited to introduce more than 250 innovative features and enhancements, many assisted by AI, that are designed to help organizations address any business need and stay ahead of the curve.

51风流Business AI

51风流continues to be at the forefront of business AI with new capabilities to help drive organizational efficiencies.

With this latest release, we are announcing Joule on 51风流SuccessFactors mobile. , the AI copilot from SAP, helps employees and managers to quickly find information, complete tasks, and gain valuable insights — all through a self-service interface they can use at the office or on the go. In the new release, Joule helps employees easily understand their pay statement and create and update time-off requests, while managers can gain quick access to status of required learning for their teams and more.

In addition to English, Joule is now available in 10 new languages, including Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Recruiting and onboarding

With this release also comes a redesigned application experience in . A guided, modernized user interface helps applicants dynamically enter their information while simplifying and accelerating the application process, reducing application drop-offs. The new experience gives candidates access to a refreshed applications dashboard, enabling them to view their submissions, complete post-application actions, and easily access, navigate, and update their information.

As part of the offboarding capabilities in , alumni can now manage personal鈥痠nformation鈥痑nd gain access to support, documents, and resources, even after termination. Additionally, AI-assisted offboarding through Joule helps enable task completion and provides departing employees with a well-structured offboarding experience.

Performance and goals

We are excited to unveil the new performance form experience in , now with a dynamic, intuitive design for a more engaging user experience. The new interface enhances performance tasks by providing contextual information and optimizing screen space, minimizing cognitive load and scrolling to boost focus and efficiency.

To further enhance the experience, we are introducing new AI-assisted features, including:

• Comment suggestions based on the skill and rating selected, helping evaluators provide constructive, growth-centric feedback
• Performance insights for managers, which analyzes talent data and summarizes employee鈥檚 strengths, achievements, and areas for improvement
• Sentiment analysis for 360-degree reviews to help employees quickly identify negative or mixed feedback, highlighting areas that need improvement and enabling focused professional development.

Learning

As organizations face growing skill gaps, continuous learning remains critical for employees to stay competitive and adapt to evolving challenges.

New skills-focused learning offers a curated list of learning opportunities to improve key skills and competencies. Users can discover filtered learning options tailored to their upskilling needs, supporting organizational transformation.

Core HR and payroll

51风流provides industry-leading solutions spanning core HR, payroll, and time that give organizations the flexibility to meet any business challenge.

Building on the successful launch of our updated people profile in , we鈥檝e continued to enhance the user experience by bringing in additional content from across 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, including benefits, payroll, and learning.

To further support the unique requirements of public sector organizations, we are introducing a new portlet that displays the financing status of an employee.

With this release, we are also introducing the integration of the position budgeting control workbench with , previously announced at SuccessConnect. Along with existing integrations with 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central and 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, this provides payroll administrators with real-time insights into position budget utilization and costs. The wider visibility enables better management of allocated funds and grants, offering a comprehensive view of salary costs, committed budget, and available funds for personnel expenses.

Additionally, we are enhancing our payroll control center, delivering a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the entire payroll process. With this enhancement, payroll administrators can optimize operations with a flowchart of tasks and their sequence in each payroll cycle. This improved experience provides real-time insights from pre-payroll activities to post-payroll processing.

We are also releasing a new local payroll version for Bulgaria, bringing the total number of natively supported locales to 53, with more supported by partners.

Learn more

These are just a few highlights from the 1H 2025 release. To learn about all of the more than 250 innovations and enhancements designed to give organizations the flexibility to address any business need, check out the or .

Bianka Woelke is group vice president and head of Application Product Management for 51风流SuccessFactors.

And for you and your business, you can tell all those success stories 鈥� and more 鈥� with the 51风流SuccessFactors HCM suite and our first half 2024 release.

As your organization and employees begin to embrace AI, HR has the opportunity to drive new levels of employee productivity, engagement, and growth. 51风流SuccessFactors HCM can give you everything you need 鈥� the global foundation, skills framework, people-first experiences, and purpose-built AI capabilities 鈥� to help take HR to the next level. With the 51风流SuccessFactors first half 2024 release, we are delivering more than 250 innovative features and enhancements.

51风流Business AI

In 1H 2024, we are thrilled to introduce more than 25 new AI capabilities to enable better employee experiences and new levels of productivity.

Among these capabilities include the ability for applicants to provide skills during the application process. This can enable recruiters to see a skills compatibility for each applicant based on matching the applicant鈥檚 skills and the job requisition, helping improve applicant screening and time to hire. Furthermore, personalization in 51风流SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace is enhanced with new AI-driven recommendation categories, 鈥淚gnite Your Role鈥� and 鈥淩each Your Aspirations.鈥� These guided experiences can enable employees to proactively take steps to reach their development goals.

Generative AI continues to be embedded across the 51风流SuccessFactors HCM suite, including new capabilities to help employees create ready-made performance and development goals and AI-assisted writing to help improve the quality, clarity, and conciseness of writing across a variety of areas within 51风流SuccessFactors solutions.

Further, with this release, insights based on an employee鈥檚 compensation and job history are available to help support managers in having effective and well-informed compensation discussions. 

We have also added more than 15 new capabilities in this release to help both managers and employees get work done in a conversational way, such as creating or changing a position, creating spot awards, clocking in and out, and viewing pay statements as well as time capabilities like requesting time off, checking leave balances, and syncing holidays to Outlook calendars while managers can review and approve time off. Further, employees can now clock in and out using Joule, Microsoft Teams, or the 51风流SuccessFactors Mobile app.

51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central

We are excited to unveil two new people profile experiences 鈥� the profile preview and the spotlight view. The profile preview can provide a snapshot of key areas of the employee profile, including job, manager, location, and contact details, to quickly view and connect with others. Additionally, the spotlight view can showcase employee skills and competencies, mentoring and target roles, and other relevant personal and organizational information.

We are also introducing a new org chart experience with a refreshed look and feel. Available on desktop and mobile, users can explore their organizational structure with improved expand and collapse capabilities, which helps provide full accessibility to an employee鈥檚 profile preview, with an option to open the new spotlight view.

Customers can now automatically process new hires from 51风流SuccessFactors Recruiting and 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding into 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central. This capability helps further reduce the time to hire, which is especially important with mass, seasonal, and high-volume hiring.

51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central Global Benefits

With this release, we are pleased to introduce a new benefits enrollment experience for insurance, savings, and pension benefit types. Available on both desktop and mobile, the guided experience for benefits elections can give employees increased convenience with improved navigation and increased confidence with side-by-side plan comparisons and embedded instructional text. Additionally, employees can update dependent information and manage beneficiaries directly from the benefits enrollment process, which helps further streamline the enrollment experience.  

51风流SuccessFactors Time Tracking

We are thrilled to share the launch of a new time sheet experience that integrates the latest version of My Timesheet in 51风流S/4HANA with 51风流SuccessFactors. Employees can now record time for payroll, as well as against activities and cost objects, from a single time sheet across applications. This helps organizations leverage real-time connectivity between HR and finance operations to keep track of employee activity and labor costs and to pay employees accurately and on time.

Additionally, a new monthly calendar view for time sheets can give employees and managers a complete picture of recorded time over a month. Users can drill down into specific days and submit or approve time for pay periods beyond a week, such as biweekly or monthly.

For managers, a new time approval center helps simplify approvals with a centralized dashboard highlighting anomalies for swift resolution. Managers can monitor team working hours effectively, helping to ensure accurate and timely payroll processing.

51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding

With enhancements to the onboarding journey experience, new hires can now use the new Your Onboarding Checklist page to reference and complete all tasks 鈥� onboarding data collection, compliance tasks, additional onboarding tasks, and exploring the onboarding guide 鈥� from one place with a single view. Available for new hires, rehires, internal hires, and employees with global assignments, this improved experience can save time for onboarding participants while helping to ensure productivity from the start.

And that鈥檚 only a fraction of all the innovations we鈥檙e bringing to customers in 1H 2024. There鈥檚 much more in the release, including new and exciting updates in:

• Generative AI and Joule capabilities
• 51风流SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace
• 51风流SuccessFactors Compensation
• 51风流SuccessFactors Succession & Development
• 51风流SuccessFactors Incentive Management
• 51风流SuccessFactors Work Zone

Read the and watch the to find out more.

Bianka Woelke is group vice president of Application Product Management at SAP.

• Can the business accommodate teams requiring physical space to get work done?
• How can leaders help accelerate the transition to having their staff back in proximity to them?
• Are there any state, local, federal, and customer pandemic policies that should be considered?
• Will the workforce respond to the transition well enough to build a cohesive culture and strong morale?
• How can employees come back with the peace of mind that they and their families will remain safe, regardless of vaccination status?

These matters unquestionably impact how businesses drive enduring changes to operating models, adapt mindsets to meet safety measures, and ensure inclusive environments that support productivity. But when left unanswered, undue anxiety and stress emerge across the workforce 鈥� driving hesitancy of on-site work, increasing employee turnover and burnout, and making attracting new talent unnecessarily tricky.

Building Assurance and Trust with Technology

Just like technology was a critical enabler of a successful work-from-home transition, it can produce the insight and visibility to define and communicate policies and their rationale. And for employees, information 鈥� such as overall health and vaccine status 鈥� can boost their confidence when stepping foot into the workplace again.

After talking to our customers about their workforce challenges throughout the pandemic, 51风流introduced the聽聽as a free upgrade option for the聽聽solution that is also accessible through the app.

51风流is not positioned to offer legal advice on vaccine mandates, health guidelines, and state, local, and federal requirements. But we are distinctively qualified to build a mobile-friendly portlet that collects data from our cloud-based human resource information system (HRIS) solution to help monitor and track employee health and vaccine status and inform decision-making.

For example, employees can provide by uploading a copy of their vaccine cards or exemption documents with their desktops and mobile devices. Plus, by checking the verification field in their profile and following related workflows and notifications, they can help ensure the HRIS solution records their status accurately.

HR organizations can extend the employee vaccination feature to the solution. They can customize vaccine data collection for new hires and existing employees to better monitor and make decisions that safeguard the health and safety of the workforce according to local and federal requirements.

Other areas of the business can also address unique demands and processes by personalizing the standardized content delivered through the health and vaccine tracking portlet. The portlet鈥檚 home page can be reconfigured to include links to national and local agencies, regional vaccine trackers, corporate policies, and organizational information.

Analytics embedded in the HRIS solution can also be used in the portlet to assess health risks securely and confidentially. A report story dashboard provides actionable data to designated executives and managers 鈥� such as employees in need of vaccination and the percentage of vaccinated employees based on, for example, department, division, and cost center.

Sharing Data to Help Ensure Business-Wide Health

The health and vaccination data collected with the portlet can help automate compliance verification. This capability can help meet the requirements of organizations that conduct government work, operate in countries or industries with strict mandates, or have internal vaccination policies for existing employees and new hires.

Automation of the validation processes is particularly important as vaccine-related obligations evolve rapidly and differ for every organization based on the type of business, location, and the emergence of new variants and health recommendations. Organizations can quickly report who is fully or partially vaccinated, has intentions to start the process, or chooses to decline due to health reasons or personal objections.

Businesses can further extend their use of the health and vaccine tracking portlet to include their legal and compliance teams in planning a physical workplace reopening. They can work together to address organizational and individual employee concerns with expertise in immediate corporate needs, local and federal policies, and long-term growth strategies.

Calming Fears and Moving Forward

While the desire for returning on-site work remains mixed, clear COVID-19 protocols and interventions can alleviate a considerable portion of employees鈥� stress. But following generic guidance is not enough to calm fears.

With the health and vaccine tracking portlet in 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central, businesses can be better equipped to care for the health and safety of employees and their families through specific COVID-19 practices. They can now understand their workforce鈥檚 health status in real time to identify opportunities and risks and plan a strategy that keeps people protected and productive.

Rinky Karthik is principal HR cloud architect for Cloud Architecture Advisory at SAP.
Mark Baker is head of Human Experience Management (HXM) Services Strategy at SAP.

鈥淥nboarding processes must facilitate a sense of community between new employees and their colleagues in order to develop an effective team and instill a sense of emotional belonging, connecting an employee to the company and its mission,鈥� said Dr. Lauren Bidwell, senior research scientist for Product Strategy Research at 51风流SuccessFactors. 鈥淯nderstanding the scope of the 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding solution can increase an organization鈥檚 success when it comes to effective onboarding.鈥�

To support customers in learning more about 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding, 51风流offers demos, product forums, and customer community user groups, which connect peer customers to share and learn from one another with product knowledge, lessons learned, best practices, and business processes. A new product user group for 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding customers is now available and will host its first meeting on October 28.

鈥淥ne of the biggest advantages of our user groups is that they are customer-led and customer-focused,鈥� said Pamela Platte, global director of User Group Engagement for 51风流SuccessFactors. 鈥淐ustomers love to collaborate and learn from one another. 51风流SuccessFactors user groups provide networking and the ability to share stories with other HR customers. It鈥檚 so great to watch customers answer questions, share how they did something, and coordinate time for further discussions.鈥�

Any 51风流SuccessFactors customer can engage in the user group communities, which are available by product, region, and industry.

鈥淐ustomers interested in learning more about 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding should attend our first group meeting to learn best practices from not only 51风流product leaders, but also peer customers that use the product every day,鈥� Platte said. 鈥淚 invite everyone in the HR and Talent Management community to join the conversation, collaborate, and learn.鈥�

The interactive meeting on October 28 will include a customer spotlight presentation, an onboarding thought leader presentation, and time to discuss the 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding solution and its features with other customers.

To learn more about 51风流SuccessFactors user group communities and register for the 51风流SuccessFactors Onboarding user group meeting on October 28, log in to the .