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.