Axel Springer Improves Efficiency with SmartRecruiters Integrations

The recruiting team of Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH is responsible for recruiting new employees of about 30 subsidiaries within Axel Springer’s national media segment and Axel Springer Holding.

To build a more efficient talent acquisition function, the company needed a system that would engage hiring managers and facilitate collaboration across hiring teams by keeping communications related to hires in one place. They also wanted to reduce the administrative burden of integrating with the SAP HCM.

When the company set about looking for a new ATS, it knew integrations would be crucial to its success. In addition to SAP, Axel Springer’s new recruiting system needed to integrate with its workers’ union hiring practices, Tableau, and SSO, among others.

Claudia Model, Manager Talent Attraction, National Media & Tech at Axel Springer, used her extensive knowledge of the recruitment process and the learnings from the limitations of the old system to define outcomes for their SmartRecruiters instance. Working closely with IT and SmartRecruiters, she and a Talent Attraction colleague acted as “translators” between their operational needs and the technical requirements of Axel Springer’s SmartRecruiters instance. In addition to aligning hiring teams around everyday recruiting practices, the configuration met the integration requirements outlined below.

SAP HCM

A middleware solution connects SAP HCM with SmartRecruiters. When an HR business partner determines from within the HCM that a vacancy needs to be published, the system kicks off a process that sends it to SmartRecruiters with the required information. After the hiring team moves a candidate into the offer stage, SmartRecruiters triggers a connection back to the HCM, which alerts the HR business partner and hiring manager to finalize and send out the contract. With job IDs matched across both systems, this data connection enables accurate reporting and eliminates manual administration.

Worker’s Union

In Germany, the worker’s union must be notified when a hire is about to be made. SmartRecruiters is configured to notify the worker’s union at the required stage in the process. From SmartRecruiters user profiles configured to the exact level of visibility required by GDPR, members of the union can consult a list of names of all candidates for that position, check their profiles, and review data needed to approve the hire.

SSO

Axel Springer constantly welcomes new employees who become users of SmartRecruiters as interviewers, hiring managers, and recruiters. The manual setup of new users was cumbersome, so the team worked together to create a connection between their active directory and SmartRecruiters through middleware. Now, new user setup is automated through SSO.

Tableau

As a user of Tableau, Axel Springer wanted to build meaningful reports on its Talent Attraction data. But as with any reporting tool, people must use it properly to get effective data. The thoughtful implementation of SmartRecruiters and its ease of use supported its adoption, resulting in actionable Tableau Talent Attraction dashboards. The team is now linking up HCM data with SmartRecruiters data for a full-scale picture of the talent lifecycle.

Additionally, SmartRecruiters is configured to automatically delete candidate information in compliance with privacy laws, but still retain anonymous activity data. Now the team can examine historical data and track progress on benchmarks over time.

Before implementing SmartRecruiters, Claudia and her team had laid the groundwork for moving talent acquisition to become a strategic partner in the business. With SmartRecruitrers, they were able to fully realize the benefits of all the work they had done to establish structured processes because the system supported that goal. “The hiring team is really happy about having an efficient workflow,” Claudia said. Using the notifications, the notes function, the in-product interview scheduling, and the rating system helps them make collaborative hiring decisions.

Looking to the future, the addition of SmartCRM is helping Axel Springer build a pipeline of interested talent and eliminate evergreen job postings. With the CRM, they can engage talent pools with a newsletter, job opening updates, and other company information.

Overall, the team Axel Springer has a positive attitude toward the system. After the huge reduction in administrative upkeep thanks to SmartRecruiters integrations, Claudia said, “It’s fun to work on new solutions and integrations with IT, HR, and hiring managers.”