The latest M&A news in the HR sector comes from SAP’s planned acquisition of SmartRecruiters. UNLEASH explores what this means for the market, both businesses and their customers in an exclusive conversation with SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr.
Global enterprise and AI business, SAP, is set to acquire SmartRecruiters, an AI recruiting company.
The planned acquisition hopes to provide SAP customers with better end-to-end recruitment management, faster time-to-hire, and improved decision-making through embedded analytics and AI-driven insights.
UNLEASH discovers more about what the acquisition will mean for both businesses in an exclusive conversation with SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr.
SAP, a software and AI business, has entered into an agreement to acquire SmartRecruiters, a talent acquisition provider.
The deal will allow SAP to utilize SmartRecruiters’ knowledge of high-volume recruiting, recruitment automation and AI-enabled candidate experience to strengthen its SAP SuccessFactors human capital management (HCM) suite.
SAP customers will therefore have greater access to the tools they need to attract and retain top talent through SAP’s all-in-one HCM suite.
Currently, SmartRecruiters’ Software-as-a-Service solutions and platform enable more than 4,000 organizations to manage their hiring workflows efficiently end-to-end.
By integrating SmartRecruiters into SAP, the business aims to improve its HR tools by strengthening decision-making, reducing time-to-hire and providing a better experience for candidates.
Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH, SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr says: “This isn’t just about acquisition, it’s about acceleration.
“SAP sees what our customers already know: that hiring is make-or-break, and SmartRecruiters has built the only platform designed from the ground up to meet that challenge.
We didn’t bolt on AI or retrofit outdated systems. We reimagined what hiring should feel like fast, collaborative, intuitive, and built for real-world complexity.”
Additionally, greater insight into talent pools, hiring bottlenecks and workforce planning will also be leveraged as a result of embedded analytics and AI-driven recommendations from both companies.
This fits with SAP’s core values, as Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering expressed that hiring the right people is “not just an HR priority” but rather a “business priority”.
In a statement, he shared that the planned acquisition will help SAP customers attract and hire talent, enabling them to “advance their talent acquisition agendas with speed and agility”.
He continued to explain that the acquisition will enable SAP customers to manage their candidate lifecycle in a single system – from sourcing and interviewing to onboarding.
This will not only streamline the experience for candidates, but for recruiters and hiring managers, too.
Concluding, Carr adds: “Our customers have always been our compass, pushing us to deliver what actually works: faster time-to-hire, better conversion rates, and a hiring experience people want to use.
“With SAP’s scale, reach, and enterprise muscle behind us, we’re going bigger, bolder, and faster.
Together, we’re not just responding to the future of work, we’re building it. We’ll continue to lead with product, driven by purpose, and grounded in the belief that great hiring changes everything.”
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
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Senior Journalist, UNLEASH
Lucy Buchholz is an experienced business reporter, she can be reached at lucy.buchholz@unleash.ai.
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