Beyond the Expo: UNLEASH World 2025 with SAP SuccessFactors and SmartRecruiters

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RC: My name is Rebecca Carr, and I'm the SmartRecruiters CEO.

LA: And I'm Lara Albert, and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for SAP SuccessFactors.

What are the most transformative trends that are going to shape Talent Acquisition as we look forward?

RC: 82% of the recruiting workflow is administrative today, which is a little unfortunate. I mean, if you think about it, hiring, applying for jobs, and going to work every day is a very relatable and personal experience. And yet, we've made it about process and governance rather than connection.

I think what AI is going to offer us is really the opportunity to build agentic workflows and take all of that process away, build more efficiency and insight into the workflow, and probably more transparency as well.

Candidates want to understand how they fare against a job that they're applying to, why they're being selected, why they're not being selected, what they could be doing differently, what they could be learning more of in order to get their dream job.

And so, I think agent-led workflows and transparency are going to be something that just overwhelms our technology industry and what we're working on today.

LA: I think a big one is personalization, I mean, regardless of whether you're thinking about a candidate or an employee, a manager, an HR leader or a recruiter or a hiring manager. Personalization is key.

When you think about the power of AI in terms of delivering highly personalized experiences, it's really a game-changer across the board.

What's so powerful about your new partnership?

RC: As a standalone best-of-breed applicant tracking system for the last 15 years, SmartRecruiters has really been limited by the data that we could see.

We couldn't see candidate data prior to application, and we couldn't see data after the candidate had been hired.

And, actually, one of the most powerful attributes of the recruiting workflow is the insight that you glean from further down the funnel in HR - performance data, learning data.

Now our ability to actually pull that back into the recruiting experience, leverage AI to drive better insight and discovery, is going to make this partnership exceptionally powerful.

LA: For years now, customers have been asking for high-volume recruiting capabilities for great candidate experiences and really great experiences for their recruiters and hiring managers as well.

When you think about what SmartRecruiters has been doing on the AI front, really at the center of their innovation strategy, it's really powerful in terms of what we're going to be able to deliver for our customers.

What HR myth would you like to debunk?

RC: I would say the myth that implementations are extremely expensive and tedious. They actually don't need to be - especially with AI as part of our ecosystem now

You can use agent-led experiences to migrate between platforms to implement more seamlessly and to do so with fewer resources.

I'm actually really excited to build some of those products, and I think it will become more table stakes in the future.

What are you most excited about in the HR technology market?

LA: It's got to be AI.

When you think about the power of Agentic AI and what that can do, not just about helping people achieve entirely new levels of efficiency and automatic processes, but really just redesining how work gets done and freeing people up to not focus on the routine tasks, but be more creative and to apply their problem-solving skills and to lean into empathy and what have you.

With the notion of agents, they're already here. It just reinforces the collaboration between humans and AI.