Why most SAP searches are lost before the first interview

A few years ago I ran a masterclass for the full hiring-management layer of a fast-growing software company — every VP, director and team lead who was allowed to say “yes” to a candidate. The brief was simple and terrifying at the same time: in a scale-up, every hire is either a step toward the plan or two steps back from it, plus the money and the runway lost while you go and do it again.

Nowhere is that arithmetic sharper right now than at SAP. That session turned into a framework I’ve used and refined ever since — part borrowed from B2B sales qualification methodology (MEDDPICC-style thinking: don’t move forward until you can evidence the thing you believe), part from behavioral/performance-based interviewing, a technique long used in high-stakes selection.

What follows is that framework, cleaned up, anonymized, and applied specifically to the environment I think needs it most today: SAP hiring.

Why do SAP searches fail before the first interview?

Most SAP hiring conversations are still won or lost on a CV and forty-five minutes of unstructured chat. It feels efficient. It isn’t predictive — and in SAP specifically, the cost of getting it wrong is compounding in a way it wasn’t five years ago.

Start with the evidence base. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter’s meta-analysis of personnel-selection methods, later revisited by Sackett and colleagues, remains the most cited body of work here. The consistent finding across decades of research: unstructured interviews — the “tell me about yourself” style most of us still run — barely correlate with future job performance. Structured interviews, built around consistent criteria and behavioral evidence, come in meaningfully higher, with some re-analyses placing them as the single best predictor of performance available to a hiring manager, ahead of years of experience or education. Years of experience alone barely moves the needle.

In other words: the two things most interview processes lean on hardest — the CV and the unscripted chat — are close to the bottom of the list of things that predict whether someone will succeed in the role.

That gap is everywhere, it’s expensive and it’s structural because of what’s happening in the underlying market.

The SAP talent deficit and SAP demand growth aren’t independent — they feed each other. Strong cloud subscription growth, S/4HANA migrations, integration work and AI projects create more implementation and support work, which pulls harder on an already-tight pool of qualified consultants. That scarcity, in turn, pushes up salaries, contractor day rates and partner fees — S/4HANA skills shortages have repeatedly been linked to higher contractor rates and difficulty retaining junior consultants. The same headcount now costs more to deploy, and the market grows in value even without growing in people.

That scarcity does two things to the way you should be hiring:

It raises the price of getting it wrong. When day rates and salaries are inflated by scarcity, a mis-hire doesn’t just cost the role — it costs a scarcity-priced role, re-run.

It raises the price of moving slowly. ASUG’s Pulse of the SAP Customer research has tracked the same pressure every year since 2022, when a quarter of organizations named skills their single biggest challenge — and the latest edition (787 members, surveyed November 2024) shows it hasn’t eased so much as moved onto the budget line, with 56% now calling S/4HANA expertise one of their most important skills and budget-related challenges jumping from 35% to 52% in a single year. The practical result isn’t that demand disappears — projects get delayed, scope gets cut, go-lives slip, and work shifts to system integrators. Demand is deferred, not destroyed. Which means the pressure doesn’t ease; it queues up.

There’s a second-order effect worth naming, because it changes what you should be hiring for, not just how carefully. High delivery costs and constrained availability are pushing customers and partners toward fit-to-standard implementations, preconfigured industry templates, automated testing, AI-assisted development and offshore/nearshore delivery. That doesn’t shrink the market for SAP people — it reshapes it. Demand for repetitive configuration, testing and basic development work softens, while demand rises for architects, integration specialists, data-migration experts, security professionals and consultants who can translate a business requirement into a standardized cloud process. If your interview process is still built to catch “years of S/4HANA experience” rather than “can this person operate in a fit-to-standard, AI-assisted delivery model,” you’re screening for the SAP market as it existed three years ago.

Put together, there’s a genuine talent ceiling forming under SAP’s growth: projects that can’t be staffed, prices that exceed budget, quality that slips when overloaded experts leave. Early-stage scarcity rewards the market — higher margins, more automation, more outsourcing. Late-stage scarcity punishes it — delays, quality problems, deferred transformation decisions. Every individual hiring manager is, in effect, deciding which side of that line their own team lands on. A structured process that predicts performance is one of the few levers you can control directly when the labor market itself is the constraint.

Where the framework comes from

I didn’t invent this off a whiteboard. I built it the way you build most useful things in hiring: by making a lot of hiring decisions, watching which ones held up eighteen months later, and working backward from the patterns. Over the years I’ve picked out the parts that resonated, tested them repeatedly across go-to-market hiring — the roles where a mis-hire is most expensive because they touch revenue directly, and in SAP that increasingly means delivery roles too, since a bad implementation hire touches revenue almost as directly as a bad sales hire — and kept what people consistently responded well to.

The result is a list of five criteria for reading a candidate, deliberately presented in no fixed order (openly discussing the ranking is what gives the insight), plus a technique for interviewing that actually produces evidence instead of stories.

The five criteria

These aren’t ranked — and honestly, that’s the point. Which one matters most depends on the role, the team, and what’s already true about your culture. What matters is that you look at all five, deliberately, instead of defaulting to the one or two you happen to be good at reading.

Character. Shaped early — by parents, school, sport, the cultures and environments someone has lived through — and largely fixed by the time they’re in front of you. You’re not evaluating whether you like it; you’re reading who this person consistently is when nobody’s managing them. In SAP delivery work, where a consultant is often the client-facing presence for months at a time with limited oversight, this matters more than most functions.

Intelligence & emotional quotient. The combination of raw problem-solving ability and the capacity to read and manage yourself and other people. Both can be developed and trained to a degree — but there’s a ceiling, and it’s worth knowing where that ceiling roughly sits.

Attitude. The most volatile of the five and, in some ways, the most powerful. It’s a choice, and it’s more easily influenced day-to-day than any of the other criteria. Long-term attitude becomes behavior; consistent behavior becomes culture; culture is what eventually hardens into a team’s unspoken norms, rules and values. If you want to change a team’s culture, attitude is usually the lever, not a values poster.

Relevant experience. It’s not just what’s on the CV — it’s the transferable skills, the evidence that someone knows how to win, and just as tellingly, what they were willing to give up in order to win. This is best assessed as a genuine gap analysis against the job to be done, not as a CV-matching exercise. The gap analysis has to be run against where the market is going — fit-to-standard, Clean Core, AI-assisted delivery — not just where a candidate’s last project happened to sit.

Coachability. How someone receives feedback: whether they treat it as a gift, whether they’re actively learning, whether experience visibly changes how they operate. In a role that’s going to evolve fast — and few roles are evolving faster right now than SAP delivery, as tooling and standardization reshape what “good” looks like — this criterion quietly predicts more than any of the others.

Not all five are equally “manageable” — and that changes where you focus as a hiring executive

Here’s the part people usually miss: these five criteria don’t sit on the same axis of “changeable vs. fixed,” and knowing where each one sits tells you where you, as a leader, can have an impact after the hire is made.

Some traits are essentially static — stable, slow to shift, closer to identity than to skill (character sits here). Others are laborious — they can be changed, but only with real, sustained effort (deep experience gaps fall here). Some are time-sensitive, shifting naturally as circumstances and seniority change. Some respond well to a reflective approach — coaching someone by repeating their own statements back to them, letting them arrive at their own insight rather than being told. And some are genuinely imminent — able to shift almost immediately, given the right moment and the right nudge (attitude, again, is the standout here).

The practical takeaway: don’t spend your coaching energy trying to move something static. Spend it where the criteria are imminent or reflective — that’s where a manager’s input compounds fastest. Given how thin the qualified bench already is, spending it in the wrong place isn’t just inefficient — it’s a slower version of the mis-hire you were trying to avoid.

The other half: behavioral/performance-based interviewing

Knowing what to look for is only half the job. The other half is asking questions that actually surface evidence instead of a rehearsed narrative — which matters more, not less, when candidates are in high demand and well-rehearsed.

Definition: behavioral/performance-based interviewing (BPI) is a technique that focuses on a candidate’s actual past experiences, behaviors, knowledge, skills and abilities — asking for specific, real examples of when they demonstrated a behavior, as a way of predicting how they’ll behave and perform in the future.

The caveat that matters: circumstances are often a bigger factor in someone’s success than their behavior as a fixed trait. A different manager, a different team, a different culture, different resources — all of it can produce a very different outcome from the same person. This is a live risk in SAP right now, because success on a well-resourced, well-scoped RISE migration doesn’t automatically transfer to a resource-constrained brownfield conversion. Be aware of the environment a success story happened in, not just the story itself.

Behavioral-focused questions

The core technique is deceptively simple: get the candidate to walk you through a real situation, then “mine” it.

Situation/setting — get them to set the scene, almost like a movie trailer, before you go deeper. And then mine it:

• What were you thinking?
• What did you do?
• What did you say?
• What happened next?

This is the part candidates genuinely can’t prepare a canned answer for. A rehearsed pitch about “leading the migration” collapses quickly once you ask what they were actually thinking in the room and what they said next.

Questions that set the scene and set up the deep dive

A few that consistently produce real signals rather than a highlight reel:

• Tell me about the biggest challenge you faced in that role, and how you dealt with it. Walk me through the company, your title, your role, the team, the environment and the resources you had.
• Please provide me with a detailed overview of an accomplishment you were given, not one you chose. When did it happen, how long did it take, and why do you think you were the one chosen for it?
• What were the three or four biggest challenges in that project, and how did you handle each one?
• Where did you go beyond what was asked, or take the initiative when you didn’t have to?
• Describe your manager’s style at the time, and honestly, whether it worked for you.
• What’s something you’d do differently if you were doing it again today?

None of these are trick questions. They’re just specific enough that a true answer and a fabricated one sound very different when you mine them — and specific enough to expose whether a candidate’s last win was really theirs, or their environment’s.

Bringing it all together

None of this replaces judgment — it just structures it. The five criteria give you a consistent lens instead of five different interviewers each grading on whatever they personally value. The manageability framing tells you where to invest your energy once someone’s hired. And behavioral/performance-based interviewing gives you a way to actually test for all five with evidence, not vibes.

A mis-hire in a growth business doesn’t just cost the salary and recruitment fee. It costs the deals — or the go-lives — that didn’t get worked, the ramp-up time wasted, the time reinvested in whoever replaces the individual, and the morale punch to the team that carried the gap. In SAP specifically, it costs more than that: you’re re-running a scarcity-priced search, in a market where the qualified bench isn’t growing as fast as the demand for it, while your project sits in a queue of deferred work that isn’t getting any shorter. If a slightly more structured, slightly more deliberate interview process shaves even a small percentage off your mis-hire rate, the math works out fast — and in this market, it works out faster than it used to.

I’d genuinely be interested to hear how other SAP hiring executives and leaders weigh and rank these five criteria, and whether the order changes by role — delivery versus sales versus architecture. That’s exactly the kind of debate the original masterclass audience had, and it’s usually where the best insight shows up.

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Lennaert Buschman is Managing Consultant at Osprey International, where he builds talent teams inside the SAP, Workday and ServiceNow ecosystems. He writes here in a personal capacity; views are his own. Articles are vendor- and firm-neutral.

Next: the other side of the same table — Why SAP Job Descriptions Repel the People They Need · or subscribe to The Talent Brief, the SAP talent market, honestly.