Moving from SuccessFactors to SmartRecruiters: the 90-day checklist before you sign with an implementation partner

The acquisition closed last year. The integration team has a roadmap, IT has had vendor conversations, and SmartRecruiters is the recommended path.

Now you need an implementation partner.

Your inbox has three or four proposals coming in, and the procurement deadline is 90 days out.

That window is where the migration will succeed or fail.

The proposal is the project

A few weeks ago, we made the case for not treating your move from SuccessFactors Recruiting to SmartRecruiters as a migration, but as a fresh implementation (if you haven't read it yet, check it out here). We still stand by that view. For consistency with the terms used in the market, we'll refer to the process as a migration in what follows.

The implementation partner you sign with sets every assumption your team will live with for the next 9 months. If the proposal is wrong, the project is wrong, and the change requests start in week 6.

Most proposals are wrong because the brief was wrong. Most briefs are wrong because the homework was deferred or skipped altogether.

Quick disclosure. Udder is one of the implementation partners you might be evaluating. We've spent the last 5 years implementing SmartRecruiters for clients in a wide array of industries.

The full SF-to-SR migration is a relatively new pattern though. No firm has done many of them end-to-end yet. What we and other implementation partners have done a hundred times is the component pieces.

The checklist below is the version we'd want a client to walk in with when conversations start.

The checklist covers three phases. Use it as a working doc with the migration lead and your HRIS admin in the room.

Phase 1 (days 1 to 30): Inventory the truth

You can't scope a migration off a brochure version of what you have. Most TA leaders genuinely don't know how much custom logic lives in SuccessFactors until someone exports it.

Get this on paper before any other conversations start.

• Active requisition fields. Pull every custom field, including the ones nobody uses. Mark which were built for a single hiring manager, a single country, or a single compliance reason. The "we need it" list is usually 30% of what's there.
• Approval workflows. Count them. Per business unit, per country, per role family. Note where the approver chain depends on org-chart logic that SmartRecruiters doesn't replicate the same way.
• Candidate status reasons. Exact list, plus how often each one fired in the last 12 months. Analyse the bottom 20% of the list and the reason why they exist. If you can't tie one to an actual business reason, drop it from the migration list.
• Career site footprint. How many career sites, how many locales, how many job boards posting outbound. SmartRecruiters handles this differently and the cost of replicating "what we have today" is usually overstated.
• Reporting and dashboards. List the reports anyone has actually opened in the last 6 months. Most SuccessFactors report libraries have hundreds. The live ones are usually 8 to 12.
• Integrations. Every system writing to or reading from SuccessFactors Recruiting. SAP HCM, Employee Central, payroll, background check vendor, video interview, assessment tools, CRM. Mark which are bidirectional and which are read-only.

Output of this phase: a one-page "actual state" doc. If you can't fit it on one page, you've inventoried wishlist, not reality. This page is the input to your brief.

Phase 2 (days 31 to 60): Write the brief that makes good proposals possible

This is where most migrations get scoped wrong before anyone has been hired. Implementation partners price what they can see in your brief. They can't price what's missing from it.

A good brief has six things in it.

• The actual-state doc. The phase 1 output goes in here, exactly as written. It's the foundation everything else builds on.
• The non-negotiables. Compliance items, candidate-data residency rules, country-specific application forms. Anything where "we'll figure it out later" isn't an option. Name them now or get a proposal that quietly de-scopes them.
• The integrations you absolutely need preserved on day one of go-live. SAP HCM, Employee Central, payroll, your background check vendor, video interview tools. Mark which are blocking and which are deferrable. Most briefs we see don't make that distinction, and the resulting proposal blends the two.
• The reporting parity bar. Reporting parity with SuccessFactors is a separate workstream. Saying "we'll need our existing reports rebuilt" without naming which reports doubles a quote without anyone noticing.
• A description of the in-house team and what they can own. Most clients have an HRIS admin who can do real configuration work. Most proposals price as if your team has zero capacity. Tell partners what your team can carry.
• Your timeline constraint and why. "Q4 freeze because we hire 60% of grads in October" is useful. "We'd like to be done by year-end" is not. Reasons let a partner challenge the timeline. Preferences just get accepted at face value.

Send the same brief to every partner. Different briefs make proposals incomparable.

Phase 3 (days 61 to 90): Read the proposals like someone who's been on both sides

Three proposals come back. They aren't comparable. Here is what to look at and what not to fall for.

• Assumptions before totals. Two proposals can quote the same number with completely different assumed scopes. Pull the assumptions section to the front of your comparison spreadsheet. The partner with the most explicit assumptions usually has the most realistic plan.
• The discovery questions are the proposal. A partner who didn't ask you questions before submitting either has a templated approach that won't survive contact with your config, or they've decided not to charge for discovery and will recover it through change requests. Either way, count it.
• Be careful with anyone claiming they've "done this 100 times". They haven't. The full SF-to-SR migration is new enough that any partner claiming deep end-to-end scars is overstating. What you want is a partner who's done many many SmartRecruiters implementations, and who can tell you honestly which parts of your specific migration are net-new for them too.
• The named team versus the team you'll get. Proposals usually feature senior consultants in the credentials section. Ask which named individuals will be on your project, for what % of their time, for which weeks. If the answer is "our team," the answer is junior.
• The shortest timeline is rarely the most experienced answer. A 4-month plan from a partner who hasn't asked you about your approval workflows is doing less work than the 6-month plans. Ask what they're not doing that the longer plans are doing.
• The cheapest proposal is usually missing two workstreams. Reporting and integrations are the two most-commonly de-scoped workstreams, because they're easy to push out of phase 1. Find them in the deliverables list. If they aren't there, they're a future change request waiting to happen.
• How they handle scope discoveries. Mid-build, every project hits things that weren't visible at proposal stage. Ask each partner how their last three projects handled scope discoveries. The answer tells you whether they treat scope changes as collaborative re-plans or as billable extras.

Compare on the total cost of an apples-to-apples scope. Headline numbers are noise.

The 90 days is the cheapest part of the project

A real SF-to-SR migration costs what it costs. The variance comes from how much of the work was front-loaded into your brief versus back-loaded into change requests. Front-loaded migrations finish on time and within budget noticeably more often than back-loaded ones.

The 90 days you spend before signing the implementation contract pay for the next 9 months. Skip them and you pay anyway, just at a higher hourly rate, with someone else holding the project plan.

Building the brief now?

If you want a second pair of eyes on the actual-state doc or the brief, that's the conversation we're having most often this year. Udder is a SmartRecruiters partner, so we'll declare that interest up front.