The acquisition closed last year. SmartRecruiters is the platform. Now someone has to decide how and when the move happens.
If you're a CPO or a TA Director, that decision usually arrives on your desk with a recommendation already baked in.
Big-bang cutover by Q3. Or a parallel run for the first 12 months. Or a phased rollout starting with the smallest region.
The recommendation will sound reasonable. It will be backed by a Gantt chart. And it will be wrong more often than the chart suggests.
SAP has signalled that SuccessFactors Recruiting is on a sunset path, with the end-of-support date expected to land in the 2028 to 2030 window. The exact date hasn't been published yet, but the direction is clear.
How you move from SuccessFactors Recruiting to SmartRecruiters has more impact on whether the project finishes on time and within budget than which platform you picked. The post-acquisition path is the single biggest variable in whether this gets remembered as a clean transition or a multi-year drag.
A few weeks ago we made the case for treating this as a fresh implementation rather than a migration ([link to prior piece]). The framing matters here, because some paths only work if you're genuinely starting fresh, and others only work if you're carrying everything forward.
Every SuccessFactors Recruiting customer will move to SmartRecruiters eventually. The remaining choices are timing and path.
Quick disclosure. Udder is a SmartRecruiters partner, so we benefit when these moves go ahead. We've also told clients to wait when the timing was wrong.
The point of this piece is to help you push back on the integration team's path recommendation with informed alternatives. Not to push you towards SmartRecruiters adoption sooner than it makes sense.
Four paths. The trade-offs each one really carries. When each one fits, and when it doesn't.
The plan: pick a date. On that date, SuccessFactors Recruiting stops accepting new requisitions, SmartRecruiters becomes the single source of truth, and open reqs in flight either complete on SuccessFactors or move over depending on the cutover rules.
Integration teams default to this because it produces a clean milestone for their programme reporting and a single training event for the recruiter base. What it actually costs is the absence of a fallback.
A hard deadline forces every gap in your phase 1 inventory work to surface in the four weeks before cutover. If your reporting parity isn't ready, hiring managers move to SmartRecruiters with no analytics for the first six weeks. If your SAP HCM integration breaks on cutover weekend, payroll gets weird the following Monday.
This path fits smaller organisations (under 2,000 hires a year) with a single primary hiring market, an HRIS team that has bandwidth, and a leadership group willing to hold the line on the date when scope creeps. It doesn't fit large multi-region orgs, regulated industries with audit trails that must stay live during transition, or any organisation where the SuccessFactors-to-SmartRecruiters move is happening alongside another major HR system change.
The plan: both systems run live for a defined period, usually 6 to 12 months. New requisitions go into SmartRecruiters, existing ones stay in SuccessFactors until they close, and reporting runs against both while the SuccessFactors reqs drain out.
The appeal is the lowest perceived risk. Nobody loses access to anything, and the messaging ("we're moving gradually") is easy to write.
Licence cost in a parallel run can be lighter than you'd expect. SmartRecruiters subscriptions sometimes include temporary dual entitlement during the parallel window, subject to time caps and conditions, so the budget line for licences can stay close to neutral while it's live.
The operational costs are still real and usually underestimated. Double admin on your HRIS team, recruiters developing different process habits across two systems that won't translate when SuccessFactors goes dark, and downstream integrations splitting awkwardly because half the records sit in one system and half in the other.
The parallel window almost always overruns its original timeline, because nobody is incentivised to close it. If you overrun the dual entitlement window, the licence conversation comes back.
There's one case where this path fits cleanly: when SuccessFactors holds historical data that legal or compliance needs accessible in production rather than archive. Outside that case, the cost-to-risk ratio is worse than most TA leaders realise. Operational drag is visible to anyone running the function, and the "lower risk" rarely shows up on any dashboard.
The plan: a sequence of regional or BU-level cutovers, usually starting with the smallest or most change-tolerant unit. Each region completes its SmartRecruiters rollout before the next begins, with SuccessFactors running in parallel for the un-migrated regions.
What integration teams like is the contained blast radius per phase and the learning that compounds across regions. What it costs is process drift between regions during the long tail, reporting that splits until everyone is on SmartRecruiters (which can take 18 months in a multinational), and recruiters who move regions mid-phase getting caught between two operating models. Internal politics around the order of regions can derail timelines that have nothing to do with the technology.
This path fits large multinationals where each region already operates with material autonomy in hiring process, where there's a natural pilot region small enough to fail cheaply with leadership willing to be the experiment, and where the regional sequence is set by hiring need rather than political calendar. It doesn't fit organisations with heavily centralised hiring operations and consolidated reporting, or any setup where the phased timeline would overlap with another major HR system change.
The plan: don't start the migration this year. Use the post-acquisition integration roadmap to argue for a deferred move date, typically 12 to 24 months out, once current constraints have cleared. Stay on SuccessFactors Recruiting in the meantime, with a committed restart date in the diary.
This path matters more than it used to because of the sunset. Every SuccessFactors Recruiting customer is moving eventually. Deferring buys you time on the conditions of the move, but it doesn't take you out of the queue.
Integration teams usually push back with "we need a consolidated platform across the group." Sometimes that's a real driver. Sometimes it's a preference dressed up as a requirement.
What deferring costs is continued SuccessFactors licence fees during the deferred window, no access to whatever capability the SmartRecruiters move would deliver, and a tighter runway later. The longer you wait, the smaller the window between your restart date and the sunset.
This path fits when current conditions don't support a clean move, meaning other major HR system changes in flight, peak hiring seasons through the proposed timeline, leadership transitions, or an HRIS team without bandwidth. It also fits when SuccessFactors is configured well enough to run cleanly for another 18 to 24 months, and when you can credibly commit to a deferred date the parent organisation will accept. It doesn't fit when parent-co integration timing leaves no room for delay, when SuccessFactors's product roadmap is degrading faster than the deferred window allows, or when the consolidation pressure makes the political cost of delay higher than the operational cost of moving now.
Most post-acquisition path recommendations are made by an integration programme manager whose KPI is "platform consolidation milestone hit by Q3." They will recommend big-bang cutover by default, because it's the only path that produces a clean milestone date.
The recommendation is rational given their KPI. Their KPI may or may not be the metric your hiring operation cares about most.
The questions to ask before signing off on a recommended path:
The most common mistake in SuccessFactors-to-SmartRecruiters path selection is letting the path get chosen by the integration team without challenge, and discovering 9 months in that it doesn't match the operational reality of your hiring function.
The path choice is a TA Director and CPO decision. The integration team can sequence it, govern it, and report on it. They shouldn't be the ones picking it.
Looking at a recommendation right now?
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on the path the integration team has put in front of you, that's the conversation we're having most often this year. Udder is a SmartRecruiters partner, so we'll declare that interest up front. We're happy to flag where the recommended path fits, and equally happy to say where it doesn't.