Our co-founder Jeremy Russon spent three days in Amsterdam with SAP and its partner community. Here’s what he heard, what it means for recruiting teams, and why he came home excited.
Three days, one big message
Jeremy’s first report from Amsterdam was a weather update: it was freezing outside. Inside RAI Amsterdam, things warmed up quickly. SAP Partner Summit for EMEA and MEE brought together partners from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to hear where SAP is heading, swap notes and plan for the year ahead.
For us, one theme stood out above the rest: recruiting has moved to the centre of the SAP story. SAP completed its acquisition of SmartRecruiters in September 2025, bringing an AI-powered recruiting platform into the SAP SuccessFactors family. A year on, the summit made it clear that SmartRecruiters is now a core part of how SAP wants its customers to hire.
As a SmartRecruiters delivery partner, that’s music to our ears. Here’s what we took away.
The most reassuring message for customers was this: moving to SmartRecruiters doesn’t mean throwing away your SAP investment. SuccessFactors stays as the HR system of record, and SmartRecruiters provides the modern recruiting experience on top of it.
Even better, there’s no need for a big-bang switch. Organisations can start where the pain is greatest, whether that’s adding conversational AI to improve the candidate experience or modernising one region, brand or high-volume hiring area first. Then they can expand once the value is proven.
Our take: this is exactly how we’d advise most clients to approach it. Big-bang migrations carry big-bang risk. A phased approach, with clear checkpoints and a proven business case at each stage, wins buy-in and keeps the business running while things change.
A modern recruiting front end is only as good as its connection to the core. A big focus of the summit was how SmartRecruiters and SuccessFactors work together, so jobs, candidates and hires flow between them without manual re-keying or data silos.
Our take: integration is where recruiting projects quietly succeed or fail. The connection is maturing fast, but every organisation’s data, positions and processes are different. Mapping what needs to sync, and when, is one of the first things we’d look at with any client making this move.
One session, led by Stefan Haehnle and Pag Miles, focused on how to make a recruiting transition land well with the business. The advice will sound familiar to anyone who’s worked with us:
Our take: technology rarely fails on its own. Projects fail when nobody agrees what success looks like, or when the change is treated as an IT upgrade rather than a new way of hiring. Get these six things right and you’re halfway there.
AI ran through almost every conversation, from matching and screening to scheduling, interviewing and candidate engagement. The direction of travel is clear: we’re moving from AI that assists people to AI agents that can do parts of the work themselves. The event framed it as a shift from automation to autonomy, from reacting to predicting, and from static systems to adaptive ones.
Alongside the excitement came a strong focus on trust: data privacy, regional data residency, the EU AI Act and keeping a human in the loop for hiring decisions.
Our take: this is the part that excites us most, and it’s also where we’d urge the most care. Agentic recruiting could take huge amounts of admin off recruiters’ and hiring managers’ plates. But AI amplifies whatever process it sits on. If your workflow is broken, automating it just makes the broken process faster. And with AI in hiring decisions, governance, security and compliance can’t be an afterthought. We’d always fix the process and set the guardrails first, then let the agents loose.
The first day closed with a brilliant session from Chris Barton, co-founder of Shazam. He walked through the full journey from an idea that solved a real pain point to a product used around the world, with a relentless focus on removing friction.
Jeremy’s favourite line: “Your pebble is someone else’s boulder.”
It’s a perfect lens for recruiting. The extra click in a hiring manager’s approval flow, the clunky step in an application form, the manual re-keying between systems: each feels small to the person who built it.
To the candidate who gives up halfway through, or the recruiter doing it 200 times a week, it’s a boulder. The best recruiting technology, and the best implementations, find those boulders and remove them. That focus underpins every project we deliver at Udder.
We’ve come away from Amsterdam with three convictions:
A big thank you to the SAP partner team for a fantastic event, and to everyone Jeremy caught up with over the three days, including Steven Burr (Zalaris), James Kelly (delaware), Ian Dunne (Gavdi), Greg Durrans (Vision33), and Mahee Thiagarajan, Ed Pigott and Stefan Haehnle from SAP. And, as always, Pag Miles.
Whether you’re on SuccessFactors Recruiting and wondering what SmartRecruiters could do for you, already planning the move, or live and looking to get more from it, we’d love to help. As an independent HR tech consultancy and SmartRecruiters delivery partner, with close to 300 projects under our collective belt, we can help you assess where you are, shape the right roadmap, deliver the change and keep optimising once you’re live.
No bull, just practical advice. Get in touch with the Udder team.