SAP has over 100,000 employees, operates in nearly every country on earth, and generates revenue in the tens of billions. So when their Global Head of Talent Discovery says the old way of hiring isn't working anymore, it's worth paying attention.
In this episode of Talent All Stars, Eric Goldstein explains why SAP ditched "talent acquisition" as a concept, how they're building a skills-based hiring engine from the inside out, and why the real cost of a vacant role has nothing to do with the recruiting fee.
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Connect with Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericgoldstein2010/
Learn more about SAP: www.sap.com
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[00:00:00] Eric Goldstein: The half-life of skills, obviously is shrinking dramatically, and we're invested in upskilling our existing talent quickly. We wanna cultivate that talent as our competitors are calling in and trying to recruit our own talent. Why don't we do the same? So we're leaning into that.Â
[00:00:15] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter, and on Talent All Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.Â
Today's talent All-Star is Eric Goldstein, the Global Head of Talent Discovery at SAP, one of the world's largest enterprise software companies.
Before SAP, Eric spent years leading executive search and talent strategy at IBM and Korn Ferry. But here's the twist. He started his career as a CPA in financial audit, about as far from talent acquisition as you can get. So let's start the conversation right there. Goldstein, welcome to Talent All Stars.
[00:00:58] Eric Goldstein: Great to be here. Thank you for having me, Dave.Â
[00:01:00] Dave Travers: Awesome. So we got a bunch to talk about, and I wanna start before your current world of Talent and SAP and go back to your. Prior roles, you didn't always work in talent. When in the path of working on M & A and doing accounting and things like that, when did the light bulb go off?
That maybe being on the people side of things, rather than the numbers side of things or the deal side of things, might be a fit for you?Â
[00:01:26] Eric Goldstein: My background is not conventional for someone in the talent acquisition space. And I'll tell you, I remember the exact moment when I decided that financial audits were not the thing for me.
So just to take a step backward, I was an undergrad, had my English major liberal arts background, didn't really know what I wanted to do, and minored in business. I immediately went and got my MBA with a specialization in accounting, and then found myself at Coopers and Lybrand, which is now Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and I was conducting financial of audits of large financial institutions, mostly broker-dealers, insurance companies, uh, like Goldman Sachs and an IG, and that sort of thing.Â
And I remember it must have been about 1994, and I was sitting in the basement of Goldman Sachs on 85 Broad Street in downtown New York. And I was, at the time, it was all paper.
Papers and I was ticking and tying, uh, adding numbers in a column basically, and making sure they cross foot and foot and that good stuff as an entry-level person would start out doing. And it wasn't even the nature of the work that I came to, the conclusion that it wasn't for me, because I didn't mind kind of doing the grunt work.
The proximity is so important, and we'll get to that later, I'm sure, in the conversation in the age of AI and the impact it's having on early talent, because I think proximity is super important, but it was really when I found out. Out that large financial institutions generally get an unqualified opinion regardless, right?
So sometimes some minor adjustments are made to the financial statements to make sure they're in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and what have you. And it came to the realization in that moment that it didn't really matter if I was there or not. And that really struck me because I'm all about having impact and value, and that's what really gets me up in the morning.
That value proposition just was off to me. So what I did was I toggled, I pivoted as I have done later in my career. And this was an early pivot. After a couple years in audit, I went into m and a advisory services. This is within the transactional services division of Coopers & Lybrand at the time.
And what it was essentially was doing due diligence, financial due diligence on behalf of private equity buyers back. Then they were known as LBO firms. And so it kick the tires on middle market companies from a financial statement perspective and just make sure that there was no fundamental financial problems that would derail a deal.
And at a young age, I get to interview CEOs and CFOs and COOs, and I realized I really, really liked that. And then ultimately the travel got to me, 'cause I was young, I was in a relationship with my now wife, and I was traveling every week. I was on a plane somewhere else and doing cool work, but the lifestyle just didn't line up for me at that point in time.
So ultimately I became a CFO of a company called TMP Worldwide, a divisional CFO of their executive search division, and got to know the executive search business, which I hadn't known prior, and became enamored with the value proposition when, when you identify and recruit an individual on behalf of an enterprise or any size company for that matter, the value that they can bring is infinite.
And I really was intrigued by the value proposition, and ultimately I pivoted my career to the front side of recruiting.Â
[00:04:41] Dave Travers: Amazing. So you've had so many different interesting experiences, and you've pivoted a few times. When do you know, and when would you give advice to someone else? About when to pivot and when to be gritty and stick with it and fight your way through it.
If you're not feeling like that day was a great day at the office or something, like how do you come to that decision?Â
[00:05:02] Eric Goldstein: You know, it's funny because my son's an early talent and he's in the pharmaceutical industry, and my advice to him, or first of all, pay your dues. Make sure that you have enough time in service to make sure that you can evaluate the opportunity effectively.
You know, you can't do it for a month, you can't do it for, you know, six weeks. You gotta put in a couple of years, like one to two years, I would say, on your, on your first job. Ultimately, then it becomes a very, very personal decision. And my best advice to young people and people in the middle of their career and the end of their career is to trust their gut.
You know, ultimately, nobody knows you better than you. You know, at the end of the day. So I think it's really important to be honest with yourself, you know, always and always continuously kind of assess your highest and best use, I would say, and always be willing to take risks and never be encumbered by your prior investment.
So if you take my example, you know, I had a lot of sunk investment costs. I got my MBA, I got my CPA. It took me forever to pass, and you know, ultimately to get that credential. And then I had a couple years in audit, and everybody was telling me, you know, Eric, you'd be nuts to leave the lead public accounting. At this point, you've, you, you've, you've gotten all this, you know, sunk capital at this point, you just carry on, carry on, and it couldn't do it.
So my best advice is don't be encumbered by your prior investments, and don't let that be an impediment, and always be true to yourself.Â
[00:06:29] Dave Travers: I love that. I love the idea of sticking with your gut because it's so easy to, especially when you're a driven person, you wanna succeed to analyze, and I think one of the great ways of getting somebody to give you an opinion and to stress test your gut is I find rather than saying to someone, here's my situation.
What do you think I should do, say to them, here's what I'm thinking about doing. Tell me if where I'm wrong. And so you do two things with that. One is you, by telling you where I'm wrong, it's like you're granting permission to be contrary rather than just providing, you know, hyperbolic praise. And two, you're giving people something to react to and often like talk about testing your gut.Â
Sometimes, when someone's telling you the opposite of what your gut says, your conviction level that your gut is right, goes up. You know, like that. You trust your gut more because you're hearing someone take the other side, and you're like, oh no, and then my gut is onto the right track. So I love doing that.Â
[00:07:33] Eric Goldstein: And actually, that prompts the thought there, Dave. Of, you know, inviting contrarian thought. You know, that's something that I take into my management style. I don't want yes, people around me. I always want to be challenged. And my boss, Gina Breuer, who's the chief people officer of SAP, often says that.
Her expectation of her team is to be sparring partners. You know, it's not just to agree, but really to disagree, you know, with conviction, and you know, ultimately the test of, I mean, had that inherent friction leads to better outcomes always.Â
[00:08:09] Dave Travers: Yeah, I think that's right. When you, when you test an idea under live fire, so to speak, that you get a much better sense of what the quality is.
But, of that idea is, so you talked about pivoting to sort of different types of roles and different functions. Another big pivot in your career and many leaders. Careers, almost everybody has to make the pivot from being an individual contributor of the superstar ticking and tying as you put it in the Coopers and context to all of a sudden now, fast forward, you're a leader of leaders and many teams and things like that.
When you started and got your first opportunity to lead and decided, oh, this is something that would really be great for me. How did you decide? Was that never a question, or were you hesitant? Or how did you think about, you know, moving away from being just the individual contributor?Â
[00:08:56] Eric Goldstein: Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, I speak to people about their careers all day, every day, as you do, of course.
And it's fascinating. It's such a gift, by the way, but ultimately it's different. Like when I have a conversation with other people, and I would say 80% of the people are very intentional. They have a track. They've been thinking about the track for a long time. They have a very calculated perspective in terms of how they're gonna go from step one to two, to three to two, four to five, et cetera.
That is exactly the opposite of what happened in my career. So I'm unintentionally in this career. I'm an introvert. I've never chosen 30 years ago this line of this functional area for myself. But what happened was, it really happened through this series of pivots and this serendipity that happened, as well as this self-discovery.
And ultimately, the transition from an individual contributor to becoming a leader was also unintentional. And I did kind of arrive at a place that was, uh, a crossroads. Um, and this happened at Korn Ferry. So at Korn Ferry, I was hired to establish a practice, kind of the rung below the sea level. 'Cause typically, historically, you know, Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds, Heidrick & Struggles, et cetera, all those kinds of more key firms focus on the C level and above, and maybe, maybe one layer below that.
And it's all strictly retained. Korn Ferry had approached me at the time to see if. There was a viable business segment, a notch below that, kind of in the middle level functional area, call it like compensation levels between like 150 and 300,000 per year. And to see if there was the, uh, a retained search business, which in this area had been kind of domain of contingency recruiters prior if it had legs.
So I built a practice first in financial services and financial officers, and then ultimately with many others, we scaled it and then ultimately became hundreds of millions of dollars per. This later on, but, um, which is a big success story. But what happened was it happened so organically after about a year, we built a pretty sizable practice, and it became kind of international.
And, you know, basically my boss came to me and said, all right, so now you gotta build a team. You need leverage. You know, how are we gonna scale this thing? I said, well, I love doing search. I don't wanna stop doing search. You know, and, and um, it was very hard to let go, but I did reach that crossroads where I had to make a calculated decision.
Do I wanna carry on being an individual contributor, or do I wanna kind of be a leader? And I chose the latter. And to this day, I still kind of dabble in executive search. So, 'cause I, I enjoy it so much and I just, I think it's so important to stay connected and really to keep your skills sharp, to stay connected to the market and encourage all of my managers to do the same.
But it was, to answer your question, a very deliberate choice. A conscious choice. But again, it wasn't a choice that came easily either.Â
[00:11:46] Dave Travers: Yeah, it's certainly when, when you love connecting people, and it's also when you're doing executive search, it's an amazing way to be on the inside of what the leaders of the business are really thinking as they design what, what sort of people or organization or roles, um, or the right fit.
So, I totally get that. One of the interesting things about your background, obviously coming from that financial and transactional services background, you more than many people who've risen the ranks in talent acquisition have ROI and business cases and things like that that you have to do to make the case, to get money or to get resources, to make an investment to improve talent acquisition, you have the background and the analytical skills that a lot of people don't have the traditional training for.Â
So how would, how do you mentor now in your senior position? How do you mentor younger people coming up through TA to make a solid business case when they say, we really need to invest in this technology, or we need to change our process and we're gonna have to invest in some people to improve the process.
How do you coach somebody to do that?Â
[00:12:52] Eric Goldstein: Yeah, well, I'm not sure I mastered it for storm, right? So every year I have a spirited conversation with our controllers and sometimes, um, you know, I win, sometimes I lose. Sometimes it's a negotiation. Um, it's always a negotiation, but I will tell you first and foremost.
Put yourself in the shoes of the controller. You know, number one, and I used to approach the conversation, I remember this very distinctly at IBM from a cost avoidance perspective only. So I would quantify it, say, all right, we did this many executive searches last year. If I take a third of annual comp and I multiply it by, let's say it's a hundred grand per search, and multiply the number of searches we made, we saved you X number of millions of dollars, right?
And then what I realized for a large enterprise, like an IBM or an SAP. Revenues in the tens of billions, they don't care about a few million, right? So it's all relative, right? So the annual savings of a few million doesn't resonate with the CFO ultimately. So instead, I really thought about kind of moving the conversation to really how this impacts revenue rather than, you know, cost, uh, savings, and really talking about.
You know, how much more revenue, what the opportunity cost of that revenue is by having a vacant position, for instance. Ultimately. And I shifted the conversation, and it was much more meaningful. Um, I would say. And the other thing is, you know, obviously more on the SAP side than the IBM side. There's a commercial component to being an exemplar of the talent acquisition since, you know, we have products that.
Relate to talent acquisition in our portfolio By being the exemplar, we talk to customers, we lead by example, and we show them what we're doing and, and le and and share best practices. So the value of that was another way that I could demonstrate the revenue-generating opportunity by investing in our function.
[00:14:42] Dave Travers: It's easy to calculate a cost, especially if you're eliminating an existing cost. You can find it like there's a, there's an invoice somewhere, or there's a P & L entry, or whatever the case may be. But identifying how as an internal service provider, by some frame of thinking, how do you actually drive revenue, is a more creative and ta and frankly takes more understanding of how the business really works.
But to your point, having an empty sales leader, um, seat. Go vacant for three months or whatever. There's real revenue impact to that. Otherwise, you wouldn't be hiring for that role in the first place. So I think, I think that there's often somebody who's interested in saving costs. There's always somebody who's interested in growing revenue, so I think that's a very smart framing for that.
The other thing, given that you work at SAP and you've had so many experiences in so many different realms, is technology. The world of technology is moving as fast as it's ever moved. The concept of AI and so many other related concepts around machine learning, deep learning, all the things that people are talking about all the time are central to driving SAP's business.
And you, as a leader, are also constantly being inundated like everyone else who listens to this with, Hey, you should be using this new tool, or you should try this new thing, or you're missing out, or how come we're not adopting even faster than this other company I heard of over here? How do you cut through the noise and decide which things you're gonna try, which new things you're gonna do, and which things you say not yet or not right now?
How do you, how do you decide what your next project is when it comes to AI and technology?Â
[00:16:17] Eric Goldstein: It's a great question and the simple answers. I talk to everybody, and I'll give you an example. I invested the time, so I went out to Nashville, um, a few months ago and went to breakfast and there was an explosion of vendors now with AI interview bots, and there's companies out there trying to disintermediate all every other company.Â
And so there's a lot of new products out there, but what was, what was, other than the volume that was so striking to me was the spectrum of quality. I would say that went from, you know, the spectrum of basic and cheesy to really sophisticated and brilliant and like, oh my God, you know, this is change in the industry.Â
So I think you really need to do your due diligence. You really need to kick the tires and hit the ground, and demo these products. Talk to the founders of these companies, um, and really understand.
That's the number one thing. Number two thing is to talk to your peers. I spend a lot of time talking to my peers, many of which have appeared on your podcast as well. Uh, so it's really cool to be among them now, and we talk. We, and they're very generous. I would say just generally in terms of, you know, trading notes on tools that are working for them, and processes and best practices.
And there's such a generosity of spirit, even though technically we're competitors, you know, and we are direct competitors in some instances in the tech space. So those are the two, I would say fundamental things and also talk to young people, you know, what are they interacting with? I literally, when my son was applying, I would go on and be like, oh, they're, they're using this ATS, and what is this experience like?
And you know, oh, that's cool. They have an AI bot, and you know, how sophisticated or not is this thing? And you know, how easy or frictionless is the application process? Or how many, you know, am I just repeating my resume and all these different fields again? And their parsing technology sucks. And so really kicking the tires and really getting my hands dirty to make an informed decision and not relying on other people to advise me.Â
[00:18:20] Dave Travers: I love that. Uh, I think, you know, you're describing yourself as a learning machine where you're constantly talking to people who are thinking about the same sorts of issues and grappling with the same issues and trying to figure out what do they know that I don't know, and.
And they're enthusiastic to do it because a bunch of stuff that they may not know and they're interested in grappling with similar issues. And I think the idea of talking to younger people and often, you know, some of the great technology products of all time have broken in sort of to organizations, um, despite not having officially been procured by, you know, a centralized IT function or something like that.
So you can often find out what's really going on and what's working and what people are using by talking to people about what they're using, whether at your company or not. I love that. Okay. So the other thing that I found very interesting in, in, um, researching your background is that the word, even though you're the head of talent attraction, talent attraction isn't always the way you like to describe, you know, what you do or what you think, you know, people in searching for talent should do.
So talk a little bit about what the word talent attraction means to you and what talent discovery is.Â
[00:19:24] Eric Goldstein: So, um, just to give a little context here, about two years ago, uh, my boss came to me, and she was new to SAP two years ago, and she's creating kind of a ground-up infrastructure of the whole people agenda as we call it.
So it's everything from succession planning to strategic workforce planning, to total rewards framework, to identifying high poses, to skills infused everything. So it's, it's an exciting time to be here. So she challenged us to come up with a more modern name for all of our practice areas. Right. And I started to think, I'm like, wow.
Talent acquisition that's been around for a really long time. That, that, that term. But you know, it's funny, but our function has changed so much, and the value proposition has changed. I would say, you know, 10, 15 years ago, people would just look at it as an administrative function. You post, you know, they process resumes, and applications, and you set the tables.
For the hiring manager, you know, ultimately, and then you kind of record the hire. It's so different now. It evolved to being a true talent advisor, and I was like, you know what? The name no longer is, is fits. It doesn't make sense. It's so transactionally oriented. And then we were previously known as Talent Attraction, as you mentioned, and I was like, talent attraction.
I was like, all right. You know what? That's one-dimensional. That's only one aspect of what we do. We track talent, but we also engage talent. We also assess talent. You know, we also help facilitate mobility for talent. You know, so there's so much more than that, right? So it's so multi-dimensional that I thought talent discovery was much more suitable because it encompasses everything.
Mostly the internal talent component, right? So it's not just external as talent acquisition would imply talent discovery. Much more inclusive to include internal, which increasingly is a bit larger share because as we move more toward kind of skills-oriented, skills-focused function, and the half-life of skills, obviously, is shrinking dramatically, and we're invested in upskilling our existing talent.
Quickly, we wanna cultivate that talent, you know, as our competitors are calling in and trying to recruit our own talent, why don't we do the same? So we're leaning into that. So I really thought that talent discovery really kind of brought it together in a much more broad manner and really was much more suitable than, than, than the historic talent acquisition, you know, nomenclature.
[00:21:52] Dave Travers: I think that is so smart because it's so easy to just use the same nomenclature everyone else does, and forcing yourself to think from first principles. And I love the example you just gave, which is something that's, I think, obvious to almost everybody. It, which is, as you put it, the half-life of skills is decreasing.
In other words, things are changing so fast that if you just know how to make one widget work or one machine work, or you know, drive one process that never changes, that inevitably is going to become outdated. But if you're a person who can acquire new skills, you're gonna be valuable as the organization you work for evolves, or alternatively, if you're the organization.
You're gonna have incredibly high turnover. If every time a skill's half-life comes to its useful end that you have to go find a new person, it's gonna, you know, be way less disruptive to the organization if you can develop internal people to get the next skill that you need. And so, thinking therefore, more broadly from first principles, okay, how do we even call what we do?
And it forces someone who's said the words TA, or talent acquisition, or talent attraction, many times over. To think, okay, what is different? Like, if I'm gonna use a different word to describe myself, what is really different about that? I think that's a really smart approach.Â
[00:23:04] Eric Goldstein: Thank you.Â
[00:23:05] Dave Travers: So we always end these episodes with a rapid-fire round.
So I want you to think about being at headquarters in Germany in your case, or the executive team is coming to visit in you in New York, and getting in the elevator, and it's just you and the CEO, and the CEO says, Hey Eric. I think about talent all the time, but you know, one thing that. I always wonder about is when it comes to talent acquisition or talent discovery, how should we measure your team?
Like, what is the metric or the way I should think about evaluating how your team performs over a year or two? What would your answer be in your 62nd ride up to the top floor?Â
[00:23:45] Eric Goldstein: Well, it's funny he does ask these questions, and lately all of our conversations have been around skills and AI. But I would say, you know, generally it's about impact of hires.
So it's very similar to the conversation we were having before, kind of around really just being able to measure, you know, in a revenue-generating role, it's easier to quantify that, right? But in a revenue enabling role or corporate functions role, it's a little bit more, it's more difficult to do that.
And again, frankly, we haven't cracked the code on quantifying it. I mean, we, we have various measures around impact of hire. I don't think we're, we've perfected it yet by any stretch of the imagination. But I would say number one is impact of hire. And number two, again, I would go back to that opportunity cost of not having the right talent in place, regardless of position.
I mean, it couldn't just, it doesn't, just doesn't have to be a customer success or a sales-oriented position, but it could be, you know, finance or recruiting. I remember recruiting. There's a big opportunity cost by not having your recruiting organization intact 'cause then you're not able to respond to the talent needs of the enterprise.
And then you have a problem, and it's gonna, you know, obviously disrupt your velocity and your ability to generate profit.Â
[00:25:00] Dave Travers: Very smart. Okay, one more rapid-fire question. Same scenario you're getting in the elevator, and the CEO's like, Hey Eric, you know, I spent a ton of my time interviewing people formally and informally for board roles, for executive roles, et cetera, et cetera, but you're the expert on interviewing. Gimme your one best tip to make me a better interviewer.Â
[00:25:19] Eric Goldstein: I'll give you more than one.Â
[00:25:20] Dave Travers: Okay, great.Â
[00:25:22] Eric Goldstein: So first and foremost, interviews. It's funny when, when somebody schedules an interview, like, that's 30 minutes of my calendar, I go nuts. I'm like, I'm like, I can't even, I could barely like, introduce myself in 30 minutes, you know, not, not adequate.
One hour minimum, you know, for an interview, number one. And during that hour, you have to be really, really intentional and you know, strategic about how you use that time, you know, ultimately, and you have to think about the three or four most important skills that you're going to. Evaluate during that interview time and you have to think in advance about the questions that you're gonna ask, and you have to also be in the moment to be able to respond and double and triple click on the answers, really to understand and listen to what's being shared with you by the candidate to evaluate the answer as well as the confidence in which it was delivered.
You know, a true behavioral interview. Um, and that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about some of the tools that are merging in the market, because some of the technology tools that are merging now give you transparency to what was formally a black box. And it really helps you understand. Did Dave do a good interview now?
So you were one panelist of four and you were supposed, you had three skills to evaluate. Did you really evaluate it? Because you know what? On the feedback you just said, you know what, Eric's a good guy. I think you should hire him. You know what? But you know, I need a little bit more than that, you know, I know you need to understand.
Tell me about, you know, the skills that you drill down on and why you think that Eric, you know, brings these recruitment skills.Â
[00:26:50] Dave Travers: I love those. So give one example. I love your idea about having the time to double and triple-click. So gimme an example if you're interviewing me, and one of the skills is you're supposed to verify is that I'm a change agent.
Or something, you know, like I can convince people to change, move the furniture around a little bit. And I give some examples that you wanna double. How do you go about doing that? What's a good double or triple click sort of question?Â
[00:27:14] Eric Goldstein: Five whys. So it just basically, Dave, tell me about a time, right? You start that right, and you go into the anecdote and then I'm like, well, why'd you do that?
And what would you have done, if it went the other way? Why you do that, and if you double click to the three or four times you're gonna get to the reality. Either Dave knows what he's talking about, or Dave is full of, you know what? Right.Â
[00:27:39] Dave Travers: Dave did not come to this interview. He came prepared for the top first-level questions, but not for all five sub-permutations of each question.
That's exactly right. I love that. Eric Goldstein, it is so clear why you're a talent all-star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.Â
[00:27:53] Eric Goldstein: Thanks for having me. Thank you.
[00:27:59] Dave Travers: That's Eric Goldstein, Global Head of Talent Discovery at SAP. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the episode description, and just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentall stars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars, and we'll see you right back here next time.