The software company’s innovations in HCM will help drive inclusion for better business results.
From hiring to succession, SAP’s new technology promises to detect and eliminate bias at every decision-making point of the end-to-end talent lifecycle.
“Bias in business undermines employee commitment, performance and retention,” says Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors.
“We’re investing heavily in furthering the functionality we have today, as well as in new capabilities across our suite, because we believe technology can help root out and eliminate bias, and promote more diversity and inclusion across the entire business,” he adds.
SAP, with its cloud-based HCM suite, SAP SuccessFactors plans to both optimise existing solutions and roll out unique new functionality in key decision areas that have otherwise been known to prevent organisations from utilising total talent.
This new solution will allow machine learning–based sentiment analysis of job descriptions to not only identify potentially biased language in job descriptions but also recommend alternative language to ensure the descriptions are gender-neutral.
It will also include calibration analysis by diversity rules, including in-app 9-box descriptors and bias detection alerts, to help ensure consistent, equitable standards in evaluating performance and potential.
Another added feature will be to match mentors based on skills and competencies to help ensure mentoring is equitable and inclusive. This will also efficiently track mentor-mentee relationships.
However, many of the features will be added in the forthcoming editions.
SAP intends to actively address the pressing problem of unconscious bias.