In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face a dynamic set of challenges shaped by shifting workforce trends, technological advancements, and a heightened focus on agility and innovation.
As organizations adapt to these changes, HR teams must lead the way in building a future-ready workforce that can meet the business demands of today while preparing for those of tomorrow.
With strong global core HR, embedded AI capabilities, and a unified skills foundation, SAP SuccessFactors HCM connects HR across the organization, unearths key workforce insights, and provides the flexibility organizations need to succeed in a world that never stands still.
In the first half 2025 (1H 2025) product release, we’re excited to introduce more than 250 innovative features and enhancements, many assisted by AI, that are designed to help organizations address any business need and stay ahead of the curve.
SAP Business AI
SAP continues to be at the forefront of business AI with new capabilities to help drive organizational efficiencies.
With this latest release, we are announcing Joule on SAP SuccessFactors mobile. Joule, the AI copilot from SAP, helps employees and managers to quickly find information, complete tasks, and gain valuable insights — all through a self-service interface they can use at the office or on the go. In the new release, Joule helps employees easily understand their pay statement and create and update time-off requests, while managers can gain quick access to status of required learning for their teams and more.
In addition to English, Joule is now available in 10 new languages, including Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Recruiting and onboarding
With this release also comes a redesigned application experience in SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. A guided, modernized user interface helps applicants dynamically enter their information while simplifying and accelerating the application process, reducing application drop-offs. The new experience gives candidates access to a refreshed applications dashboard, enabling them to view their submissions, complete post-application actions, and easily access, navigate, and update their information.
As part of the offboarding capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, alumni can now manage personal information and gain access to support, documents, and resources, even after termination. Additionally, AI-assisted offboarding through Joule helps enable task completion and provides departing employees with a well-structured offboarding experience.
Performance and goals
We are excited to unveil the new performance form experience in SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, now with a dynamic, intuitive design for a more engaging user experience. The new interface enhances performance tasks by providing contextual information and optimizing screen space, minimizing cognitive load and scrolling to boost focus and efficiency.
To further enhance the experience, we are introducing new AI-assisted features, including:
- Comment suggestions based on the skill and rating selected, helping evaluators provide constructive, growth-centric feedback
- Performance insights for managers, which analyzes talent data and summarizes employee’s strengths, achievements, and areas for improvement
- Sentiment analysis for 360-degree reviews to help employees quickly identify negative or mixed feedback, highlighting areas that need improvement and enabling focused professional development.
Learning
As organizations face growing skill gaps, continuous learning remains critical for employees to stay competitive and adapt to evolving challenges.
New skills-focused learning offers a curated list of learning opportunities to improve key skills and competencies. Users can discover filtered learning options tailored to their upskilling needs, supporting organizational transformation.
Core HR and payroll
SAP provides industry-leading solutions spanning core HR, payroll, and time that give organizations the flexibility to meet any business challenge.
Building on the successful launch of our updated people profile in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, we’ve continued to enhance the user experience by bringing in additional content from across SAP SuccessFactors solutions, including benefits, payroll, and learning.
To further support the unique requirements of public sector organizations, we are introducing a new portlet that displays the financing status of an employee.
With this release, we are also introducing the integration of the position budgeting control workbench with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, previously announced at SuccessConnect. Along with existing integrations with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, this provides payroll administrators with real-time insights into position budget utilization and costs. The wider visibility enables better management of allocated funds and grants, offering a comprehensive view of salary costs, committed budget, and available funds for personnel expenses.
Additionally, we are enhancing our payroll control center, delivering a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the entire payroll process. With this enhancement, payroll administrators can optimize operations with a flowchart of tasks and their sequence in each payroll cycle. This improved experience provides real-time insights from pre-payroll activities to post-payroll processing.
We are also releasing a new local payroll version for Bulgaria, bringing the total number of natively supported locales to 53, with more supported by partners.
Learn more
These are just a few highlights from the 1H 2025 release. To learn about all of the more than 250 innovations and enhancements designed to give organizations the flexibility to address any business need, check out the SAP SuccessFactors 1H 2025 release brochure or watch this video.
Bianka Woelke is group vice president and head of Application Product Management for SAP SuccessFactors.
