Job seekers can often feel lost or disconnected—like the right opportunity is out there, but they don’t know where or how to look. Employers face a similar challenge when trying to attract the right candidates. Many companies, especially large enterprises, face a talent shortage across a range of critical roles.

For global companies like Johnson & Johnson (J&J), their online career website is an important recruiting tool. It’s the “front door” for talent that could make a vital difference in the company’s future and drive innovation for years to come.

However, career sites are often underutilized. If a job seeker doesn’t find a good job match with a quick search, they will likely move on. Too often, that represents a lost opportunity for both the company and the job seeker that could have been avoided with better search results.

“Partnering with Jibe and using Cloud Talent Solution for our career site allows us to do a much better job matching opportunity to talent on a very large scale.”

—Sjoerd Gehring, Global VP of Talent Acquisition, Johnson & Johnson

While J&J receives approximately 1 million applications for 25,000 positions each year, the percent of applicants that were highly qualified for open positions was low.

Although the company always has a variety of open jobs on its career site, it noticed that even when strong matches existed between online job seekers and available positions, search results often didn’t highlight or even display the right opportunities. The user interface wasn’t intuitive enough, and job seekers couldn’t easily find their ideal positions.

As J&J began to reevaluate recruiting to take a more relationship-centric and digitally-driven approach, the company began working with Jibe, a career-site solutions provider.

Jibe introduced J&J to Cloud Talent Solution, which uses machine learning to better match job listings with job seekers’ interests and qualifications. Using Cloud Talent Solution, companies can build a compelling career-site search experience that helps candidates easily find the jobs most relevant to them. With smarter job searches and recommendations, J&J improved the effectiveness of its career site in just a few weeks.

“Jibe and Google make it easy for a large company to make a real difference in the candidate experience without investing a lot of time, money, or internal resources,” says Sjoerd Gehring, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at Johnson & Johnson. “Now that we’re using Cloud Talent Solution, our career site search results are exponentially better.”

Transforming job searches with better matches

Cloud Talent Solution better connects job seekers with jobs, because it understands the nuances of job titles, descriptions, industry jargon, and skills, matching job seeker preferences with relevant listings based on sophisticated classifications and relational models. It helps decipher job seeker queries and employer job postings, removing the manual effort of optimizing job content for search.

By using the Jibe platform to integrate Cloud Talent Solution with its career site, job seekers are more easily finding what they’re looking for and J&J is filling business critical roles more efficiently.

Since integrating Cloud Talent Solution, J&J has seen a 41% increase in high-quality job applicants per search and a nearly 45% increase in click-through rate on its career site.

“Partnering with Jibe and using Cloud Talent Solution for our career site allows us to do a much better job matching opportunity to talent on a very large scale,” adds Sjoerd. “We’re able to take a more personal approach and really connect with job seekers, which is a win.”

“Today’s job seekers expect a prospective employer’s career site to work like the other cloud services they use. Using Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can help customers like J&J get better search results and return jobs that candidates are more likely to apply to.”

—Joe Essenfeld, Founder & CEO, Jibe

Connecting people with opportunities

J&J is now offering job seekers experiences in line with what they have come to expect as consumers—searching for a job should be as easy as searching for flights, restaurants, products, and other services. Because candidates are familiar with the experience, their level of interaction and engagement goes up, creating a larger pipeline of qualified candidates and filling jobs faster.

“Today’s job seekers expect a prospective employer’s career site to work like the other cloud services they use,” says Joe Essenfeld, Founder & CEO at Jibe. “Using Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can help customers like J&J get better search results and return jobs that candidates are more likely to apply to.”

A new digital revolution for recruiting

J&J continues to work with Jibe and Google to offer new features which make its career site even more effective. By offering job seekers a transformative, engaging experience, J&J is a more attractive and visible employer, increasing the value of its brand. It’s also continuously improving its recruiting process with end-to-end visibility and feedback from interactions with a million people every year.

“Transforming our career site with Jibe and Cloud Talent Solution directly impacts our ability to attract high-quality talent and hire those candidates faster,” adds Sjoerd. “Lots of people are looking for their dream job, and if it’s here at J&J, we want them to find it quickly and easily.”

Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.

That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud. 

Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.

Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.

Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth. 

Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.

“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”

To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.

SAP forms the critical backbone of thousands of enterprises, supporting critical business functions such as finance, supply chain, warehouse management, and more. Google Cloud provides a highly scalable and resilient infrastructure to run such workloads and offers tools, such as Smart Analytics and Machine Learning that can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation. 

In fact, a recent study by Forrester found that running SAP on Google Cloud can generate a 160% return on investment and a payback period of six months or less, thanks to legacy infrastructure cost savings, downtime avoidance, and productivity improvements.

How you deploy your SAP systems across your network has a tremendous impact on its availability, resilience, and performance. In addition to separate production and high-availability (HA) environments, SAP deployments typically include sandbox, development, quality assurance (QA), and disaster recovery environments as well. 

Because most of the Google network is virtual, SAP administrators can easily design complex landscapes that suit your organization’s SAP deployment and organizational structure while also meeting security and operational requirements. 

As you get started with SAP on Google Cloud, you’ll need to decide how to configure your networking to ensure the availability and performance of various SAP systems. Here’s a look at your options.

VPC and shared VPC

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a secure, isolated private network hosted within Google Cloud. VPCs are global in Google Cloud, so a single VPC can span multiple regions without communicating across the public internet. Similarly, subnets can span across zones within a region. A zone represents a single failure domain, so typical SAP deployments place production and HA systems in different zones to ensure resiliency. Google Cloud simplifies this type of deployment, because subnets containing both production and HA systems can span multiple zones.  

This capability also simplifies SAP clustering, since the cluster’s virtual IP (VIP) address can be in the same range as those of the production and HA machines. This configuration shields the floating IP using Google internal load balancers and is applicable to HA clustering of the application layer (ASCS and ERS) and the HANA database layer (HANA Primary and Secondary).

Shared VPCs are a feature unique to Google Cloud that allows an organization to connect resources from multiple projects to a common VPC network. This lets them communicate with each other securely and efficiently using internal IPs. You can also centrally control the network for all SAP projects (service) from the Host project while using firewalls to inspect communication between compute engines in the same subnet, and between those in different subnets. (Best practice is to limit the communication between these systems to only the required ports — typically via SAP remote function call (RFC) communication at Layer 4.)

When designing your network, start with a host project containing one or more Shared VPC networks. You can attach additional service projects to a host project, which allows them to participate in the Shared VPC. It’s common practice to have multiple service projects operated and administered by various departments or teams in your organization.

Depending on your needs, you can deploy SAP on a single Shared VPC or multiple ones. The two scenarios differ in terms of network control, SAP environment isolation, and network inspection. Let’s look more closely at these differences.

Scenario 1: Deploying SAP on a single Shared VPC

If you require only a single network inspection, deploying SAP on a single Shared VPC has the advantage of simplicity and reduces administrative overhead.

• Network control: The Shared VPC serves as the network hub, allowing central network management based on identity access management (IAM) roles for the network team(s) in both production and non-production environments.
• SAP environment isolation: You can create projects and subnets for each SAP environment. Projects help group resources together for finer IAM control and billing visibility, while subnets provide network isolation for individual SAP environments. In service projects, compute engines can communicate by default; however, you can adopt simple firewall rules to block communication between compute engines within a subnet or in separate subnets.
• Network inspection: Use Google Cloud firewalls to allow only the required ports for communication between SAP systems. Leverage network tags and service accounts to define granular control for both north-south and east-west traffic.

Scenario 2: Multiple Shared VPCs for SAP deployment

In scenarios requiring additional network inspections, you can create multiple Shared VPCs, typically one per environment. Use peering between these Shared VPCs to enable RFC communication among the SAP development, QA, and production systems.

• Network isolation: Multiple Shared VPCs are completely isolated from each other except via specific ports opened in Google Cloud firewalls. This allows additional East-West traffic inspection by a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) within a Google Cloud network. 
• Network control:As the number of Shared VPCs increases, activities such as peering and firewall policies also increase. This diminishes the central network control that Shared VPCs offer, so the network team should plan to manage the policies in each VPC separately.

Hybrid scenarios – for example, one Shared VPC for the production environment and one Shared VPC for all non-production systems — are also possible. This arrangement allows network inspection between production and non-production systems, and limits the number of central network administration layers to two.

Configuring the networking environment for multiple SAP systems can be a complex process. Thanks to Google Cloud’s Shared Virtual Clouds and other tools, SAP administrators can create scalable, secure networks that provide logic, resilience, and visibility to their cloud deployments.Learn more about these networking capabilities and our full offerings for SAP customers.

While the shift to digital business and the cloud has been well under way for some years now, organizations today have a new sense of urgency due to COVID-19. Delivering digital transformation is no longer a ‘nice to have’ option, rather, it is an operational imperative. Taking advantage of the infrastructure, platform and solution gains that cloud and microservices architecture provide is a must for brands today. 

At Google Cloud, we understand the pressures and challenges organizations of all sizes, across all industries are facing. The pandemic has dramatically impacted global commerce at-large, exposing (for many organizations across multiple sectors) gaps in omnichannel capabilities, business continuity and forecasting plans, not to mention spots in supply chain agility, resilience and responsiveness. 

A rapidly evolving consumer-driven commerce landscape has put innovation squarely in the spotlight for supply chain teams all over the world, with the effects of the global pandemic making it increasingly difficult for manufacturers, wholesalers, third party logistics providers and retailers (in particular) to weather the perfect storm of fast-moving consumer trends and a need for ‘always on’ digital innovation. 

These same effects have driven increasing interest and uptake of technology like the Manhattan Active® suite of solutions, as well as our own cloud platform; both of which afford organizations the levels of agility, flexibility and scalability needed to insulate their people, processes and long-term business strategies against unforeseen future obstacles such as global pandemics or international trade disputes.

An excellent example of this agility, flexibility and scalability in action is PVH’s response to the global pandemic. One of the most admired fashion and lifestyle companies with such iconic brands as Calvin Klein, TOMMY HILFIGER, Van Heusen, and IZOD, PVH was forced to temporarily close its physical stores and, as a result, experienced a sudden massive increase in online sales. The retailer was able to quickly pivot by adjusting its business rules in Manhattan Distributed Order Management (part of Manhattan Active Omni) to expose store inventory to online consumers and reroute its fulfillment processes. Thanks to Manhattan’s solution delivered through Google Cloud, in a matter of days, PVH was able to leverage both its distribution centers and vast store network to fulfill its online orders.

“The events of 2020 have accelerated retail and ecommerce operations forward,” said David Herridge, executive vice president of Global Value Chain Technologies for PVH. “With quick, creative thinking and the right partner, we were able to pivot operations, satisfy our customers and prepare for the future.”

Manhattan’s products have been recognized for their ability to solve real-world challenges through innovation, and used by many of the world’s top brands to solve some of their most complex commerce and supply chain challenges: the latest recognition is Manhattan’s position as sole leader in the 2021 Forrester Wave™ for Order Management Solutions. 

Since December 2018, Google Cloud has been collaborating closely with the team at Manhattan and its ‘always on’, versionless approach to innovation. And, during the last two and a half years, Manhattan has significantly accelerated its cloud-first solutions and market adoption, resulting in tremendous growth in its overall cloud business efforts. 

By building cloud native solutions on Google Cloud, the teams at Manhattan continue to deliver the high-performance, elastic, high-redundancy, secure solutions their customers rely on. Moreover, it means both Google Cloud and Manhattan continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of the supply chain and omnichannel innovations that underpin global commerce – innovation that is needed more now than maybe ever before.

Our commitment to distributed cloud solutions and ongoing innovation, not to mention the fact Google Cloud operates a net carbon-neutral cloud, means that the working partnership between both industry leading teams continues to be a perfect match of brand values; not just from a technology perspective, but also a long-term sustainability and environmental one too.

More information on the partnership can be found here.