A senior SAP role usually asks for several distinct layers of skill at once in a unique blend of some of the following: functional configuration, technical development, integration, and architecture, not counting management and sophisticated ‘soft skills’. Each layer takes years to build on its own, and very few careers can build all of them equally well.

Even a modest SAP practice runs into this problem. The consultant who is already capable in every layer a senior role involves is not going to walk through the door fully capable in all that the role requires.

The T-shaped model hires for the vertical stroke, deep and provable expertise in one domain. The horizontal stroke, breadth across adjacent areas, keeps building throughout a consultant’s career, sometimes through their own initiative, sometimes through what a firm invests in developing once they’re inside it. A firm that takes an active hand in that second stroke tends to close it faster than one that leaves it entirely to the individual.

SAP recruitment has quietly drifted from that logic, with briefs now routinely asking for both strokes of the T to arrive fully formed in one candidate, at one point in time.

The 80/20 model is really that same idea, restated for SAP: hire the depth that’s provable now, and treat the remaining fifth of the role as a capability building project rather than a screening failure. Handled this way, an 80% match becomes the normal shape of a good hire.

What Holding Out for 100% Costs

A vacant billable seat carries a price tag many practices don’t acknowledge.

Take what the role should generate in fee income across a working year, divide by roughly 260 working days, subtract the salary the practice isn’t paying while the seat sits empty, and add whatever a stand-in is costing to cover the gap. Run that figure across six or eight extra weeks spent chasing a complete match, and the total quickly outstrips what a capable but not-quite-complete hire would have cost to bring up to speed.

That cost multiplies whenever a months-long search collapses at the final stage, because the whole cycle restarts from the beginning, with nothing carried over except the delay.

The longer a search runs, the more of the strongest candidates drop out partway through it, because good people don’t usually stay available for long in a market this specialized. A slow search doesn’t just cost money. It thins out the pool.

There’s a performance argument alongside the cost one, pointing the same direction.

Wharton’s research on internal promotion (highlighted by Harvard Business Review and others) found that people promoted into a role outperform externally recruited “complete” hires for roughly their first two years and leave the organization at a lower rate, because familiarity with how an organization actually works predicts early performance better than a CV that already ticks every box.

A practice chasing the fully-formed candidate often passes over the person likely to do better work eighteen months from hiring, provided the practice actually invests in closing that final fifth rather than leaving it to chance.

Why Consultancies Keep Searching for a Candidate Who Doesn’t Exist

Given that arithmetic, the obvious question is why so many practices keep running searches for a candidate who was never going to be found.

Part of the answer is a habit recruiters call requirement inflation: every stakeholder in a hiring decision adds one more line to the brief, each addition reasonable on its own, until the combined list describes two or three different careers rather than one role. Sometimes nobody has ownership of the final job description or the authority to say when a skill is outside the scope of the role.

It is also about where blame falls afterward. A hire who turns out wrong is visible and that hiring error gets attributed to whoever made the call, while a search that simply runs too long has no obvious owner and drifts on past the point where it still makes financial sense.

Once a search has already run for four months, there’s a reluctance to loosen the brief, precisely because so much time has already gone into finding someone who matches it exactly: a textbook case of the sunk cost fallacy, continuing a course of action because of what’s already been spent on it instead of what it’s still likely to produce.

Defining and Scoring the 80% for an SAP Role

Getting practical use out of an 80% match means being specific about which skills need to be considered part of that 80%.

Most SAP roles split into layers that are rarely achievable by one person because each layer requires so much experience: functional configuration knowledge, hands-on technical or development capability, integration know-how across the wider landscape, and the architectural judgment to see how a design decision plays out three project phases later. A brief expecting one candidate to hold all four at senior level is really describing a small team.

RISE and GROW delivery models have changed where the emphasis is inside that split, since a Clean Core, fit-to-standard project now demands comfort with SAP’s own configuration tooling and platform extension patterns as a baseline, in a way legacy ECC work never required. That recalibrates which skills belong in the fixed 80% for a given role and which can reasonably be closed within the structure the rest of this piece describes.

The useful next step is to pick the five to eight things that will actually predict success in the role, distribute a hundred points across them by how much each of those matters, then score every candidate against each and calculate the total in a way that provides a percentage.

Run that model against ten or twenty of the practice’s past hires first, check whether the candidates it would have rated highest were the ones who performed, and adjust the weights until the model’s judgment matches the practice’s own experience.

Once calibrated, the scorecard turns “is this an 80% match” from a gut feeling into one set of measurement criteria applied consistently across every search.

Sourcing and Screening for the Match

Once the scorecard exists, screening becomes an exercise in generating evidence for each line on it rather than reading a CV for relevant certificates.

A short case built around an actual configuration problem the practice has faced, or a sandbox task built around a common design decision, produces a stronger score against the technical and functional criteria, because it shows the candidate doing the work.

Certification still has a place, but a narrower one than it used to. SAP’s own move toward hands-on, performance-based exams has closed some of the gap between “certified” and “capable,” but a certificate confirms exposure to a topic rather than judgment under real-world project conditions, and belongs on the scorecard as a baseline, from which to differentiate further.

The same weighted matrix built for final-stage decisions works just as well at the long-list stage, before a full panel gets involved, so the practice compares every candidate against one fixed bar throughout the search rather than tightening or loosening its standards depending on how the pool looks that week.

Interviewing for How Fast They’ll Acquire the Skills

The missing fifth is only a manageable risk if the candidate picks up new capability quickly, and there’s a well-researched way to test for that.

Learning agility, studied for decades by the Center for Creative Leadership and Columbia University’s Teachers College, breaks into five measurable facets: how someone thinks through unfamiliar problems, how they read other people, how comfortable they are with change, how they perform under pressure, and how accurately they judge their own limits. People who score well across these facets grow into stretch roles faster than people who simply look qualified on paper.

Incorporating that in an interview means asking about a specific moment rather than a general trait: a time a candidate was given difficult feedback and what they changed afterward, or a project where their first approach was wrong and had to be rebuilt mid-stream.

The candidate to rule out on the grounds that they lack the mindset for learning tends to explain away every setback as caused by a client, a manager, or a deadline that was never realistic: a habit that tends to repeat once the consultant is the one tasked with bridging that gap.

Closing the Gap Fast Once They’re Hired

Hiring for the 80% fit only pays off if the remaining fifth actually closes, and that depends on an upskilling plan with dated checkpoints. A thirty, sixty, ninety day structure forces those checkpoints: what the consultant should do unsupervised by day thirty, what they should contribute to a live deliverable by day sixty, and what they should own outright by day ninety.

Pairing the new hire with someone senior for a defined stretch, rather than leaving it to informal mentorship, does much of the actual work of closing a skills gap through practical, situational learning in low-risk scenarios.

SAP’s own learning platform organizes material into role-based paths rather than one generic curriculum, giving a practice something concrete to point a consultant toward: whether that’s a technical bridge from functional work or an introduction to the platform layer around core SAP. 

Some SAP staffing providers already run a hire, train, and deploy model that takes an early-career candidate from a standing start to billable work inside eight weeks, evidence that a structured program can close a skills gap fast. An experienced 80% match, starting with far more of the role already covered, should reasonably close their narrower gap.

Managing the End-Client Side of the Bet

None of this works if the end-client discovers the gap on their own partway through the engagement.

Naming the plan upfront, what the consultant covers well, what they’re still building, and how that build is supervised, turns a potential concern into a detail the client has agreed to.

Keeping a named senior consultant actually on-hand during the ramp period (not just nominally assigned) is what makes that agreement credible.

A majority-match placement, framed this way, is interpreted as a considered staffing decision rather than something the practice settled for, and consultancies that can explain clearly why a consultant was chosen tend to keep more client trust through a ramp period than ones that hope nobody asks.

Hire for the Depth, Deliberately Build the Rest

Every argument here rests on the fact that the cost of a search sits on the vacancy side of the ledger far more than on the candidate side, and a consultant hired for proven depth with a clear plan for building the rest usually beats the wait for someone who was never going to appear.

Treat the 80% match as the deliberate, T-shaped hire it actually is, and the fifth of the role still missing becomes a short, managed piece of work which avoids an indeterminate search. 

IgniteSAP works with a number of SAP consultancies on exactly this kind of talent pipeline, matching practices with consultants who bring the depth a role needs now, and the capacity to build the rest quickly under controlled conditions. If that kind of staffing support would help your practice, contact us on LinkedIn.