(and why that is the real problem)

Most failed SAP hires don’t fail interviews.
They pass them.

That is what makes them dangerous.

Interviews are designed to assess things that are easy to observe:
communication skills, confidence, and how well someone can describe past experience.

SAP delivery, especially in complex programs, tests something very different.

It tests how people behave when:

• requirements are incomplete
• stakeholders disagree
• trade-offs have no obvious “correct” answer
• delivery pressure increases

These conditions are rarely simulated in interviews.

Over many years in SAP delivery, I have seen the same pattern repeat.
Candidates perform well in interviews, receive positive feedback, and appear “safe”.
A few months later, problems start to surface — not because of missing knowledge, but because of weak judgment under real project conditions.

This is not a recruiting failure.

Recruiters do what they are supposed to do:
they assess fit, experience, availability, and communication.
Interviews do exactly what they are designed for.

The failure happens at the decision level.

Organizations often mistake interview performance for delivery capability.
Confidence is interpreted as competence.
Past success is assumed to transfer automatically to a new context.

In SAP, that assumption is dangerous.

Large SAP programs are not repeatable environments.
Scale, governance, stakeholder dynamics, and constraints differ significantly from one program to another.
What worked before does not necessarily work again.

That is how false positives enter SAP programs.

They look convincing, speak confidently, and reference familiar projects.
They pass every interview step.
And yet, once delivery reality sets in, gaps become visible — usually too late to correct them without escalation.

Replacing a senior SAP role mid-program is expensive.
Not only financially, but politically and operationally.
By the time the issue is clear, the cost of correction is already high.

That is why technical validation should not try to identify the “best” candidate.
It should try to avoid the wrong one.

Interviews alone are not enough for that.
They provide signals, not evidence.

When the cost of being wrong is low, that may be acceptable.
When the cost is high, relying on interviews alone is a risk decision — whether it is treated as one or not.

Good SAP hiring decisions are not about speed or confidence.
They are about judgment under conditions that interviews rarely reveal — incomplete information, rehearsed answers, and hidden gaps in real-world expertise.