SAP SuccessFactors H2 2025 release: 385 enhancements to elevate your HR experience (EN)

The new SAP SuccessFactors release for the second half of 2025 introduces no fewer than 385 updates, many of which focus on improving the platform itself. Here’s an overview of the most impactful features to help you optimize your HR experience.

People Profile: a must-have update

The new People Profile is becoming the standard. It has been activated by default on preview instances since October and will soon be deployed on production environments starting November 17. Now is the time to configure it according to your needs. Key features include:

• Customizable display of fields in both the overview panes and profile header.
• Display of the number of direct (team) and indirect (hierarchical) reports, with links to navigate to their profiles.
• Integration of a link to the job role directly from the Job Code field in employment data.
• Dynamic display of time spent in a role or within the company, based on profile exploration date and potential departure date.
• Availability of new “Notes” and “Internal Career History” cards.
• Enhanced historical data experience for Employee Central customers.

Note: We recommend testing and configuring this new profile now, as it will become mandatory in the next release. Arago offers tailored support to ease this transition.

New homepage and enhanced user experience

The redesigned homepage transforms the user experience with a more modern and customizable interface. Key updates include:

• The removal of traditional cards, replaced with a streamlined action bar.
• Introduction of analytic cards (e.g., upcoming absences, timesheet overview).
• Personalization options for themes, colors, and backgrounds.
• A more user-friendly design aligned with SAP’s future UX vision.

This new homepage is currently opt-in but will become mandatory by the end of 2026. We recommend enabling it in your test environments now to prepare for the transition.

Role-Based Permissions (RBP) enhancements

• New user group search tab for better visibility of assigned permissions.
• Centralized RBP search capabilities.
• Improved management of admin and superadmin access rights.

Employee Central

• New experience for historical data and dependents.
• Ability to control target population visibility during rehires.
• Option to restrict data visibility to a manager’s period of responsibility or employment relationship*

Reporting and artificial intelligence

In reporting, while there’s no decommission date yet for legacy tools, SAP continues to align reporting around Story Reports.
Notably, the term “People Analytics” has been retired in favor of specific module-based naming.

SAP now introduces People Intelligence, a new solution built on the Business Data Cloud, enabling predictive and temporal analysis of HR data. Note that this is a separate, licensed product, distinct from SuccessFactors.

Artificial intelligence is also being embedded into development goal creation, career analysis, and successor recommendations, making talent management and internal mobility smarter and more efficient.

Time management and onboarding: automation and efficiency

Time management :

• Yearly overview of absence calendars.
• Automatic recalculation when public holiday calendars are updated.
• Half-day leave management via Joule.

Onboarding :

• Automatic launch of onboarding once a candidate is ready to be hired.
• Requirement to specify the event reason when initiating onboarding from Recruitment.
• Standardized Offboarding dashboard experience.

Performance and development: the era of flexibility

Major innovation: you can now create dynamic rules within performance forms.
These rules allow you to control field visibility, editability, and mandatory status, paving the way for truly intelligent forms.

Other key improvements:

• Bulk routing of forms to a specific step.
• Change history tracking in calibration sessions.
• Controlled goal import based on target population.

Compensation & Learning: more control for administrators

Compensation :

• Schedule updates of forms directly from the instance.
• Custom validation available for up to 10 custom fields.
• Direct integration of numeric Employee Central fields into compensation statements.

Learning :

• The new mandatory homepage is now live.
• Managers can now unenroll team members directly from the Team View.
• iContent can be cleaned directly within the instance, without external tools.

What’s next?

SAP provides a clear roadmap:

• Legacy features are being phased out in favor of unified, intuitive functionalities.
• Innovations centered on user experience, data, and automation are setting the stage for a smarter, more integrated HR environment.

Arago by your side

Every organization has its own HR context, integrations, and priorities.
Our teams can provide a personalized analysis of the SuccessFactors H2 2025 release, tailored to your environment, active modules, and business needs.

Contact your Arago Customer Success Manager to schedule your dedicated release review and fully leverage the potential of this new version.