Setting up the integration

A quick note before we get started:

Making the necessary configuration changes within SuccessFactors requires admin permissions. If you don’t have admin privileges, we recommend getting in touch with the person responsible for managing your company’s SuccessFactors instance.

With the necessary permissions, the setup should be fairly straightforward, but there are always edge cases, so if you get stuck in the process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Once you’re ready, the first step is to find the correct API domain for your SuccessFactors instance. This is, unfortunately, not the same domain as the one you use to log into SuccessFactors, but SAP provides a list of all available API domains:

Open it up here and filter by the type of environment you’re on (this is probably “Production” unless you’re working with a test instance) and the location.

The resulting “API Server” URL will usually look quite similar to the SuccessFactors domain you log in on (the API for pmsalesdemo8.successfactors.com is, for example, located at apisalesdemo8.successfactors.com).

The next step is to find out your company ID. For this, please log into SuccessFactors, click on your profile picture in the top right, and select “Show version information.”

You should now see a popup like this:

Copy the value next to “Company ID.”

For setting up this integration, you can either use a regular user account to which you assign the relevant permission or a new user that you create specifically for this integration. We won’t go into the details of creating the user account here, but here are the permissions you should grant depending on your use case:

All permissions listed above can be found in the respective 📂 tabs under “Manage Permission Roles” → “[ The role you want to edit ]” → “Permission…”.

Now that you’ve prepared the user you want to use for the integration, you need to find the user ID of this user (which is different from the username).

SuccessFactors, unfortunately, makes it quite difficult to find this through the UI. That’s why we have to get it from an export of all employees/users. To start the export, search for “Employee Export” using the top bar and select the first item:

You should now be on the “Export Users” page. Click on the arrow icons next to the different sections to open them and configure the settings as shown below (pay special attention to “Valid users only”, “Short format”, “Character Encoding”, and “Locales”).

After configuring the settings, click “Export User File”, wait for the file to download, and open it up in the spreadsheet software of your choice (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc, Apple Numbers). Alternatively, you can also open it in a text editor, but that will make it slightly more difficult to find the relevant information.

Once you’ve opened the file, search for the username of the relevant user (in my case sfadmin). The username will be in the third column (the rightmost column in the screenshot), and the user ID will be in the second column (the middle one below).

Sometimes (like in this example), the user ID and the username are the same, but they can also be different, so make sure to copy the value from the USERID column.

Make sure you’re logged into SuccessFactors and click on the search bar at the top. Enter “Manage OAuth2 Client Applications” and select the first item that comes up:

Then, on the new page, click on “Register Client Application”:

Enter the name of the software you’re trying to connect to SuccessFactors under “Application Name” (I’m going with Example App for the example) and any valid URL (e.g., https://example.com/example-app) under “Application URL.”

Remember the user ID from the previous step? Check the “Bind to Users” checkmark and paste the user ID into the “User IDs” field.

Below the User IDs field is the text area “X.509 Certificate”. We will provide you with this certificate later, so please keep this page open.

After going through all the steps, you should now have the following:

Now it’s time to enter these details into the connection flow within Alva.

To do this, head to the integration section of your Alva account settings and select Add Integration.

After entering your API domain and company ID, we will provide you with a certificate.

Make sure to copy the certificate from the output field, as shown below.

Now enter the certificate into SuccessFactors:

Make sure to click “Register” before continuing with the authentication flow. Click on “Continue” in the authentication flow and follow the instructions. After entering the remaining data, you have a working SuccessFactors integration!

A final step before you can get started is to set up a new stage called "Alva Assessment". To do so, please reach out to your SAP Expert to get help.

The final results should be that you are able to see the "Alva Assessment" under the Status dropdown of a job, as shown below

👀 Still running into issues setting up the integration? Please reach out to us and make sure to save the details you entered in case we ask you to provide them. We’ll get your integration live in no time.