Pharma ATS and Application Friction Report (DACH, Q4 2026)

Workday and SAP SuccessFactors run 70 of 82 employers in the inclusion set. That is 85.4%. Counted on 13 November 2026, from public careers pages, with no account created and nothing submitted.

85.4%

Workday 43 (52.4%). SAP SuccessFactors 27 (32.9%), including Teva as an inferred match. SmartRecruiters 4 (4.9%). The base is the inclusion set, N = 82, not the 96 employers that were researched.

The rounded shares 52.4% and 32.9% add up to 85.3%, because each share is rounded to one decimal on its own. The headline is 70 divided by 82, which is 85.4%.

• Shares
• Segments
• Front ends
• Friction
• Employers
• Method
• Limits
• Cite

Shares

An employer is counted once, under the system that receives the application. Phenom, Radancy, Eightfold and the other front ends are below, and they are not in these shares. The ATS is named for 81 of the 82. Schwabe is the unknown case in the inclusion set.

Inclusion set (association members) · N = 82

Inclusion set, confirmed only · N = 80

Teva (inferred) and Schwabe (unknown) are removed here. Workday 53.8%, SAP SuccessFactors 32.5%, N = 80.

All 96 researched employers · N = 96

The same count across all 96 researched employers. Workday 48 (50.0%), SAP SuccessFactors 31 (32.3%).

Segments in the inclusion set

Rough buckets, so the 82 can be read. Pharma and biotech 44, medtech and tools 28, CDMO 5, CRO 5. They sum to 82. The finer research label is in the employer table.

Pharma and biotech · N = 44

Medtech and tools · N = 28

CDMO · N = 5

CRO · N = 5

Candidate-experience layers

On 32 of 82 inclusion-set employers the careers page loads a known front end. On 50 none was recorded. A front end is not the ATS. An employer can carry more than one, so the rows sum to more than 32. Across all 96 researched employers, 35 have a front end.

Application friction

The counts sit on 80 scripted flow records: 46 Workday tenants, 20 SuccessFactors job pages, and 7 forms that could be read in full or in part. A further 7 pages (SmartRecruiters, Phenom, Eightfold) could not be read by script and were checked in the browser where they fell inside the 15 walkthroughs. No account was created and nothing was submitted. The 46 Workday configurations are not the 43 Workday employers in the inclusion set. 5 sit outside the set, and AstraZeneca and BD (Becton Dickinson) are in the set on Workday but are not in this configuration sample. AstraZeneca is covered by the Eightfold walkthrough.

Account wall or guest apply

Of 46 Workday tenants, 36 require a candidate account. 10 do not enforce an account: Sandoz, Qiagen, Philips, Siegfried, Galderma, Medela, Ferring, Rentschler, Eppendorf and Mundipharma. This setting is not a browser test. In the six Workday walkthroughs, guest apply was open at Sandoz, Eppendorf and Philips. An account with no guest path was required at Roche, Siemens Healthineers and Fresenius Kabi.

On the account pages at Roche, Siemens Healthineers and Fresenius Kabi the password rule was the same: 8 or more characters, with an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a special character and an alphabetic character. Each of those pages had a hidden honeypot field. No captcha was shown. Email verification is required in 21 of the 46 configurations, and not in 25. The browser did not reach that step, because no account was created.

5 SuccessFactors tenants showed a sign-in wall on an anonymous request: Bayer, Merck KGaA, Novo Nordisk, Zimmer Biomet and Vetter Pharma. On 16 further Recruiting Marketing sites the apply control went through a JavaScript session, so the wall is not established from the script. In the browser, Bayer, BioNTech and Astellas required an account and offered no guest path. Bayer's password rule, the same one at BioNTech, was 8 to 18 characters, upper and lower case, a digit or punctuation, and no spaces. Merck KGaA's Phenom form opened without an account.

AbbVie, Gerresheimer and Brainlab opened a SmartRecruiters guest form. AbbVie and Gerresheimer failed on the first load and worked after a reload. Gerresheimer is outside the inclusion set.

LinkedIn, Indeed, SEEK, XING

The Workday configuration offered LinkedIn on 22 of 46 tenants and not on 24. SEEK was present at Amgen, CSL, Stryker and Philips. In the browser, Philips showed Apply with LinkedIn. Sandoz and Eppendorf showed Autofill with Resume, Apply Manually and Use My Last Application, and no LinkedIn button. A profile form before the application is on at 10 Workday tenants: Johnson & Johnson, Biogen, Viatris, Fresenius Medical Care, Medtronic, Galderma, Alcon, Ferring, Parexel and Bavarian Nordic.

Of 20 SuccessFactors job pages, 4 had a Start apply with LinkedIn button: Bayer, Grünenthal, Astellas and Boston Scientific. 12 had a single Apply button. 4 could not be read. The Bayer posting walked in the browser had no LinkedIn option. Astellas offered one. AbbVie and Brainlab offered Apply with Indeed, with no LinkedIn or XING import on the first page. XING is on Otsuka (Recruitee) and on Octapharma Plasma GmbH (softgarden).

Language of the interface

39 of 46 Workday configurations include a German interface. Seven do not: Biogen, Siemens Healthineers, Syneos Health, Evotec, Parexel, Mundipharma and Bavarian Nordic. Four of those are inclusion-set employers with a DACH posting in the sample: Biogen, Siemens Healthineers, Syneos Health and Parexel. Mundipharma is in the inclusion set, has no German interface, and the sample found no DACH posting. Evotec and Bavarian Nordic are outside the inclusion set and also had no German interface on a German posting. In the browser, Siemens Healthineers was English only, with no language selector, on a German posting. Astellas offered English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese for a Munich job. Merck KGaA's Phenom form was in English on a German job.

CV autofill (Workday's "Autofill with Resume" option)

CV autofill was on for 41 of 46 tenants and off for 4: Qiagen, Fresenius Kabi, Siegfried and Rentschler. It is unstated for Mundipharma, and that sample had no DACH posting. In the browser, Fresenius Kabi had no CV autofill. Where CV autofill is on, it means the option is offered. It says nothing about how well a CV is read. Bayer's SuccessFactors form showed no CV autofill.

Required fields, where the form opened

The nine required fields on page 1 of the three Workday guest applies, the step counts, the SuccessFactors required fields and the SmartRecruiters fields are in the walkthrough table. The seven forms that could be read by script, in full or in part, are underneath, with the field lists as they were noted. Dr. Falk requires salary expectations. Debiopharm, outside the inclusion set, requires nationality among 12 required inputs. Otsuka was the shortest path in the scripted sample: name, email, phone and CV, with all five screening questions optional. At Dräger the first step is a privacy consent plus a maths captcha. The walkthrough stopped before that consent was submitted.

Fifteen browser walkthroughs

One live posting each, on 13 November 2026. Nothing was submitted. Where an account wall appeared, the walkthrough ends on the first page that could be reached.

Seven forms that could be read

Employers

All 96 researched employers. The filter starts on the inclusion set (82) once the page script runs. Without the script, every row is visible. Confidence is the research label, not a score.

In view: 96

Method and inclusion rule

The list was assembled by hand. It is not a ranking. It covers global pharma, biotech and medtech companies with a real DACH presence, DACH companies in pharma, biotech, medtech, CDMO and tools, and large CROs with DACH offices. Merged or dropped: MorphoSys (part of Novartis), Vifor (part of CSL), Hexal (part of Sandoz), Aesculap (part of B. Braun). CureVac stays in, because its own SuccessFactors instance is still live. Checked on 13 November 2026, timezone Europe/Berlin.

Inclusion rule. An employer is included if it, or its DACH subsidiary, appears on at least one current public member list of the leading DACH pharma, medtech, diagnostics, tools or CRO industry associations: vfa, Pharma Deutschland, BPI, Pro Generika (Germany); Interpharma, scienceindustries (Switzerland); Pharmig (Austria); BVMed, SPECTARIS, VDGH (Germany); AUSTROMED (Austria); BVMA (Germany, CROs). Result: 82 of 96. One list is enough.

Matches were made on company or subsidiary names and each snippet was checked by hand. Removed as false positives: Schwabenheim (vfa), Merz + Benteli (scienceindustries), Carl-Zeiss-Straße (VDGH), INFICON (SPECTARIS), FIEGE HealthCare (Pharma Deutschland), and narrative mentions on Pro Generika of Novartis, Pfizer, Bayer, Merck and Stada via ALIUD. The SPECTARIS introduction naming Carl Zeiss, Dräger, Sartorius, Otto Bock and Eppendorf was not used. Only directory entries were used.

Not on any of these lists, so outside the headline shares, and still in the table: Basilea, Debiopharm, Helsinn, Bavarian Nordic, Evotec, Sonova, Ypsomed, Tecan, Medela, Gerresheimer, Medpace, Labcorp, Fortrea and Charles River Laboratories. That is 14.

How many lists an included employer hits:

The ATS was identified from domain and asset signatures on the careers page: myworkdayjobs, successfactors and sapsf including Recruiting Marketing, smartrecruiters, icims, personio, softgarden, recruitee, workable, rexx, mhmhr, phenompeople, talentbrew and radancy, eightfold, beamery, avature, paradox. Phenom pages carry an apply link per job. That link shows the underlying ATS. Front ends are recorded separately and are not counted in the ATS share.

Workday was read from the public site configuration and one job page. SuccessFactors was read from the job-page HTML and, where it could be, from the anonymous apply URL. Personio, Workable and Recruitee expose the field configuration. softgarden, MHM and Dräger were read with an anonymous request. Opening a softgarden form creates a server-side draft session, the same thing a browser click does. Nothing was submitted. At Dräger the run stopped before the privacy consent was submitted. One DACH posting per Workday tenant, except Mundipharma, where only the configuration was available. One SuccessFactors sample, Boehringer Ingelheim in Delhi, is outside DACH. The apply options there are properties of the career site.

There is no consistent public source for DACH headcount. Membership is a filter, not a size ranking.

Limits

• A Workday setting that does not require a candidate account is read here as guest apply possible, account optional. Only Sandoz, Eppendorf and Philips were confirmed in a browser. The other seven tenants with that setting off were not.
• CV autofill shows that the option is offered. It says nothing about how well a CV is read.
• The number of Workday steps and the mandatory fields are not visible from the configuration. They were recorded only where a browser walkthrough opened the form, and only on the first page when an account wall stopped the walkthrough.
• Each scripted record and each walkthrough is one posting. Forms differ by job, country and legal entity. Octapharma AG uses SuccessFactors while Octapharma Plasma GmbH uses softgarden. Hamilton in Switzerland uses Workday while Hamilton in the United States uses iCIMS. iCIMS is not counted as Hamilton's DACH system.
• One SuccessFactors sample, Boehringer Ingelheim in Delhi, is outside DACH. The SuccessFactors apply-option records are properties of the career site, not of that role.
• Some careers sites blocked scripted requests (IQVIA, Syneos, CSL, Ypsomed, straumann.com, and Lonza on repeat requests). For those, the ATS tenant was checked directly.
• The vendor names for Dermapharm (P&I LOGA) and Berlin-Chemie (talentsconnect) come from the hosting domain and the platform assets, not from a vendor statement on the employer site.
• IQVIA's Radancy layer is inferred from a URL pattern on jobs.iqvia.com. It is counted in the front-end table and marked inferred. It is not counted as an ATS.
• Teva is inferred SuccessFactors. The tenant is live and linked from the teva.de careers FAQ, and current applications run through Eightfold. Teva is inside the 27 SuccessFactors employers and outside the confirmed-only subset of 80.
• Schwabe's ATS was not identifiable (own Drupal portal, JavaScript job list). Schwabe is the one unknown employer in the inclusion set. Helsinn, outside the inclusion set, is the second unknown.
• Swiss Medtech's directory returned HTTP 403 to every scripted request, so Sonova, Ypsomed, Tecan and Medela (and Hamilton's Swiss entity) could not be checked against it. vips in Switzerland shows its member list only after login. BIO Deutschland's member search did not return a usable list. Fortrea has a 2023 member-profile PDF on bvma.de and is not on the current list of June 2026, so Fortrea is excluded.
• No consistent public source for DACH headcount was found. Association membership is a filter, not a size ranking. The 14 employers outside the inclusion set stay in the dataset and in the employer table. They are excluded from the headline shares.
• Membership lists change. The lists named in the method were fetched on 13 November 2026. A later edition has to fetch them again.

How to cite this report

The line to quote, as of 13 November 2026:

Workday and SAP SuccessFactors run 85.4% of the DACH pharma, medtech, CDMO and CRO employers on the leading association member lists (70 of 82; checked 13 November 2026).

The German edition is at https://morethancareer.de/de/pharma-ats-report.html. Both editions read the same figures.

Last updated, and the next edition

Last checked: 13 November 2026. The next edition is planned for Q1 2027. Membership lists and careers pages change. The figures on this page are replaced when the dataset is replaced. They are not an estimate.

• 13 November 2026: First edition. 96 employers researched from public careers pages. Headline shares use the inclusion set of 82 association members. Fifteen postings were walked in a browser. No accounts were created and nothing was submitted.

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