ERP & CRM don’t fail quietly.
ERP and CRM systems run the two halves of a business: what it makes and moves, and who it sells to. When one of them breaks, or the project to install one goes wrong, the fallout is rarely invisible. It shows up in a supply chain that can't ship, an invoice that doesn't match a contract, or a sales team that can't see its own pipeline.
Gravitas is a specialist CRM & ERP recruitment agency, placing consultants, architects, developers, analysts and project leads across Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and NetSuite. We work with employers across Germany, for permanent hires building long-term platform ownership and for contractors brought in around a defined go-live. Specialist, certified skill sets on these platforms are consistently among the hardest for employers to fill directly, and a generic recruiter running a keyword search on a CV is not built for that market.
delivering recruitment across ERP & CRM
From our Germany Leadership team.
Gravitas consultants specialise in one niche area of the technology sector. This means when you partner with us, you get a market expert who is up to date with the current trends, skills and technologies underpinning ERP & CRM. Our consultants then focus their knowledge to be platform specific: D365, Power Platform and solution architecture, alongside SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and NetSuite.
A CV that lists Dynamics 365 or Power Platform doesn't tell you whether a candidate configured a single module or owned an entire rollout, or whether their change management skills match their technical certification.A generalist recruiter can source a CV that mentions the right platform without always checking for the right level of detailed execution. Our specialist consultants know ERP and CRM inside and out - they have the technical understanding to know whether a candidate has the skills to be trusted with your implementation, and they ask the follow-up questions that separate a module owner from a rollout owner before your team invests interview time.
In practice, that means every candidate we put forward has already been technically screened by a consultant who knows the market specifics inside and out, going beyond job titles and certifications. We have the capability to fill urgent job requirements within 2 days, with a 96% fill rate through our exclusive partnerships and 77% in a preferred supplier list partnership capacity.
Gravitas recruits across the full range of ERP and CRM specialisms, including:
- ERP Consultants - functional and technical specialists across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, SAP and Oracle, covering financial management and reporting through to supply chain, procurement and inventory
- CRM Consultants - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Salesforce and comparable platforms, covering sales performance and customer engagement through to support operations and case management
- Functional Consultants - configuring a platform to support business processes, gathering requirements and training end users
- Technical & Development Consultants - building custom functionality, integrations and platform extensions, most commonly using Microsoft technologies Solution Architects - designing end-to-end ERP and CRM solutions and aligning business requirements with technical delivery
- Business Central Consultants - implementing and customising Dynamics 365 Business Central for small and mid-sized organisations
- Power Platform Specialists - extending ERP and CRM capabilities through Power Apps, Power Automate and low-code solutions
- Business Analysts - bridging the business requirement and the system build
- Implementation & Project Managers - overseeing implementation programmes, coordinating stakeholders and managing delivery for a migration, rollout or upgrade
- Data Migration Specialists - moving and cleansing data between systems without breaking it
- Support & BAU Analysts - the team keeping an already-live system running day to day
- Heads of ERP/CRM & IT Leadership - strategic ownership of the platform and its roadmap
A failed ERP or CRM hire is rarely a pure technology failure. It's usually a process failure: a consultant who understood the software but not the business process it needed to support. That gap is easy to miss on paper, because ERP and CRM hiring rewards the wrong signal more than most technical disciplines do. A candidate can hold the right certification, talk fluently about the platform, and pass a technical test, and still misconfigure the module that runs your billing or your customer record, because the skill that actually matters is understanding how the business works, not just how the software does.
That's what makes this specialism harder to hire well for than it looks. The market rewards certifications because they're easy to verify, but a certification tells you someone has studied a platform, not that they've been trusted to run it end to end inside a real business. Specialist recruitment closes that gap by asking the questions a generic process can't: not just what a candidate knows, but where they've applied it, and what happened when it mattered.
Gravitas works with organisations running Dynamics 365 and other ERP and CRM platforms in-house, at every stage of that platform's life: businesses mid-implementation building out their internal team, organisations that have just gone live and need to build the function that owns it day to day, and established platform teams absorbing a new module, upgrade or automation rollout. In Germany specifically, that often means supporting the complex, multi-entity finance and reporting requirements financial services and energy sector organisations run through their ERP estate, rather than a single straightforward instance. For an in-house hire, the conversation centres on who owns the platform after go-live: patching, upgrades, user support and the roadmap for automation and AI features as the vendor rolls them out, not just the skillset needed for launch day. For a systems integrator engagement, it shifts to something narrower and faster: the module, the timeline, and the specific skill gap on the implementation team that's putting a go-live date at risk.
We typically deliver a shortlist within days for roles with strong network coverage; niche platform specialisms or senior architecture roles take longer, depending on platform, seniority and how time-critical the requirement is. We're upfront about realistic timeframes rather than promising a speed we can't deliver.
For a full picture of how we work, see our permanent recruitment and contract hiring pages.
ERP and CRM hiring sits across sectors, and Gravitas’s client base spans:
- Manufacturing and supply chain: ERP is the backbone of production planning, inventory and logistics; Germany’s manufacturing base makes this a consistent source of SAP and Dynamics 365 briefs.
- Financial services: CRM drives client relationship management and reporting; ERP underpins finance.
- Energy and utilities: ERP supporting asset management, infrastructure investment and regulatory reporting, with CRM increasingly in demand for customer and billing relationship management as utilities modernise.
- Professional services: implementation partners and consultancies resourcing client delivery on SAP, Salesforce and Dynamics 365 engagements.
- Public sector: digital transformation programmes bringing modern ERP and CRM platforms into public administration.
- Most clients end up running both: a permanent Head of ERP or CRM providing continuity and leadership, with contractors/freelancers brought in around the busiest phase of an implementation.
How you hire tends to follow the type of work rather than the sector: permanent hiring suits ongoing platform ownership, while contract hiring suits a defined implementation or migration. A business that's just gone live on a new CRM needs someone who'll still be there long after the project team has moved on, building institutional knowledge of your specific configuration and your specific customers - that's a permanent hire.
A business migrating from SAP ECC to S/4HANA on a fixed timeline, a live pressure point for many of the manufacturing and financial services clients above given SAP's 2027 maintenance deadline, needs a specialist for the scope of that project rather than a permanent headcount once it's finished - that's a contract hire.
Most clients end up running both: a permanent Head of ERP or CRM providing continuity and leadership, with contractors/freelancers brought in around the busiest phase of an implementation.
ERP & CRM Market intelligence:
Shared by our Associate Director, Kumar Gawri
The single biggest driver of ERP hiring in Germany right now isn't a new platform, it's an old deadline. SAP's mainstream maintenance for ECC ends in 2027, and adoption of its replacement, S/4HANA, is running well behind schedule: only around 39% of ECC customers have migrated so far, and analysts expect a meaningful share of the remaining installed base to still be running ECC when support ends. That's creating unusual, simultaneous demand for two different skill sets at once: consultants who can keep ageing, heavily customised ECC environments running safely, and consultants who can deliver an S/4HANA migration that, for most organisations, takes several years and touches every core business process. There's a generational element too: a meaningful share of deep SAP ECC knowledge sits with consultants approaching retirement, which sharpens the shortage further.
On the Microsoft side, Dynamics 365 continues to grow as a genuine SAP and Salesforce alternative, particularly for mid-market organisations, with Business Central covering smaller implementations and Power Platform increasingly used to extend or customise a D365 environment without a full development cycle. Solution architecture skills spanning both ERP and CRM, rather than sitting entirely within one, are in particularly high demand as more organisations run multi-platform estates and need someone who can own the data model connecting them.
German ERP and CRM salaries vary meaningfully by platform, not just by seniority, in permanent (annual, gross) and contract (Tagessatz / day-rate) terms:
- SAP Consultant - €53,000 to €90,000 permanent
- Dynamics 365 Consultant - €56,000 to €73,000 permanent
- Salesforce Consultant - €45,000 to €80,000 permanent
- Solution Architect (ERP/CRM) - €61,000 to €94,000 permanent; SAP and ERP freelance specialists command day rates around €900 to €960 per day, the highest of any IT specialism we've benchmarked on this rebuild
- Head of ERP/CRM & IT Leadership - €95,000 to €130,000 permanent
AI has stopped being a bolt-on feature in ERP and CRM and started becoming part of how these systems work. SAP's Joule, Microsoft's Copilot and Salesforce's Agentforce and Einstein tools are all being built to act inside the platform rather than sit alongside it, and the vendors are now connecting their assistants to each other, so a request that starts in an email or a Teams chat can trigger something that actually happens inside your ERP. That's a genuine shift from AI that answers questions to AI that does the work.
It's also created a governance problem before most organisations have caught up to it. The technical capability to let an AI agent make a change inside SAP or Dynamics is arriving faster than the policy work to control what it's allowed to touch, who's accountable when it gets something wrong, and how that action gets audited afterwards. The organisations getting real value from this aren't the ones with the most Copilot licences, they're the ones who worked out the governance question first, and that's changing what a strong hire looks like: platform knowledge alone isn't enough anymore.
For hiring processes, this is showing up as a widening of what \"ERP skills\" means. A functional consultant is increasingly expected to understand what an AI agent can and can't be trusted to do inside their module, not just how to configure it. That's a harder thing to screen for than a certification, which is exactly where a generalist recruiter runs out of road.
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