2024R2 Recruiting Updates
Summary Pages
Job Description Generation on Job Requisitions
AI is turning up everywhere, and Workday is no exception. This may be our opportunity to work smarter, not harder, as generating job descriptions per job requisition can be time-consuming. This feature is new and experimental so it will still require review, but we stand to gain better, unique job descriptions more efficiently.
U.S. Federal Veteran’s Preference
With this update, Workday enables additional configuration beyond veteran’s status to verify Veteran’s Preference and include attachments. This will allow for easier verification of veteran’s status to meet government requirements, if needed.
Manager Insights Hub
Up to this point, there were a dozen delivered manager dashboards specific to different functional areas. And the Manager Insights Hub was no different – focusing solely on Talent & Career related items. But no longer! This update moves the Manager Insights Hub closer to one-stop-shopping for Managers with the inclusion of themes like Hiring and Staffing, Time Management, and Budgeting.
Hub Navigation Customization
Previous Hub customization options were limited. Workday 2024R2 makes it easier for you to customize the navigation experience of your hubs. This enables you to create your own navigation items and groups with custom labels. You can also use this new feature to group and re-order Workday-delivered and custom navigation items on hubs.
External Career Site Job Applications
Speeding up the application process and making it more enjoyable overall is a win. This update is a series of small but mighty tweaks to the application process that have historically been a nuisance to candidates. This is our first touchpoint with potential future hires, and these enhancements can help us put our best foot forward right from the start. To enable, navigate to Maintain Feature Opt-Ins > External Career Site Apply Flow Improvements
Undo Move for Multiple Candidates
Prior to this update, if candidates were mistakenly moved in bulk, that action had to be undone one by one. And considering how delightfully easy Workday makes it to move candidates en masse, I’m thrilled we finally get an easy reverse. If this does accidentally occur at your organization, it can now be corrected in minutes rather than hours!
Candidate Home My Application Redesign
A lot of focus has always gone into the initial Job Application experience, and rightfully so. But this update gives the post-application Candidate Home experience some much needed attention. These UX updates increase intuitive navigation and make it easier for candidates to review and act on their application after that initial submission.
View and Review Documents on Candidate Home
The Candidate Home and post-initial application experience continue to receive attention in this update cycle. With this update, Workday has made the experience of referring to previously reviewed & submitted document tasks easier to access and more in-line with the job application navigational experience holistically.
Candidate Home Tasks
With this update, Workday has streamlined the task experience for external candidates who are prompted to take additional action within the job application process after the initial submission of their application. Instead of navigating to a new screen, candidate tasks will appear in a pop-up window. This is supposed to
Candidate Home Job Alerts
Workday continues to improve the candidate experience for functionality outside of the initial job application. This touchpoint is particular to Job Alerts, and follows the theme of pop-ups and side panels instead of new tabs, and actions bundled into a related actions button. All towards making the full candidate experience more accessible and intuitive
Posting End Date & Time Left to Apply
Previous default behavior did not give candidates any indication of a deadline when reviewing posted jobs. This update is aimed to increase transparency and reduce the need for recruiter intervention if a candidate misses a deadline that they did not know about and wants the recruiter to submit on their behalf.
Prospect Consent Collection
A big emphasis for this cycle has been consistency & injecting intuitive design into candidate-facing elements. This update is no exception, making PIY submissions a similar experience to the rest of the Workday application experience. This update is unlikely to knock your socks off but if you previously thought the PIY space was a bit clunky, hopefully this helps!
Mappings for Job Application Questions
This update streamlines the background process for mapping custom questions to delivered questions within a job application. What used to be a 1 to 1 relationship can now be a 1 to multiple relationship. We can now accomplish the same goal with fewer custom questions.
Core Connector: Candidate Outbound
If you’ve felt limited by the available capabilities and data fields within Workday’s Core Connector: Candidate Outbound integration template, this update is for you. Workday has beefed up the information you can include and leverage during launch as well as added to overall default capabilities with configuration options for output location and output file sequence ID.
3 Quick Custom Recruiting Reports
3 Quick Custom Recruiting Reports
Workday Recruiting is a veritable gold mine for custom reporting; rife with variables, daily injections of new data, and nuanced company-specific metrics. With that being said, I’d like to share with you 3 custom reports focusing on Candidate data for Workday Recruiting.
Those reports are:
Candidate Applications by Week
Are these three reports going to cover all your Recruiting reporting needs? Unlikely. BUT the three reports above are an excellent combination of easy-to-build and valuable-to-have. The juice is worth the squeeze, if you will. Especially if report-building in Workday is unfamiliar territory.
While the Recruiting Hub is excellent and worth leveraging if you aren’t already, circumstances arise where we need to report on candidate data in aggregate for non-Recruiters. Or share data beyond the immediate Recruiting team without giving over the keys to the kingdom. Or we want to customize our data lens beyond what the Recruiting Hub functionality allows.
If any of these pain-points sound familiar, this trio of custom reports might come in handy.
Candidates by Stage
Data Source: Job Applications
Purpose: Display an aggregate count of all active job applications and what stage of the application process that application is presently in (Review, Screen, Interview, Offer, etc.)
Why I like it: Get a quick snapshot of high-level recruiting activity across every job requisition. This report can give us a sense of how busy our Recruiting team is likely to be in the coming weeks, and what sort of support will be needed for a sourcing-heavy vs. interview-heavy period.
How Do I Build It?
You will only need to fill in the Row Grouping section for this one with report field = Candidate Stage. No Column Grouping required (unless you want to get fancy and inject another variable to see candidate stage by candidate type or recruiter (or anything, really).
The Detail Data can be anything you’d like to see when you click on the blue numbers displaying in your report. If you’re not sure, the fields pictured below are an excellent place to start!
There are no filters or required prompts but if you find the dispositioned candidate data volume overwhelming, please feel free to pop in a filter of Candidate Stage > not in the selection list > Rejected, Declined by Candidate to exclude them.
For the output, I’ve gone with the “Chart and Table” donut. I usually (read: always) prefer a visual but you can leave it at just a table. There are additional graphic options so feel free to explore!
And voilà – we’ve got ourselves a custom report on Candidate Status!
Candidates by Step
Data Source: Job Applications
Purpose: Display an aggregate count of all active job applications and what specific step of the application process that application is presently in (Manager Screen, Recruiting Screen, 2nd Interview, Make New Offer, etc.)
Why I like it: This report is excellent for identifying delays or bottlenecks that slow down your recruiting process so you can be proactive about providing support and moving things along.
How Do I Build it?
Almost exactly the same way we built the first one. So much so, I encourage you to copy the Candidate Status report we’ve just built and save yourself some time.
The only thing we need to change is our Row Grouping. Instead of Candidate Stage, select Job Application Step. This field captures any step label overrides we may be using within BP: Job Application, 1st Interview vs. 2nd Interview; Manager Screen vs. Recruiter Screen.
No column grouping necessary but feel free to add additional variables if you want to highlight different cohorts of applicants (EX: internal vs. external vs. agency).
Every other tab will be exactly the same as our previous report for Candidate Stage, so if you did go ahead and “copy,” your done! Just be sure to check the Share tab, this will always return to the default of shared with only you.
And just like that, we’ve got our second custom recruiting report!
Candidate Applications by Week
Data Source: Job Applications
Purpose: Display a weekly rollup (this can be any range of time – quarterly, monthly, etc.) of Candidate Applications that have been submitted.
Why I like it: Track how well you are performing following any new recruitment promotions/initiatives. See the aggregate application volume in real-time to coordinate staffing and coverage appropriately.
For this report, our Row Grouping is going to be a calculated field (dun dun dun!) on Added Date (aka Application Date). But fear not! It’s one level, straight-forward, and will allow us to bundle our application dates into the same week (or whatever timeframe aggregate speaks to you).
Our calc field type is going to be a Lookup Date Rollup, with our date field being Added Date. The format drop-down is where you can deviate from my “week” if you’d like to do a different summation.
Once you create this calc field and pop it into our Row Grouping, we are just about done! I’d suggest following the same pattern for the detail data and filters you’ve selected on our previous two custom reports on Candidates.
The main difference, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is that I’ve ditched the donut. Instead, I pick a Bar-Clustered with our calculated date rollup occupying the vertical axis and my count summarization occupying the Legend.
As an aside, you can flip your vertical axis and legend to get more colors involved in your report output. I like the additional colors, but not as much as I dislike my dates being in the legend instead of running down the vertical axis. But entirely personal preference, the numbers remain the same.
One final thing – if you intend to add these custom reports to a dashboard, be sure to identify that dashboard in the Output tab > Worklet Options and share the report with at least one security group.
That wasn’t so bad – three custom recruiting reports to monitor your job application process!
If you’re reporting needs extend beyond these three reports, don’t hesitate to reach out! There is more where these came from!
Skills Touchpoints & Suggestions
Skills Touchpoints & Suggestions
For part 2 of our skills cloud series, we’re going to cover the main cross-functional touch-points for Skills, and how it drives different suggestions.
The Skills touch-points we’ll cover are in the realms of Talent, Learning, Recruiting, and HCM. Most suggestions will be of skills themselves in different places on different objects, but Workday ALSO has the ability to suggest Colleagues, Learning Content, and Job Opportunities (aka Job Requisitions & Flex Teams).
Below we’ve summarized what Workday can suggest and where:
One example I like to use when talking about Skills Cloud, machine learning, and AI is Spotify (apologies to my Apple Music listeners). Spotify can push to their users any artists that they already listen to; simple and straight-forward. Spotify can also push songs & artists from the same or similar genres as the music their users listen to. Still straight-forward, but there’s a little bit of inference involved here. The fancy thing Spotify can do (which has been pretty accurate, in my experience) is identify other listeners with similar music tastes to you and suggest songs that THEY like. The connection is a bit more difficult to track since we don’t have access to all this data in bulk (nor perhaps the processing power to analyze it) but the resulting suggestions can be impressively accurate.
Loosely, Workday’s suggestions are doing something similar. Workday is looking at all the data at its disposal and making straight-line or dotted-line connections from object to skill or object to object. It’s just a bit more fun to talk about in terms of music.
Let’s dive into some of the places skills can show up, and the role they can play in the larger picture. As an aside, I’ll intermittently call out decisions we can make around skill functionality; by-and-large that decision is a check box in Maintain Skills and Experience Setup.
Talent
Lets start with the most well-known one. Skills on a worker. Individuals can select skills they have, or skills they would like to have. The songs on your playlist, if you will.
At this point, Workday can begin to identify other workers that are “similar” to you based on the skills that they have and are interested in. Workday can also reference objects like job profiles and supervisory organizations when looking for similarities.
Via the Connections & Mentors functionality (pictured below in Career Hub) Workday can create dotted-line connections between workers. Workers that are similar to you or workers that have something you want. This one is a slightly different suggestion of People rather than Skills.
Learning
The suggestions on Learning Content are two-fold. Within the Skills drop-down is a category of Recommended Skills where Workday will make suggestions of Skills to include on this content. In addition, Workday can also take this Learning Content and suggest it to Learners based on their interests and learning behavior.
Recruiting
Internal Candidate Skills
When you apply internally, applicants can leverage skills cloud & skill suggestions in much the same way they do on their worker profile. Optionally, an internal applicant can update the skills on their worker profile with any changes they’ve made in their job application so these two places remain in sync (this capability is new-er).
External Candidate Skills
External applicants function a little differently with regards to skills. You can optionally allow skills cloud to be accessible to your external candidates, but it won’t make skill suggestions (I assume because Workday doesn’t have much data on them at this point). The value in opening up skills cloud to external candidates (in excess of clean data and seemingly unlimited skill selection options) is that upon hire this information transfers over to a new hire’s worker profile.
Job Requisitions & Flex Teams
Add required and optional skills directly to your job requisitions & flex teams (gigs) for clarity on the role, and direct influence in how it is promoted to applicants. If a worker has skills that this job requisition/flex team professes to need, it’s more likely to be pushed to them as an opportunity that matches their skill set. In absence of direct skills applied, Workday can leverage the free-text descriptions and/or job profiles to make skill inferences.
HCM
At this point, it’s becoming clear that we can sprinkle skills in A LOT of different places. The final object we will cover is Job Profiles. For Job Profiles, the information lives amidst other Qualifications, and you can add additional skill data for Required vs. Optional and Skill Level (more on Skill Levels to come in our Skills part 3 post).
If you want to add skills to Job Profiles in bulk, this effort has recently become MUCH easier. This will likely be it’s own Skills post, but the involved parties are the delivered report Suggested Skills for Job Profile and the mass action Edit Skills for Job Profiles.
There is so much to cover within the realm of skills. I hope this overview has left you with more clarity and fewer questions. If that’s NOT the case, or if you have suggestions for the next deep-dive skills topic, don’t hesitate to drop a comment in the link below!
Revisiting Recruiting Dispositions
Recruiting Dispositions
Disposition Reasons are a critical and sensitive touch-point between candidates & recruiters. Historically, they could be unruly to deal with. As a product of Workday’s 2024 R1 updates, Disposition Reasons just got easier in two significant ways; categorization of the list & custom disposition notification creation.
Disposition Categories
This update is going to make it easier for recruiters to find the right disposition reason. If you have a long list of very specific dispositions in each stage of the job application process, this update is for you. Workday now allows you to apply a Disposition Category to each of your Disposition reasons, which recruiters can leverage in navigation when attempting to disposition a candidate.
As an added benefit, Disposition Category is now a field we can leverage in summary reporting to help us identify trends without all the noise of dozens of specific disposition reasons.
Disposition Notifications
This update, personally, will get the award for saving me the most time. Previously, to create unique notifications off specific disposition reasons (EX: Position Closed), we had to create a notification for each Job Application section where it appeared as an option. So if I get a request for a specific notification to go out to candidates dispositioned when a position is closed, and the disposition reason “Position Closed” appears in Review, Screen, Assessment, Interview, Offer, Background Check, and Reference Check, I will need to create the same notification 7 times off each of those 7 specific triggers.
You can see how this quickly spirals into hundreds of notifications. Now with Workday’s Notification Trigger on Disposition update, this scenario is a thing of the past. If I need a specific notification for a disposition reason (or several disposition reasons) I only need to create one notification instead of seven.
The set-up is easier. The maintenance long-term is easier. But the “old way” of creating them via On Entry > Conclusion > Disposition Reason (Stage) is still available. The current disposition notifications you may have now are “fine”. They still work. Because I am a subscriber to the “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” philosophy, I don’t think updating your existing disposition notifications to this framework is hair-on-fire necessary. But I do think conversion at some point is worth the effort; this is sure to be a call-out on optimization efforts going forward.
What’s Automatically Available in Recruiting 2024 R1?
What’s Automatically Available in Recruiting 2024 R1?
For this go-round, there’s only 1 Automatically Available update in the realm of Recruiting – and the argument could be made that it’s not technically Automatically Available because you have to opt-in via Maintain Feature Opt-Ins in Production. This update has also been slightly delayed; appearing in preview tenants March 15, 2024 and Production tenants on April 19, 2024.
This update defaults to “on” in your preview tenant but you will have to enable it in Production via the Maintain Feature Opt-Ins task. The feature you are looking for is titled “External Career Site Apply Flow Improvements.”
External Career Site Job Applications
Without further ado – the 2024 R1 Recruiting Update in question is External Career Site Job Applications. Workday’s done a smattering of revamping within the External Career Site functionality to make things more intuitive, accessible, and efficient for applicants. It’s a bit of a bundle-situation; while technically only 1 update, there are several pieces involved. Below, we walk through each of the external career site components that are changing.
Candidate Home Account Creation
This is my favorite component of this update. If Candidate Home Accounts are required, Workday now includes the task to create a candidate home account within the progress bar of the application.
Errors & Warnings
One of the more noticeable updates of this grouping, the UI for Errors & Alerts has changed slightly. Instead of appearing on the right-hand rail, they are now bundled into a banner at the top of the section.
Country Default on My Information Page
It’s unlikely I would have noticed this if Workday had not said anything, but Workday has made the Country field defaulting a bit smarter. Previously, this field defaulted based on the primary location of the position if a candidate wasn’t applying with a resume or previous application. Now, Workday sequentially considers the factors below in it’s auto-population decision:
- Address provided in any application
- Country from a candidate’s resume (if applying with a resume)
- Country from a LinkedIn profile (if applying with LinkedIn)
- Country based on the candidates browser language setting
- Job Posting primary location
- The default country selection within Edit Tenant Setup – System
Questionnaires
If you include questionnaires with branching questions, the load-time here has been improved. If you include numerical questions in your questionnaires (EX: desired salary), there are no longer numerical limits. Inflation, am I right?
Websites URLs
If you are leveraging this section, your applicants no longer need to include http:// or https:// as a precursor to their website URL.
Social Network URLs
Workday used to default social networks for candidates into new applications even if they selected “Apply Manually.” That auto-population will no longer occur.