I wanted to share our successful recruiting data migration experience as we moved to Workday R2-2023 last quarter. Our organization had 4 years of recruiting data in our legacy ATS covering approximately 45,000 candidate records and 1,200 job requisitions.
The migration scope included active job requisitions, candidate profiles for anyone who applied in the last 18 months, and full application history. We used Workday Studio to build the integration and completed the migration in 6 weeks from planning to production load.
Key success factors were thorough data mapping documentation, extensive validation testing with sample data sets, and close collaboration between our recruiting team and technical implementation team. Our approach might be helpful for others planning similar migrations.
Can you share more details about your Workday Studio integration architecture? Did you use multiple integration steps or one monolithic process? How did you handle the validation and error handling? We’re building a similar integration and I’m trying to understand the best approach for managing the complexity of candidate data with all its related objects like applications, interviews, and offer details.
We took a selective approach to requisitions. Only active and recently filled requisitions from the past 6 months were migrated - about 300 requisitions total. Older filled or cancelled requisitions were archived in the legacy system for historical reference only. For filled positions where the candidate was hired, we did establish the linkage to the worker record in Core HR, but we did this post-migration through a separate reconciliation process rather than trying to do it all in one load. This simplified the initial migration and reduced dependencies.
Great question. We absolutely did deduplication as part of the migration. Our legacy system had duplicate candidate records based on email address - some candidates appeared 3-4 times if they applied through different sources. We built deduplication logic into our Workday Studio integration that identified duplicates by email and merged their application history into a single candidate profile. This reduced our 45,000 records down to about 32,000 unique candidates. The deduplication step was crucial for data quality in Workday. We also standardized phone number formats and address data during the transformation.