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Last Updated: 2025-10-17
Setup Considerations: Duplicate Candidate Merging

Setup Considerations: Duplicate Candidate Merging

You can use this topic to make configuration decisions for duplicate candidate merging. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How this feature fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

With Workday Recruiting match and merge functionality, you can identify potential duplicate candidates and merge a candidate to a:
  • Contingent worker.
  • Candidate.
  • Pre-hire.
  • Previous worker.

Business Benefits

  • Improved Data Accuracy and Integrity
    • Eliminates redundancy, ensures a single, complete candidate record.
    • Prevents conflicts, consolidates history, contact information, and application data.
  • Increased Recruiter Efficiency
    • Saves time, reduces effort spent managing duplicate profiles.
    • Simplifies hiring decisions especially with high volume hiring
    • Centralized candidate history improves visibility.
  • Enhanced Candidate Experience
    • Prevents duplicate outreach for the same role.
    • Reflects a well-managed and respectful hiring process.
  • Better Recruiting Analytics and Metrics
    • Accurate source tracking.
    • Improved pipeline metrics, better visibility into time-to-hire and conversion.
  • Stronger Compliance and Data Governance
    • Supports GDPR compliance, avoids unnecessary data duplication.
    • Maintains audit trails, tracks changes for transparency and accountability.

Use Cases

You can use duplicate candidate merging to:
  • Identify candidates who apply for jobs multiple times through external career sites using different emails or resumes.
  • Identify rehires or seasonal workers by asking if they’ve worked with the company before.
  • Merge confidential candidates or candidates with confidential job applications to other candidates, contingent workers, or former workers.
  • Link applicants who are also current employees, contingent workers, or former workers under a single profile.
  • Merge profiles created through referrals with those already in the system to maintain one source of truth.
  • Consolidate records from job fairs, campus events, or sourcing campaigns where candidates might register multiple times.
  • Combine profiles when different recruiting agencies submit the same candidate.
  • Prevent confusion during hiring and onboarding by ensuring the candidate’s history is accurate and complete.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
How do you want to merge duplicates?
You can merge duplicates manually or automatically.
When you enable automatic candidate merging, Workday automatically merges candidates based on specific matching criteria to help you save time.
You can merge candidates manually when they don't meet the criteria for automatic candidate merging. Example: Workday doesn't automatically merge candidates if at least 1 of them has a Candidate Home account.
Which types of duplicates do you want to merge?
You can merge candidates to:
  • Contingent workers
  • Other candidates
  • Pre-hires
  • Previous workers
  • Terminated workers
Workday identifies duplicate pre-hires when they’re eligible for hire and share the same country.
You can merge candidates who apply through an external career site with their active contingent worker profile.
Workday enables you to merge confidential candidates or candidates with confidential job applications to:
  • Contingent workers
  • Former workers
  • Other candidates
  • Terminated workers
When do you want to identify and manage duplicates?
You can add the duplicate candidate merging as a required step at any stage of the recruiting process.
When you include previous worker questions on your external career site, external candidates can identify themselves as previous workers. You can display responses to previous worker questions on the candidate grid to make recruiters aware of potential duplicates early in the recruiting process.
You can configure Workday to prevent a referral when:
  • The candidate applied for the job requisition previously.
  • There's a duplicate prospect for the same job requisition or job area.
  • The person already exists anywhere in Workday.
You can configure Workday to notify recruiters of potential duplicate agency candidates for review.

Recommendations

To avoid duplicate candidates, enable candidates to identify themselves as previous workers.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

You can't:
  • Automatically merge 2 candidates when at least 1 of them has a registered Candidate Home account.
  • Merge external candidates with active internal employees.
  • Merge a candidate to a worker who has an in-progress event. Example: Personal information change or future-dated
    Hire
     event.
  • Merge records when the source record has an in-progress event. Example: You can't merge a pre-hire with an in-progress
    Hire
     event to a previous worker.
  • Unmerge records that have an in-progress or completed
    Hire
     event.

Tenant Setup

You can enable automatic candidate merging on the
Edit Tenant Setup - Recruiting
 task.

Security

Domains
Considerations
Candidate Merge
 domain in the Recruiting functional area.
Users secured to this domain with
View and Modify
 access can view and merge potential duplicate candidates. Users with
View
 access can't take action on duplicates.
Former Worker Storage
 domain in the Staffing functional area.
Users secured to this domain can access information on former workers.

Business Processes

You can add:
  • Duplicate candidate merging as a
    To Do
     step on the
    Job Application
     business process.
  • Condition rules to
    To Do
     steps to review responses to previous worker questions and send a task to recruiters to review and manually merge duplicates.

Reporting

Reports
Considerations
Find Duplicates for Candidate
Use this report to view and manually merge or link duplicate records.
Merged Candidates
Use this report to review merged and unmerged records.

Integrations

You can use the
Put Candidate
 web service to load a small number of candidates. When you enable automatic candidate merging, Workday searches for duplicates created with the
Put Candidate
 web service. For loading a large number of candidates, we recommend you use the
Bulk Import Put Candidate
 web service. The
Bulk Import Put Candidate
 web service offers much more efficient loading. When you use the
Bulk Import Put Candidate
 web service, automatic candidate merging will not occur even if it is enabled. You can use the
Find Duplicates for Candidate
 report to identify duplicate candidates and merge them manually.

Connections and Touchpoints

Duplicate candidate merging interacts with these parts of Workday:
Features
Description
Cash
When merging, Workday takes this pre-hire data into account:
  • Ad hoc payment status.
  • Ad hoc payment template status.
Expenses
When merging, Workday takes this expenses data on candidate and pre-hire records into account:
  • Credit card transactions.
  • Expense item attributes.
  • Expense payees.
  • Expense payments.
  • Expense reports.
  • Mobile expenses.
  • Spend authorizations.
  • Ticket details.
Learning
When merging, Learning takes this pre-hire data into account:
  • Contact person for a course offering.
  • Learning history.
  • Learning paths.
  • Topics.
Settlements
When merging, Workday takes this payment data on pre-hire records into account:
  • Ad hoc payments.
  • Expense payments.
Student
The Match and Merge process suggests potential duplicates for merging.
Talent
When merging, Talent takes this pre-hire data into account:
  • Awards and activities.
  • Certifications.
  • Competencies.
  • Education.
  • Internal projects.
  • Job history.
  • Languages.
  • Professional affiliations.
  • Skills.
  • Training.
  • Work experience.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.