Setup Considerations: Questionnaires for Recruiting
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of recruiting questionnaires. It explains:
- Why to set them up.
- How they fit 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 They Are
Recruiting questionnaires in Workday enable you to gather and collate candidate, recruiter, and interviewer data. You can issue questionnaires at any stage of the recruiting process.
Business Benefits
- Improved Recruiting Efficiency: Gather key details up front to reduce follow-ups. Example: Candidates submit availability and work status with the job application.
- Stronger Compliance and Reporting: Collect structured data to support legal and reporting requirements.
- Better Team Collaboration: Share responses with hiring teams to align on candidate strengths and gaps.
- Personalized Experience: Tailor questions to match the role, location, or business needs.
- Consistent Candidate Evaluation: Ask every applicant the same questions for fair, uniform assessment.
- Efficient Screening and Selection: Example: Assign scores and weights to questions to identify top applicants quickly.
Use Cases
- Candidates Pre-Screening: Collect work eligibility data to filter out ineligible candidates.Example: Ask if candidates have legal authorization to work in the country.
- Interview Preparation: Provide hiring managers candidate responses in advance to help guide interviews.Example: Share responses about leadership experience before a manager-level interview.
- Role-Specific Assessments. Include job relevant questions for candidates.Example: Ask software engineers to describe a recent coding challenge they solved.
- Localization and Compliance: Add region-specific legal or policy questions.Example: Ask EU candidates if they consent to data processing under GDPR.
- Capture Candidate Preferences: Gather information on location, salary, or start date preferences.Example: Ask candidates if they are open to relocating or working remotely.
- Supporting Internal Mobility: Assess internal candidates' readiness and career progression goals.Example: Ask internal candidates what skills they want to develop in their next role.
- Manage High-Volume Recruiting: Use structured questions to efficiently screen large applicant pools.Example: In a retail hiring campaign, ask about weekend availability and prior customer service experience.
Questions to Consider
Question | Consideration |
|---|---|
What kind of questionnaires do you want to create? | You can create primary questionnaires to ask candidates general questions. You can create secondary questionnaires to ask more specific questions, such as questions about job location. Supplementary questionnaires enable recruiters to:
|
How do you want to view questionnaires? | To display questionnaires automatically on job or evergreen requisitions that use that job profile, set a condition rule on the Maintain Job Requisition Questionnaire Defaults task. If you update any of the fields on the job requisition before submitting it, Workday:
You can also access the View Questionnaire report to view and preview completed questionnaires. |
How do you want to filter eligible and ineligible candidates? | You can assign points to multiple choice questions to eliminate ineligible candidates and advance high scoring candidates. Example: A candidate gets low scores because of age threshold. Workday eliminates the candidate.
You can also create a branching question for possible answers and assign points to possible responses. |
Recommendations
Workday recommends that you create question tags to help you search and keep track of questions. Example: Create question tags for internal and external questions so that you can easily search for these question types.
To ensure that candidates, complete a questionnaire, you can add the
Complete Questionnaire
action step on any subprocess of the Job Application
business process. Workday recommends that you add this step before the Make Decision
step.When using questionnaires on an external career site, Workday recommends that you keep the total number of questions, including branched questions, to under 100 questions.
Requirements
No impact.
Limitations
If you add a
Complete Questionnaire
step to the Interview
business process, you can't send questionnaires to the groups specified in the Schedule Interview Team
step. You can associate a questionnaire with the Schedule Interview
and Manage Interview Feedback
business process steps of the Interview
business process so that interviewers receive the questionnaire.Tenant Setup
To enable changes to primary and secondary questionnaires, select the
Enable Primary and Secondary Questionnaire Removal or Replacement on Evergreen and Job Requisitions
check box under the Job Requisition
section of the Edit Tenant Setup - HCM
task.Security
Domains | Considerations |
|---|---|
Candidate Data: Questionnaires in the Recruiting functional area. | Provides access to questionnaire responses.
You can use segment-based security groups to determine access to questionnaire responses. |
Candidate Data: Questionnaire Total Score in the Recruiting functional area. | Provides access to the total score of a questionnaire on the Job Requisition composite view. |
Configure Questions for Business Process and Configure Questionnaires for Business Process in the System functional area. | Enables you to manage access to supplementary questionnaires.
Provides access to these tasks during the Supplementary Questionnaires for Job Requisition event:
|
Set Up: Questionnaire Calc Fields in the Recruiting and Talent Pipeline functional areas. | Enables you to create a question report field for a question from the related actions menu of the question. |
Set Up: Recruiting domain in the Recruiting functional area. | Enables you to add eligibility questions to job applications for external candidates. |
Staffing Actions: Job Requisition Job Questionnaires in the Staffing functional area. | Provides access to job requisition questionnaires and the questionnaire sections on these tasks:
Provides access to job requisition questionnaires and controls whether the Questionnaire section displays on the Create Job Requisition and Edit Job Requisition tasks. |
Questionnaire in the System functional area. | Provides access to all tasks and reports related to configurable questionnaires. |
Questionnaire Creation and Distribution in the System functional area. | Enables you to access the Maintain Questionnaires task and create, edit, delete, view, and preview questionnaires. |
Question Library in the System functional area. | Provides access to all tasks and reports related to questions and question tags. |
Questionnaire Results in the System functional area. | Provides access to all the tasks and reports related to accessing the results and the attachments for a questionnaire. |
Business Processes
Business Processes | Considerations |
|---|---|
Job Requisition
| To add or update questionnaires assigned to job or evergreen requisitions, you can configure the Job Requisition business process and security policy for the Staffing Actions: Job Requisition Job Questionnaires domain in the Staffing functional area. |
Supplementary Questionnaires for Job Requisition
| Configure this business process to enable recruiters to create supplementary questionnaires on job and evergreen requisitions. |
Reporting
Reports | Considerations |
|---|---|
View Questionnaire
| View questionnaires you have access to. |
View Questionnaire Security Segment
| Enables you to identify who has access to questionnaire responses. |
Integrations
No impact.
Connections and Touchpoints
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.