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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Reference: Search Workday

Reference: Search Workday

To improve the speed and accuracy of your search results, Workday recommends that you use:
Recommendation
Description
Numbers only
Search for an ID by removing special characters, such as dashes or spaces.
Search categories
When you enter a search term, select a search category to narrow your results.
Workday uses the Common category, which lists only active workers, applicants, organizations, reports, and tasks. To change the default search category in your tenant, use the
Edit Tenant Setup – Search
 task. To change your individual preferred search category, use the
Change Preferences
 task.
Search prefixes
To restrict search results to a specific type of Workday object, precede your search term with a prefix and a colon.
Example:
bp: time off
 returns business process definitions related to time off.
To view a list of search prefixes, enter
?
 in global search.
Worker search criteria
Use these criteria to search for active workers in global search or worker prompts, using any language enabled for your tenant:
  • Business title of the primary job.
  • Business title of an additional job.
  • Business title of an international assignment.
  • Contingent Worker ID.
  • Employee ID.
  • General name display.
  • Location of primary and additional jobs.
  • Primary work email address.
  • Public email address.
  • Reporting name display.
  • Supervisory organization of the primary job.
  • Supervisory organization of an additional job.
  • Supervisory organization of an international assignment.
  • User name.
You can configure the
Search: Current Legal and All Historical Names
 security domain to allow specific security groups to search by current legal and historical names.
Staffing Organization search criteria
Use these criteria to search for staffing organizations in global search, reports, and tasks:
  • Organization ID.
  • Leader Names (First and Last Names).
  • Primary Location of Organization.
  • Organization Code.
  • Organization Name.
Use external IDs to search for supervisory organizations in prompts.
Search supports these delimiters:
  • Valid search with underscore (_):
    John_Smith
    .
  • Valid search with hash (#):
    John#Smith
    .
  • Valid search with greater than (>):
    John>Smith
    .
  • Valid search with slash (/):
    John/Smith
    .
Search doesn't support dots (.) as delimiters. Search treats criteria with dots as 1 string, and you can only search on valid segments of the string.
In this example, we formatted location with dots:
  • Valid location string:
    John Smith USA.CA.Pleasanton
    .
  • Valid segment of location string:
    John Smith USA.CA
    .
  • Invalid location string:
    John Smith CA.Pleasanton
    .