Your survival guide to managing duplicates in Workday

Read time: 10 minutes

Hey there! Mia and Ceci here.

Have you ever searched for somebody in Workday and found them... four times?

Of course, you did. We all have. And we all know what this means...

Untamed duplicate records growing wild, silently eating away at your data integrity, forever preventing you from having a well built tenant…

Oh, the pain! 😩

HR has no idea which record to use for transactions, headcount reporting is plain incorrect, moving candidates into Ready for Hire triggers random processes, dynamically generated offer letters make no sense, referral payment eligibility has to be manually checked (again!), and the list goes on and on… 😵‍💫

But fear not! The Unified Duplicate Management Framework (DMF), the hero we know we needed (and, frankly, deserved), is here to save the day, and to help us make sure that each person has exactly one record in Workday. Identifying and merging those pesky duplicate profiles has never been easier (if you follow this guide, of course 😉)!

A bit of history 📖🤓

Once upon a time, only these two modules had their own separate duplicate management frameworks, called Match & Merge:

• Recruiting (for candidate profiles only)

• Student (for student records only)

Then, with 2020R2, Workday delivered DMF, providing significant enhancements and enabling us to swiftly manage all duplicate records across the tenant (including Recruiting, Student, and HCM)! 🥳

The time had come to bid farewell to the obsolete legacy features, embrace DMF, and live happily ever after 🥰

Of course, that’s not what happened. Upon its release, DMF was not quite ready to satisfy customers’ needs, and updates trickled in over the following years. Fast forward to today—now it’s fully baked and ready, but many customers are still relying on the outdated, redundant frameworks for Recruiting and Student, or even worse… not managing duplicate records at all 😱

We can now confidently say that making the move to the Unified Duplicate Management Framework is a no-brainer for all—yep, all Workday customers.

If you haven’t made the switch yet, now is the best time. If you’re already using DMF, be sure to follow along & review your setup! 🙌

Now on to the tech stuff… 🛠

Setting up Duplicate Management, step-by-step

Okay, ya’ll. This is a big topic. Fasten your seatbelt for this one 😅 To make things more digestible, we’ve broken this configuration guide up into two parts. Here’s the agenda…

Step 1: Set up security 🔒

First things first: If you’re brand spankin’ new to DMF, go to Maintain Functional Areas and enable the Duplicate Management Functional Area. Don’t forget to confirm this via the Activate Pending Security Policy Changes task.

Then, set up access as needed for the following three domains:

✅ Set Up: Duplicate Management

Grants access to setup tasks for admins, including:

• Opt-In to Duplicate Management

• Manage Match Rules

• Run/schedule Find Duplicates job

Only unconstrained groups are allowed here!

✅ Manage: Duplicate Records for a Person

Grants access to manage (potential) duplicate records for a single person. Add your constrained roles here, e.g., recruiters and/or HR analysts. This way they can handle (merge or remove) duplicates for the profiles they're responsible for, without granting them access to all the profiles in the system.

✅ Manage: Duplicate Records for the Tenant

This domain is primarily for your admins—unconstrained groups only! Access here includes everything on the previous domain (⬆️ Manage: Duplicate Records for a Person), as well as the ability to see all duplicate profiles tenant-wide and perform mass actions via delivered faceted admin reports.

⚠️ You’ll need Modify access to this domain to unmerge records! ⚠️

You could technically add a role-based unconstrained security group here (for example, Recruiter) to enable more self-sufficiency, but then you’d have to be OK with exposing all of your recruiters to all of the profiles in the system—and anyone can be flagged as a duplicate, even confidential candidates!

Lastly, use the task Opt-In to Duplicate Management (domain: Set Up: Duplicate Management) when you’re ready to say buh bye 👋 to the old ways and embrace the new era of matching & merging. After this, the die is cast 🎲—there’s no opting out, and even if you try to access some of the old functionality, chances are you'll be met with a similar message:

To prevent confusion and old tasks/reports from cluttering your system, you should also disable these domains that belong to the obsolete and now-retired Match & Merge framework:

❌ Candidate Merge

❌ Manage: Duplicate Records

❌ Set Up: Student Match and Merge

❌ Reports: Student Match and Merge

Step 2: Configure match rules 👯

Now that you have the perfect security setup for DMF, let’s demystify how Workday can help you track down duplicate records!

The Manage Match Rules page is where you should spend most of your time—not really configuring—but more like contemplating setup considerations, business needs, edge case scenarios, and maybe the meaning of life 🌿

Workday delivers 11 Match Criteria:

You cannot customize this list, but you can select multiple criteria to create your very own Match Rules to accommodate a wide range of business needs.

For example, if you select Email and Phone, all profiles in the system with an identical email address 📧 and phone number 📞 will be flagged as duplicates.

The last three selectable criteria for Previous Workers only apply to Recruiting customers.

To ensure you collect Previous Worker self-identification data during your job application workflow, go to Edit External Career Site, select the appropriate site, and navigate to the Apply - Previous Worker section. The questions you configure here will only pop up for external applicants who identify themselves as a previous worker when applying.

When creating your Match Rules, at least one of these fields needs to be included in each rule:

• Date of Birth (but you can’t match on this alone!)

• Email

• Name - All or Name - Basic

• National ID - All or National ID - Basic

• Phone

• Previous Worker ID

Matching on Name and National ID components 💳

You probably noticed how you have two match criteria for names: Name - All and Name - Basic. Here’s why:

Name - All

Takes all name components into consideration, and everything has to match for the record to be flagged as a duplicate (e.g. First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Prefix, Suffix etc.).

Name - Basic

Only considers whether the basic name components for the given country are the same (e.g. in the US it would match on First Name and Last Name only, ignoring everything else).

Keep in mind that data must be identical for a match to occur, so, for instance, “Stephen Smith” will never match with “Steve Smith” (no fuzzy match!); however, accents and lowercase/uppercase differences are ignored, so e.g., “steve smíth” can be a match for “Steve Smith”.

Similarly, we also have National ID - All and National ID - Basic, where the former will only recognize a match if all 4 components (National ID Type, Issue Date, Expiration Date, Number) are identical, with the basic version only considering ID Type and Number.

Auto-merging 🤖

Notice the Automatic Merge Enabled checkbox next to the Match Criteria—if you check this, the system will attempt to automatically merge duplicate records identified by that rule. “Automatically” in this case means “without any human intervention or oversight whatsoever”, so be careful with this one—only use it when you feel super duper comfortable that the rule is rigid enough so that the duplicates identified by it are, in fact, 100% duplicates—no false alarms! 🚨

For example, it may be tempting to set up an auto-merge rule based on Email only, but that could lead to disaster the first time a husband and wife submit separate applications using their joint email address 😬 Consider using, for example, Email and Name - Basic instead!

⚠️ Note: Unmerged records (profiles that were merged, then split up ✂️ again) will not be automatically merged under any circumstances!

Naming your Match Rules ✍️

It’s important to give descriptive 📜 names to your rules, including the Match Criteria used as well as whether it’s enabled for auto-merge. For example, “Potential duplicate based on Email and Phone” or “Auto-merge based on Date of Birth and Email” could be good names, making it easy to identify the reasons behind these matches down the line.

Lastly, keep in mind that once a Match Rule is used, it cannot be modified or deleted—but you can easily enable/disable it with a click 🖱

Phew! 😮‍💨 That was all a mouthful… but now you know everything about Match Rules! 🙌

Well, almost everything 😉 There are still a coupleee more things to review…

Person Types Excluded from Automatic Merge ⛔

If you have at least one active rule that’s enabled for automatic merge, you can opt to exclude specific person types (e.g., candidate, employee) from auto-merge runs, allowing for more manual control.

Employee Merge Options 👥

You have two choices here:

1. Append data from source

2. Don’t append data from source

This setting only affects merges where the target record is an employee or contingent worker. The “weaker” record is called the source, and this is the one that gets merged into the target (the “stronger” 💪 record)—more on this next week!

Append data from source

If you choose to append, the data from both initial records will be kept in the final, merged record, where applicable. For example, in the case of two different home addresses on the duplicate profiles, both would be displayed on the resulting merged profile, with the data from the source listed under additional addresses.

Don’t append data from source

If you decide not to append, the “weaker” data from the source profile will be permanently deleted during the merge, and can only be restored if you unmerge the records later.

Workday recommends opting for the append option here, to prevent loss of info & preserve as much data as possible 💾

Match Exclusion Criteria 🚫

Lastly (and this time for real!), you can add some specific emails and names to exclude from matching. This could be useful when your tenant is full of creative email addresses like [email protected] or legendary names like John Doe. We all know and love them. No need to clog the Matching Machine with these fine specimens 🧐

Pro tip: You need to create a new match rule or edit an existing one, then run the Schedule Find Duplicates Job task to actually activate new match exclusions 💡

Step 3: Schedule the Find Duplicates job 🕐

The Find Duplicates job does two things:

1. Attempts to automatically merge duplicate profiles flagged by your auto-merge enabled Match Rules.

2. Refreshes the results of the Manage Duplicate Records admin report based on the latest Match Rules and data 🔄

It’s a good idea to schedule this job via the Schedule Find Duplicates Job task to run quite frequently, e.g., an hourly recurrence or even up to every 5 minutes, to ensure your data is kept up-to-date.

The very first Find Duplicates job (or one right after a change in Match Rules) can take a good while ⌛, as in these cases, the system evaluates every person against every other person in the tenant for all the rules.

The “welcome page” of the main admin report, Manage Duplicate Records, displays useful details about your last and next Find Duplicates jobs, and clicking on Run Now allows you to run the job directly from here.

Oh, and don’t forget to make sure the owner of the job is an ISU (with Modify access to the domain Set Up: Duplicate Management) to ensure your process is not only turnover-proof, but also to prevent various departments calling you non-stop because they saw your name on a merge process (unless you enjoy the spotlight 💃🏼). Read up on setting up ISUs here.

That’s all for now, folks 😜

Alright! We’ll put a pin in this for now, and we’ll be back with part 2 next week.

Stay tuned ✌️

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳

Until next time!

Mia & Ceci

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions

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