iCIMS Hacks: UKG Org Fields, Hiring Automation & More (5/22/26)

Admins tackle the messy reality of iCIMS: migrating org-level fields in UKG integrations, fixing a broken implementation from scratch, troubleshooting hiring automation errors with background check vendors, and exporting CXM data. Plus: when leadership picks your ATS without asking you.

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Transcript

Me: Hi, everybody. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody to system admin insights, a place where ISM system administrators get together to talk about everything isims, what's working well, what are our challenges. If you are joining us here for the first time today, I'm not sure if anybody is. I think everybody here has been here before. So scratch that. Let's just go to some gratitude. So please drop something in chat that you are grateful for today. I am grateful for. Three day weekend. Got a lot I want to do this weekend, so looking forward to it. Greg says a long weekend and the new Mandalorian movie. Interesting. I don't know anything about that. I watched contact for the first time last night with Jody Foster.
Them: Oh, wow. That goes back.
Me: An. Oldie but goodie. Yeah.
Them: That's a, that's a classic. I like that. It's a good one.
Me: It is. It is. Yeah. And there's a quote in there from Carl Sagan book that was quoted in Dario amade's essay on the adolescence of technology. And it's something to the effect of what would be the first thing that you would ask an alien species if you met them. And Jody Foster, the movie says, how did you do it? How did you manage to evolve technology technologically to this extent without destroying yourselves? Right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good one. Michelle says some time to rest during the upcoming weekend. Yes, long weekend, Vivian. A lot of us are looking forward this long weekend. Yeah. Agreed. All right. So let's hop on over to our submitted questions. And let's see. Jessica, I think, did we talk about your UKG and items third gen Integration preferred name thing last time?
Them: Uh, yes, we did.
Me: We did. Okay, great. So Michelle, I see you have a question here that's already received some answers. And did we, because I have hearts on these, but maybe these are old. I guess they are. Yeah. All right, so Kathy. Kathy, are you in here? No, Greg, you had one posted one day ago. Getting started with event notification creation.
Them: Oh, yeah. I just, I posted, I want to share that with the community. Because there was. An iims employee who came who really wanted to, I guess, share some details about how event notifications work. If it's your first time using it, or if you're trying to better understand when to use it, like especially with now with hiring automation, you've got this extra tool in your tool chest, but it's now it's good to understand when to use it versus another tool. So like event. So this post that they have developed, it's still available in the community, but for those who don't have access to community, I did, I did post a print out of it. It's a really nice quick summary of it. And kind of explains if you're trying to, if you need a quick two cent tour, like, hey, what is it and how is it different from hire automation? This is, this is actually a really nice intro, especially if it's been, especially if you're visiting it for the first time.
Me: Great. Thank you for sharing that. Really cool. Cordell, you're back. Can't hear your quarter dog mute. D.
Them: I know I'm muted. I'm having my.
Me: Welcome back. How you doing?
Them: Peanut butter banana sandwich.
Me: Oh, banana sandwich.
Them: I'm doing well. I've been on assignment trying to. Get items to talk to some other system. And it's been fun. But yes, I'm back.
Me: Good to see you, sir. What other system? What's, what's, tell us more. Tell us more about fun.
Them: Thank you. Yeah. We are playing. Do I have items on the call?
Me: Nope. Just, just us. A couple of excisems. Yeah.
Them: Yeah, so long story short, my boss and her boss came back from a meeting and said, hey, we got this really new great system that we're going to be moving over to. And so it's called eightfold. And it's, I guess the gentleman, there's some whiz bangleman who's an AI guru that I forget what software he. Invented. But I think you actually may have referenced him in one of our meetings previously, not for eight full, but for something else. So you're googling this now. Or chat GPTing it.
Me: Of course.
Them: So we're still with, we're still with isoms now it's possible that in a year and a half, we might.
Me: You could tell from the eyes.
Them: Not be, we might be using the safe fold product. It is not that much different than isoms from being able to use AI stuff that since ISO has put that talent. Town to explore talent, something in there to surface candidates who match based on. Whatever algorithm has some disease. However, the decision was made above my pay scale and I just have to carry on and do what they say.
Me: Interesting. So you know what the eightfold lawsuit? Right?
Them: Oh yeah, we passed that along to them too. Yeah, there's ai issues with that. Yeah, no, I got that from you all. I think I passed it on to our general counsel that that came at a very inopportune moment for us. But. Basically it's one of those. It is what it is.
Me: Yeah.
Them: You're in a very common spot. I see this a lot. When folks are handed technology and it doesn't matter if they're coming into ISIMs or they're going. It's my leaders made a decision with not without consulting me. And now I have to deal with the consequences. I can't count the number of times I've heard that particular sentence. So typically we get the opportunity even the director of talent acquisition has the opportunity to do a request for a proposal and we pick three vendors and we go through this whole process. It didn't even happen this time. They just said, nah, we like this one.
Me: So it's so, so interesting to me. It really is. Yeah. And we see all different variations on this, you know, see some orgs where. It's very strict process in some where it's, I think somebody's golf buddy just said eightfold. And cool. You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Them: A former customer of mine had a new CHRO come in who liked workday for whatever reason. And they are so they're one of the most over engineered customers I've ever worked with. They have like apis swimming in and out of items at almost every touch point. They had their own developers like write their own specific code bolt ons and they're leaving for work day. And workday isn't going to do 90% of the stuff that they do. On a day to day basis. And it's because some leader came in, had a relationship and said that they were more, they wanted to go back to them and nobody was consulted. One of the selling points that was not really. Doesn't seem like it's true was that they were supposed to be able to handle these. Resume per job application stuff. And so we're going through our UAT and we're getting to those scenarios and it's like, oh yeah, well you can submit all the resumes you want, but only the last one that you submit is the one that gets surfaced.
Me: I thought ISM shipped that. Is that still not in product?
Them: No, no, well they were supposed to, but that was one of the one reason that we would have considered moving from isms, but the eightfold doesn't even do it either. So we were told that, or at least. It was told to me that that was a possibility. But doesn't look like eightfold does it either.
Me: So, Greg, you dropped a comment. He said, what's driving the decision costs or features? That's a big one. Yeah.
Them: Costs or features. It supposedly features, but they sold it as cost, which then I later found out from somebody I have. A good relationship with in procurement that basically it's the same cost. So. That's who he's trying to promote it is, oh, well, we're getting AI to surface candidates. And it's like, yeah, we can do that in isoms too. So what's the big deal? But. I don't know. I hear you basically, you play the hand your deal. I mean kudos to the sales team, I guess. I mean, they weren't able to basically do it. I mean, right? I mean, that just sounds like I did. A lot of us, I mean, I'm in the same boat. A lot of people, I have some leaders up there who are looking at workday. And, you know, I know a lot of us are in the same boat, you know, where they have other vendors looking, you know, they're not wrong looking and, you know, keeping items in their toes. Any vendor on their toes for that matter. But it should be based on the right decisions. And sometimes, like Alex said, sometimes you get it and then you're kind of dealing with the fallout online. I wish you the very best though, you know, because that, you know, hopefully it does it backfired and, you know, that it's not something that you have to deal with a lot, but I don't practice a lot of us have to kind of deal with the fallout and you just document. That's what I end up doing. I have document everything's like, all right, you made a decision or make when someone asks, you know, why is this not working? Why is this not going wrong? How come our great wonderful pool of APIs aren't function? I'm like, remember all that stuff? Yeah, give it us like the heads up. We would have loved to have told you that. But okay. And then it's also a great opportunity for consultants to come in and work on that. That's the other thing I've discovered. It's a consultant, you know, because it's had to come in because you can only do so much or they need people to kind of help do that. So it's like, again, nothing wrong with the consultants, but it's like you actually, you could have used that money to build out something else instead. But yeah, you do what you got to do. You got to do what you got to do.
Me: And I, and I advise you to ask whatever consulting firm you partner with to disclose any referral relationships that they have. With vendors. It's often not messaged prominently. And we've certainly seen where companies have relationships that, in our view, can pollute that process. Liam, you said you had workday at Salesforce and it was abysmal as an ATS. I feel that way with most big box companies that build an ATS prod. Yeah. I mean. Vivian has written about this several times on our blog. The sales functions of these companies are very slick and they're good at telling a story. And when a, when you get high enough in your organizational hierarchy, you need a story, you need something, you can wrap your mind around. And the narrative of consolidation makes Intuitive Sense. And if you're not bringing technical people into the room, whether internally or externally. The, the, the nuts and bolts and the nitty-gritty and the apis and this and that. Oh, stop. Well, you're words and letters, you know, and, and workday is particularly good at that. It's very interesting. Liam, many other thoughts on what was missing for you there?
Them: No, not really. I mean, this predates my time at raise holdings, but they did tell me that they had talked to workday. When they were interviewing new vendors before they officially settled on iims. And workday wouldn't sell them the company. The recruitments tool without purchasing the entire suite of products. Whether or not we were going to use them, they wanted the infrastructure built in case they could try to push us to adopt other products.
Me: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Them: So, that was a no, a no for the company.
Me: Yeah. And I've never heard of anybody purchasing just, just the workday recruiting module. That wouldn't make sense.
Them: Yeah.
Me: Yeah. Jessica, we'll get your question in a second here. Curious, Angela, what do you mean by you said my last company was moving from ISIMs to ADP WFN? I started answering recruiters. What does that mean?
Them: It was rough. We had really specialized recruitment needs and ADP workforce now as a ATS didn't function in a lot of the ways we needed for multi sites and sourcing and hiring events and outreach. And it really would have tied my hands. And at that point, just the writing was on the wall. It was a organization that was purchased by private equity and they were just looking to save costs. And clearly the talent acquisition function was no longer a priority to be best in class. So we just, it, it just seemed while I'd be really excited to learn any new system, just knowing how much our hiring managers and teams would struggle with that transition after having had ISIMs really customized to work for their needs. I couldn't watch it happen.
Me: Yeah, I, so my first optimization project was ADP. WFN recruiting module. And the very first project was looking at the candidate experience there. And I was like, wow, this is, this is nuts. Horrible. And then about a year later, we moved to items and yeah, very happy with the improvements. All right, so Jessica, you have a question.
Them: Yes. Okay, so we're still moving through our third gen isims UKG Integration. And, Angela might be able to reference this because we met a while back or maybe anybody else did. But I was just curious. And I'm going to share my screen here so you guys can see what I'm talking about. So as a part of the Integration, you have these fields under HCM Integrations and you can rename them to be whatever name you want them to be instead of org level one, two, three, four, five. Right. So if you want, if those map to, say, department or division or whatever, you know, whatever specific things they are in your ATS, you can. But my question was, we already had, so before working on this or implementation or Integration and having these fields being mapped, we already had our own version of the fields with our names for department division, whatever it is. And I was kind of envisioning before I learned how it would work. Well, we would be able to just have those that already exist and are already built into all of our reports and our dashboards and everything else, like those lists would be populated. And that's not how it works. And I was told that conditional field logic also doesn't work for these fields because I was thinking, oh, well, maybe I can just go in there and set up a rule to kind of map our existing fields to whatever these fields are. So my question more so is how did everybody handle that? Did they just stop using the fields they had before and rewrite all of their reports and dashboards to integrate, you know, with these new fields that are now part of the Integration? Did they take a different approach? Like, because if I had to go in and manually update the list to match what's populating as the fields that are a part of the Integration, that's kind of defeats the whole purpose of having an Integration. The whole purpose is that if something changes, you don't have to manually update it because it just changes in the drop down. So I'm just curious for those who started without having this off the bat and already have fields they've been using, what approach did they take? Oh, Jessica, I love this question. We, we went through so many iterations of this. We ended up redoing all of the four org levels. And we also had our departments in the position category, which ties to the career site. So if you're using department for that, certainly are yep. Exactly. So then you end up having to have it twice because you can't have your org level one be your position category. And anything that's tied to the API, you can't use conditional formatting conditional field logic because it's an input or output or I'm sure Vivian can explain it better than I can. But a lot of limitations there. So we revamped everything, started using the org levels. It's working really well for us. But it was a lot of data cleanup. And unfortunately, there isn't an easy answer. Yeah. I'm actually going through this building gen three with a customer right now, and we're just getting to the point where this conversation has happened. So it's kind of timely that you're asking this question. It's weird to me why how, how UKG kind of forced isim's hand in the way that they had to build this. They had to revert to the oldest technology in the system, which is profiling fields in order for it to work with the way you kg formats information. And what that basically means is that those org levels, depending on how different customers across ukg's platforms use that data can have table based information. So table based information, you've got your department code, you've got your department description. Sometimes there's a cost center or another piece of information in that table as well that needs to be part of the record that gets sent with the hire and gets sent and maintained within ISID. So because of that, the only way ISIMs can maintain a table of related field based data is within the location org table. And that location org table by folder will determine what type of record it is. So you've got a department record and the department record determined by the department folder will say department code in the external ID field department description in the title name field and then any other relevant pieces of data that are associated with it. So because of the way you kgs got their table formatted, ISIMs had one choice and that is with a table based piece of information as an input. It's also based on the way that the Integrations work, which is why you're kind of backed into this corner. As Angie said, the only thing that you can do in this case is migrate and that's migrate your historical information into the new fields in order to take advantage of the new functionality you're going to have the ability to do from a filtering perspective because of the way this is structured. You'll now have the ability to filter people dynamically by where that data point matches their employee record, which is a functionality that unless you've been manually maintaining all of your employee records, you typically don't have. So there, there's a lot of cost to it. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of rework, but it does have a lot of upside. Yeah. And I would just add really think through from a people analytics and business analytics perspective, what makes sense for those four org levels with the API, you can switch it and it's a simple change to update. But we went through a couple different iterations of org three and four based on what business leaders needed to see in data. And as Vivian mentioned, really being able to filter the employee data, have that perfectly aligned with UKG. And it's, it's game changing in terms of how you can play with the data. And you don't have to make the decision to put all of that information on the job like you did before. It can live in the table behind the value. So your user can select the name and all the related Integrated pieces are tied both to the job record and the employee record because they're pointing to the same table piece of information table reference in the profile. So this is how profiling fields work in general. You don't need an Integration to use profiling fields. I did a now you know on them a long time ago that's in our library somewhere. But bottom line, it hurts and you are a hundred percent right to call out the hurt and there is no great way to marry the information without migrating your historical information. Clarify what you mean by migrating your historical information. So if you have a timeframe of a year and you have a hundred jobs that were created in a year and all hundred jobs were using the historical department field, you're going to want to go back and do a bulk edit and migrate all those hundred jobs with the new value from UKG so that now the dashboards that your users are representing don't need duplicate filters. So what I mean by duplicate filters is if you had a dashboard filtering by department jobs by department, now you're looking at a different data point. For that dashboard. And you either have to build your reports where they're taking two filters where it's either the old field or the new field or you go back and you migrate any relevant information and now you're only looking one data point. Okay. Yeah. Because I mean it's that or like, let's say we have an open jobs report that has, you know, all of these fields and that's the only way that I can go back through and look at historical data. And we actually referenced this on the call before the last call when we said because you can't in ISIMs like go back and view that really that past data as far as like number of openings over time. The only way is to export it outside of iSIMS. Yeah. So if I want like the problem is like the lists are not going to match perfectly because they were manually uploaded before versus what's in UKG now. So either way like it's not going to be perfect. You'll have to do a translation of what equals what? In that migration where if it was X in the historical information, you're not deleting it from the historical field. You can leave the historical field there read only and have that reference information. But if it was X, it is y in the current world is part of the migration effort. Okay. So you're kind of saying like when you're going in and bulk editing these new fields that are listed under HCM Integrations, you're kind of like you're updating those not you're not updating the old ones. You're going through and updating the ones that are now blank on the past data. Yep. So you could still use your old information and you can still slice and dice the way you were doing it before and then moving forward you are you have to update all your reports and all your dashboards to pull the new fields, which is why it's relevant to pick a time frame. So in other words. I always advise people to not look at their system from like the macro view of I need every piece of data to match because it's just not relevant. The lift is not worth the end output. Your leaders care about the last year of data at most. So pick a timeframe that is relevant to what you think your leaders and your users are going to need and migrate that and then they'll leave the rest of it in the deeper historical well that if you need access it you're looking at the old field. And then in that case you have to pull separate reports. But how often are you doing that? Feel like no one but me sometimes cares about this stuff. So yeah. And I've felt that way many a time in my career too. So that just what you have to do is analytically look at your battles that you fight on a daily basis and see what matters to your client who is your end user and fight those for them, but let the rest of it kind of go in these cases.
Me: What if you have terrible OCD like me?
Them: Really helpful information. Thanks. You got to find a way to get push past because yeah. Alex, I'm in your boat. We went back and just finished it was a OKR for us to get the historical data right back to January of 2017. And we did it and probably no one else will care, but I need it.
Me: Nobody threw you a party?
Them: Nobody threw me a party.
Me: You should have let me know. I would have thrown you a party.
Them: Exactly.
Me: I can relate. All right.
Them: Well and I'll start one other thing I'll mention. Angela brings up a good point. We probably will keep our old like department list that translates to career sites and certain reports because what we have the department named as sometimes in UKG is not always easily looked up, especially by external candidates like they're not going to think of this one weird name we have for this department. They really just kind of want to surface by how the jobs would be grouped in their own mind to find what they're looking for. So I probably will keep that old field for certain things. That's a really good call out because a lot of times when you're doing these kinds of Integrations things like org data are already being used by the candidate experience as filters. And if you remap them to a new field you break that. So one of the things to be cautious notifications. Ask that again did I hear that I was just saying like what you mentioned is like job alert notifications. We have those set up by category or department if they all change suddenly none of them work and now they're not being notified of the jobs that they were interested in. Yep. Yeah. So there's other down the line features that you could be breaking if you remap this. So are you using templates? In your Integration? We will we use job templates in general. I'm not sure what you mean by in the Integration. Okay. So one of the early design decisions in every one of these Integrations whether it's UKG or anyone is whether you're going to be bringing each position as a I'm sorry I'm laughing at ISM's equals unintended consequences for my team Vivian. Don't touch it and as a system admin if you don't ask me first because. That's funny all right. So anyway what I was saying was. Actually I've just lost my train of thought. What was I talking about? Oh you said job temp something to do with job templates. Thank you. Okay. So in all of these Integrations part of the design decision that you're going to have to make is are you bringing over the position that is in the HRIS in its form as a job template and then marrying your position templates to it. It's called a template library merge. And so the client that I'm currently working with on one of these UKG Integrations we're going to do that. So essentially every single job code that they have is going to have corresponding template on the ISIM side and get activated or inactivated by the Integration. So when it's new, when it's open when the headcount's active it will activate the template. The user will select the job code and it will pre populate all of that org data that you were saying you needed CFL to fill up. So the template itself is doing a lift as far as filling out the organ formation that's related on the job. Now in order to not lose all the heavy lift that they have done to that point to have all their job descriptions beautiful and their screening questions associated and all of the other Integrated like field based data that's inputted into their existing templates, we're doing a merge or a join, which means that I've got this long list that says if it's an associate admin, that means you have to pick the admin template that is existing and then join any job code that's in the admin list with that admin template. So regardless of the fact that there's a hundred different iterations of admin and UKG, there's one admin template in iSims. So anytime that admin job code is relevant we're going to use the ISIMS admin template and then the two of them merge. So the job code piece when the user picks the job code piece fills all the org and Integration information out. But the merge brings over the information that's pre populated in the template for the admin as the external facing. Okay, I think it sounds like that really also depends on how you utilize your job code because the ways that are that wouldn't work for us with the way that ours are utilized and also they're undergoing a facelift. So like I don't want anything to rely on the job because we have maybe one template that maybe could apply to like seven different job codes because of the way our job codes are set up. It's more about what we want posted for like recruiting needs and all of that in UKG or nysims. In I said well. So in like in ISIMs let's say we're hiring, we have a delivery driver job template in UKG we might have an obscene amount of job codes for delivery driver based off of what location are they in and what is the revenue of the locate and all of that. But none of the actual job template needs to change and I don't want to have seven different versions of that job template. We only ever need to post the one. So it doesn't really matter what the job which job code it is. So we're saying the same things, but you're seeing it the opposite of the way that I'm describing it. So if you have seven different versions of delivery driver in UKG. Your existing one delivery driver template would merge with all seven of those codes on the isims side. So when you go to create the requisition, you create the requisition using the UKG job code and then it brings over the ISIM delivery driver template and takes the org data that's related to that job code and puts all of them into one job. So when you're creating that job, you have your items based template and then you have the UKG job code related or position code related template all into one requisition. So when you're creating it, all the UKG data is right and all of the data from iSense is right. Don't want to overtake too much time on this call, but I'm curious to know how you set that up because it doesn't they don't offer that as a part of the Integration from what I've heard are you doing like conditional field logic to say if it's one of these job codes? No, the Integration Specialist I'm working with is doing it. So I don't know yet we can have an offline conversation about which Integration specialist you're working with, but it's it's an option. Okay, I'll keep that in mind and come to one of your office hours. Thank you.
Me: Thanks for the question. And speaking of UKG, we have our first SAI UKG call on June 18th. That's a Thursday at 1:30 p.m. And if you are UKG customer, we also have a discussion space. Nine has got a post here. If anybody want to wants to hop on that, very excited to kick that off. And that first call, part of it will be about talking about direction of call, what we want to talk about on those calls. All right, next question. The floor is open. Who else has a question today? Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, are you there? Hey, Brian, how you doing?
Them: I'm just talking with a mute. Good. How you doing?
Me: Good. How's it going some street new these days?
Them: We're basically going back to design phase. So the person that. Was here who sold us. She was an internal person. She's like, oh. We're going to buy icems. We're like no. And she said yes. So we did it. And then she left. And now we're stuck with items. But being part of HRS, we weren't part of, we were kicked off of the design team. Because we had a lot of questions and she didn't like the questions. So she developed it with ismser herself. And then left. And then. Thought she knew what she was doing. So now we're going back to the well and have to start from almost scratch. But. Yeah, that's that's where we're at. So in the next couple weeks we're going to start redesigning a few things that just didn't make sense to how they initially designed it. And also kind of get training to understand what what the thought process was on some of the design.
Me: Got it. And Brian, what is your role in the process here?
Them: S administrator.
Me: Okay, got it. Yeah, that's a, that's a lot to take on. What, what.
Them: So basically it was it was training by fire when it was, you know, our TA team would come and say, hey, we have this issue. And then I would have to go and research it, look at all the different articles. AI is a good thing.
Me: Go ahead.
Them: And try to figure out what the answer was because going to help desk like I've heard in this call, one person might tell you, oh, we can do this. And the next person will say, oh, we can't do that. And there's nothing consistent. So it was pretty interesting. And then we go to our, you know, second tier. And we have a weekly call with our second tier. They're like, yeah, you just do this. Oh wait. Admins don't have access to this isms does so and, and that was the other thing. I'm like, do you have like a some sort of detail spreadsheet that says what I can, I cannot do. Oh, I can't do event notifications. I have to go and open up a ticket with you all. And then I have to explain to you in detail.
Me: Yeah.
Them: Agonizing detail what I actually want instead of you just being, you know, using a little bit of logic and saying, oh, you need this to be done. And then coming to me instead of me having to answer 45 questions. So yeah, it's, it's, it's been fun. And we're two years in just FYI and where we were developing it two years in.
Me: Interesting. Well, very glad that you're here. You're in the right place because I think everyone here can, can relate. Jessica smith asked, what sort of options is ISIS give you for starting from scratch? And going back to some of the default setups?
Them: Just a general question for everybody too, because I think sometimes we've all at one point been like, oh, I could only, if I could do this all the way from the beginning, I would have done things so differently. Agreed. We haven't had those discussions yet, so I don't know how much change or I can actually going to make to the system, which is kind of interesting. So I just feel that some of the flags that should have been turned on or may not have been turned on as they were developing it without us in the room that they didn't think about long term like, okay, Integration part of this. Oh, can we actually use APIs? Like just like the different things. Like there's this, does this make sense in the long term capacity? Which whenever we're trying to figure it out on the back end, like, well, how do we, you know, line up these two fields? There's no way or we need to re, or we need to change the field. And it's like, oh wait, we need to make sure that we're tagging the right field. It's just interesting how. Our frustrations have. Grown over the last two years. And then the way that we've received. Help from ISIMs themselves. Has been hit or miss. I'm sorry you're going through that. I can't count the number of times I've been talking to customers in your exact shoes. Jessica, to your point, I had one customer when I was there do a full reimplementation. They started from scratch with a new platform and migrated information from the old platform into the new platform. It was such a nightmare from a migration perspective. We were instructed never to sell that again. It literally caused more problems than you could possibly imagine and took almost five years to clean up. Until they left. They're not with work day. So I wouldn't recommend starting from scratch. There are ways. I mean, you could start completely fresh system and not migrate the existing system. Something to potentially talk to your rep about if you feel like you want to completely throw everything out and start from, from scratch. I don't see why they wouldn't say yes to that. But I would start with a test environment if you're really that worried about it. And see what getting a bare bones test environment looks like and everything that would be involved in going through implementing the system from scratch. In my experience, every problem that ISIMs accumulates as tech debt is fixable with database hygiene. And I probably harp on that particular topic a little too much. But if you go back and you clean everything up, it cleans up a lot of the problems that you have. Your database in realistic words should not be housing information more than three or four years old anyway. If you have to hold on to that data for legal reasons, put it in a data warehouse, but your day to day data database should not have three year old plus jobs and hiring information and all that just because of all the liability that comes on withholding all of that information in your system and the fact that it's slows you down significantly from a server perspective. It slows the search engine down. It slows everything down. In my experience. So as much as the instinct to start from scratch is definitely one we can all relate to. Cleaning it up is probably. Your best bet to get as close to that as possible.
Me: You mentioned that they do have a template for event notification requests. This is helpful to use. It's good to know. Any other template, any, anything else that might be useful for Brian here?
Them: That's a loaded question. I'd have to think about it. But that event notification template, it'll say something like your trigger, the status that you want. And if you just, it's like a formula that you can follow for all of your requests. And if you give them your request in that format, understand it and it'll save you a lot of time. It's if you just look up event notifications on the help site, you'll see the little like, you know, the template. Perfect. Thank you. And now that some of us are discovering now the hiring automation might be able to address some of your concerns without needing an event notification. So if it's, it's not something that requires an iForm and you're like, I just need a one person and you're okay with it. Not needing to respect entrance criteria. You could look at the hiring automation. It's, it's definitely the current version is definitely night and day compared to what was released just a couple months ago. So it's definitely a lot more doable. And I know some of us are. I know I'm moving something from test to production in the next couple weeks. And that was a big deal and I was able to get around event notifications. The best part. Is, well, it's not a holy grail. It is able to, because you could combine it with searches, it can do things that are thought were not possible. So I thought that was pretty cool. Um, so I say, you know, definitely, you know, ask around there are different, you know, if you don't, if you're not hearing an answer and you know that for a fact, you know, it can be done talk to talk to other admins out here who kind of have had to go through the same thing. They might. You know, you know, you can, before I go into a consultant, maybe it's something that you can do. But definitely maybe set up a couple of office hours here, you know, and just kind of brainstorm. At the very least, you can walk away with a list of items that you can go to your, your weekly contact and say, hey, can we talk about this? Can we and prioritize this instead of this other piece? And I think you're on the right track there. It's going to be more about prioritizing, you know, what, what needs to be redone and then what's going to give you your biggest, have your biggest impact and then kind of whittle that list down. But as long as your leaders understand this is going to probably be a multiyear project and not going to be done overnight, then I think you'll be fine. Overall. I mean, but yeah, I do feel your pain. I really do. Especially when you are involved in implementation. People are looking at you set for to fix it. So exactly. And the other problem, the other thing that we're thinking about too is the whole change management and the training. So we don't want to make complete changes. We just want to make sure that we're using what we have currently because everybody, all the, you know, everybody who's been using it for two years now. So we don't want to go back and be like, okay, guess what everybody's going back to training. So, good luck with that. And, you know, just piss off all of our stakeholders. And clients and everything else. And they're just like, wait a second. Wait. You trained this two years ago and now we have to be retrained. This just doesn't make sense. So when we're, when I'm talking about like redeveloping, it's, it's not completely, you know, out of the box. It's more of making corrections to, you know, the different gaps that we have currently and then going from there. But my biggest complaint is, you know, The fact that we were kicked out of the room when they were developing in the first place.
Me: Can be frustrating. Yeah. You know, Patrick mentioned that he has 16 event notifications. Nine of them are going to migrate to hiring automation. That is really cool. Patrick, can you say some more about which ones you, you selected?
Them: Yeah. We had some older, what I like to call legacy event notifications for my predecessor that. We. Just awful. Miss bill search templates, just not good stuff. And some of them were actually duplicating notifications to hiring managers. So we had a, a history where hiring managers are basically just looking at any email that came from iSims and putting it right to file 13. So we were in our weekly TA hire manager call we had this week. We're going to have some training next month. And we basically said this is going to change. You're going to see more direct communication that has meaning and purpose and not just stuff that you need to file away to file 13 basically. So getting the hiring automation fixed with the information that the help desk provided about the job detail tab cannot be hidden for certain profiles. Was a huge thing. I thought that they didn't really make clear when they first announced this. And then that article coming out about event notifications was perfect timing. Because if anyone's thinking about doing a hiring automation, make sure you don't have an event notification. Because like Greg was saying, you know those event notifications. Are not like we have stuff that goes through our HR inbox. You can't put HR inbox for the hiring notice hiring automation. It's more relational to what's on the job detail. So we had to really look at those and make sure, hey, is this what we want to migrate or is this when we want to keep as is?
Me: That's great. And we like to call this empathy for the end user. You know, notification overwhelm is real and you only get so much of somebody's attention. And if, and if you become a force in the organization for something that people want to ignore that really can really be a problem. So good on you for getting folks together and listening to them and letting them know that things are changing and they can expect something different. That's really cool. Vivian dropped in chat about event notifications. You can have a maximum of 24 per profile type. 24 recruiting workflow, 24 iForm complete notifications and 24 application complete notifications. She does not recommend that. But that is the capacity that can be done. And then Greg asked, is there a cap on number of hiring automations?
Them: Not that I'm aware of? Has anybody else been informed? I was looking at the documentation to see if I missed something. Not that I'm like planning to have 100 automations, but it's, it's funny is like I'm still going to need event notifications for now because I have a few identifications for iForms. So if I want to trigger based on the iPhone, I want, I need that. But where I can have like a situation where I want to send out an email or update, you know, work on something with an offer. It would be nice to have take that pressure off the verification. And I was just brainstorming with some recruiters yesterday and our talent average folks and they thought of at least three or four really good scenarios to use hiring automation that would make their lives easier. And I thought, yeah, you know, that would be pretty cool if it's going to make your, if it takes something off your plate, why not? So that if there's a gap, please don't tell me because I don't want to go on the route and be like, hey, you know, I've got 50 here in our platform just now crawling to a halt. Just want to make sure I'm not, I'm not opening a can of worms or, you know. But this might be the, for me, the summer of the hiring automation, that might be, might be.
Me: That was a good way to spend the summer. For sure. All right, before we go to our next question, just wanted to share something with everybody that we're excited about. It's a service called the isims ROI blueprint. This is great for folks who are been on ISIMs for a while. Maybe not sure where they stand. And want to know the things, the things you don't know that you don't know. Great for that. It's also great if you're looking at a renewal coming up. And you want to get a sense of whether items is still the best choice for you. I alluded to this earlier, but we don't take referral revenue from any vendor. So we give the most agnostic possible view on your utilization of ISIMs. It includes all of these elements here. So we talk about your process and operating model items configuration review Integrations and connected systems capability mapping compliance and regulatory posture platform trajectory and AI readiness. And you get a very nice executive handout, just a couple of pages. You get a 3060 90 day roadmap, which is exhaustive 20 to 30 pages worth of really nitty gritty detail detail. What it would take to get you the right place with iSIMs. And the timeline on that is takes four to five weeks, about 15 to 20 hours of a system administrator's time, about five hours of TA leadership time and a couple of 30 to 60 minute calls with adjacent system admins. If you'd like to know more about that, feel free to shoot me an email or DM me and we can talk about that. All right, the floor is open once again. Who else has questions today? Shannon, Peter, good to see you.
Them: I'll just do a plug for the road map is really useful. And we are doing a system redesign because of it.
Me: I didn't want to say anything. Thank you very much, Shan. I appreciate that. Yeah.
Them: S been great.
Me: Great.
Them: Yeah, it's been great.
Me: I do have that.
Them: Sorry for the late joint I was testing something in items. Actually, I do have a question. If it's a good time right now, this is a good time right now, Alex.
Me: Yes, quick cordell. I forgot to mention you next. So we'll go right after Peter. Okay. About the cxm question. Great. Peter, go ahead.
Them: Sure. Awesome. Has anybody had any. Orangutan error with a hiring automation? That has. That involves an Integration that launches our background check with Acura background check. It's a status change. The trigger is a status change in, in the, in the workflow. And for some reason, it's not, it launches the background check, but the, the Integration is erroring out. We've been working on this for about a couple weeks and we've even been working with both items and Acura background. Has anybody had any success in anything like this? Basically hiring automation that triggers an API. I'd be interested in finding your solution. We use Acura with ISEMs and have not connected it with the hiring automation because of different selections. We have to make through the process that are more human decision making and not binary. I see, I wonder about the, is it timing? You know, I haven't done it yet because I haven't, I haven't had to trigger a status that triggers an API or Integration. But I do know like when I'm working with higher automation, with higher automations, even as something as simple as an email, it's not like an instantaneous. There is like a slight two minute, about a two minute delay, three minute delay. So an Integration that, you know, depending on the timing, that might as well be five hours. So I'm wondering if that could be the challenge is it's the timing. No, I don't know. I'm not sure, you know, the status is changing. So my trigger is when the offer is actually extended. You know, when you, I have it up. When, when you send the offer. Let me. Share my screen. This, you know, when you send the offer right here, you extend it right here. That is the trigger when the offer becomes spending. It changes into our status of offer sent in BGC right here. So it says it did launch it. You know, it is in background check. But if you look at the. Error is the screen tab. And Shannon's going to kill me because I'm in old items. But if you look. At this is the era I'm getting. So. Yeah. All right. And when you look at and when you look at the log file for the automation, is it showing that the person that it ran and it matched that person as a result? I'm not sure how to do that. There's no log file in heart. So like when I'm testing hibernation, you go to higher automation, there's a log. And that log will tell you if that, you know, it's great when you try and test for positive and negatives. Yeah, exactly. Yes. It's going to tell you. So it's, yeah, it looks like that. Person met the criteria. Let's say we look at the person at the very top. It gives you this candidate number which comes in handy. So to go away, I was making sure like, okay, did, did it actually, did it actually do something, you know, the omission itself. It looks like it did. So you got the results. That person would there and then they completed it. So it looks like from the hiring animations perspective, it's like, yeah, I move that person to that status. I triggered it. So I did my part. If let's say this was connected to us, let's say a search template and the expected behavior was I'm testing to make sure that person does not get picked up because I don't want to always pick up everyone. It should be based on some criteria. Then you would expect this to say search results, you know, some like no success, which would be exactly what you want. So it looks like this is getting picked up. It's getting bypassed and the entrance criteria if you had any, which is expected behavior. And it's, it's fired. So it's fired. It's actually completed at peace. Now it's handed off. So status change. Now when you do this mat now, if you do the, if you were to do that status manually, do you see any difference? Nope. Yes, it worked. It work. Ed. It works. Yeah. I'm wondering if in the back end hiring automation is configured on a user basis and that user base just doesn't have the ability to the permission to trigger the Integration. That is true. You have to have a license to and you have to have a license with Acurite background. And the person who did this does have an account. No, but what I'm saying is the hiring automation itself. This looks to me like it was built in the spa layer. So when you think about offer management and you think about interview scheduler, they're all built in something called the spa layer of items. And the spa layer is basically an API layer that floats over the base code. And it swims in and out via API credentials behind the scenes and you don't ever see it. So what that actually means from. An architecture perspective, in as much as I understand it, which I'm not a developer, so I'm giving this man in the moon description here is that each one of these spa layers is essentially a user that is going in and out of the system with its own API credentials. So what I'm saying is, does the hiring automation piece itself need the license permission for accurate? And is that the break? It might be. We were going out around this morning if that could be causing some issues. I don't see higher ambitions a user though, but maybe behind the scenes isim support sees it as a user that you can actually assign rights to. Possibly. Possibly I can't guarantee this, but that would be my first suspicion. That for whatever reason, the hiring automation is using a different permission layer and that permission layer doesn't have the license. That user would need something and that user would need a license with accurate. Okay. That's good to know. Vivian, if it was going to live and it would it live under the Integration user section, we have a couple. I sometimes see different Integration users, even though we may not use it, but, but I have noticed a few background check prime connectors kind of lurking there. Our account rep said our account rep said the problem, the TSCs probably have to turn something on in the back. And you know what that setting might be what you're saying Vivian. How would how would I call that out with the TSC? How would I say that to them? I would ask them if hiring automation specifically needs to be granted license credentials. Okay. And if their answer is no or I don't know, then I would reach out to your vendor and see if you can generate a HAR file of iSIMS while it is taking the action and see if they can look through that HAR file to find where the authentication is failing. How do you spell that HR? Okay?
Me: All right. I want to miss. Thank you for the question. I want to miss cordell's question because I promised him that we get to it. Cordell, go ahead.
Them: Helpful? Yep real quick anybody playing with cxm and I just I'm trying to export some data from there and either I don't have the correct search. Or. Maybe it's not even possible to do what I'm trying to do when I do have a case with them. With items. But I'm just doing a candidate search and I've got all these candidates and and I'd love to have more information. I'm missing some fields that I would love to have. And I don't know. There's no I'm trying to get the system ID for this person. This is how you can create I guess pipelines too. But is anybody familiar with exporting data out of cxm. And just like a regular kind of search where you can add output fields? Patrick you have an answer. Hey Cordell in the admin settings this is something we ran into as well. There is a way where you can add other and remove other column headers. But it's a little bit interesting. They have to add up to 100. If that makes sense as far as the length whenever you're doing this. So it is possible to add like the system ID number and everything that you're looking for, but you have to go into the admin settings. And when you adjust it, it has to add up to 100.
Me: What? What do you, what do you mean by that?
Them: I don't know. I don't know how to really explain it. Basically if you decrease one column, let's say you decrease it from down to down by 10.
Me: Oh.
Them: And you want to add another one. Well that's now 105. So you got to decrease it and it has to equal 100.
Me: Oh. Okay.
Them: It's weird until you look at it and once you look at it makes sense.
Me: Okay. Got it.
Them: Okay, I am in admin settings. I'll play around a little bit and see if. Maybe there's I can figure something out from there. All right. Thank you Patrick. No problem.
Me: Ty, you've touched a couple cxms. Any thoughts on that?
Them: Features there's a you can generate a report. It's not the same. It's nowhere near as straightforward and easy as what we're used to in the ATS, but you can I think I think it's based off of Google's analytics tool. You can build pretty pretty in depth reporting there.
Me: Yeah. All right.
Them: Okay.
Me: I have a few more minutes that folks want to hang out, but this is, it's 2 30, so I want to wish everybody a great long weekend. Thank you so much for stopping by system admin insights again. We'll be here next Friday. At 1 30 p.m. eastern Stand time, same place. Have a restful and restorative weekend. Take care, everybody.
Them: Thanks you too.
Me: Yeah.
Them: Thank you.
Me: Thanks, Peter.
Them: Have a good one. Bye bye. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Bye.