1. Implementing Onboarding (Transitions)
  2. Standard Fields and User-defined Fields

Standard Fields and User-defined Fields

Onboarding (Transitions) uses both standard fields supplied by the system as well as user-defined fields (UDFs) created by your organization to capture any additional information that is needed about a new hire, candidate or employee.

Important Information

There are two general categories of fields available for input on forms or for use in message templates, PDF documents, content pages, conditions, reports and Taleo Connect imports and exports:

  • Standard fields Supplied with the system, these fields include standardized information on a candidate, an offer, or the current task such as candidate's name, the offer's proposed salary, or the current task's due date.

  • User-defined fields Onboarding (Transitions) administrators often create UDFs when there are not appropriate standard fields to capture the information that their business requires.

Both standard fields and user-defined fields display current read-only information on PDF documents, content pages and message templates. If the Onboarding (Transitions) administrator configures the fields such that they are editable on forms, people can replace the current information via the forms with more recent data.

  • Onboarding (Transitions) Process user-defined fields: Onboarding (Transitions) Process user-defined fields are specific to the process. These fields are created in Onboarding (Transitions) Administration. They can be displayed and updated on any assigned onboarding form for any Onboarding (Transitions) assignee but cannot be used in Recruiting at all, neither by candidates nor by Recruiting Center users. Take the case of a "Do we have signatures yet?" user-defined field. A "Yes" value would trigger one series of Onboarding (Transitions) steps while a "No" value would trigger a different series of steps. Each time a process is started or re-started, the user-type field would need to be completed regardless of the candidate or the job submission.

  • Personal Information user-defined fields: These fields are created in Onboarding (Transitions) Administration. They can be displayed and updated in the Onboarding (Transitions) Center but not in the Recruiting Center. These fields are persistent for the person in all processes. Each time a new Onboarding (Transitions) process of any type gets launched for the person, the values in these fields will be displayed again and can be updated. This is very similar to the UDFs created by the Recruiting administrator in the Candidate Personal Information category. Additional UDFs can be created in Onboarding (Transitions) Administration to augment the list of Recruiting Candidate UDFs. When an OVI service is installed, this usually introduces some vendor-specific UDFs into a zone. These UDFs are defined by the OVI vendor for use with its service and they appear in the Onboarding (Transitions) Personal Information UDF category. These fields are usually filled for each candidate/new hire when the service is invoked during an Onboarding (Transitions) process. These fields can be used in all the same places as all other UDFs to display the results of the OVI service.

There is no limit in the number of Onboarding (Transitions) UDFs that you can create. Limiting the number to 250 is a best practice because you can assign a Reporting ID to up to 250 UDFs per entity type (Requisition, Candidate, Offer, Department, Work Experience, Education, Submission), making those UDFs available to be included in reports created with OBI Reporting.

In Recruiting Administration, in the Custom Report Universe configuration page, the limit of UDFs is 250. (Path: Recruiting Administration > Custom Report Universe)

In Onboarding (Transitions) Administration, in the User-defined Reporting configuration page, the limit of UDFs is 250. (Path: Onboarding (Transitions) Administration > User-defined Reporting)

The 250 UDF limit is available to existing and new customers but there is a private setting that controls the number of UDFs to report on.

To use more UDFs in reports, system administrators need to configure Recruiting and Onboarding (Transitions).

The 100 UDF limit remains in Legacy Onboarding.

In the Custom Report Universe configuration page, if one of the UDFs for an entity type (Requisition, Department,Offer, Candidate, Experience, Education, Submission) has its Reporting ID set to 250, the following error message will be displayed when trying to make another UDF available in reporting: "The maximum number of user-defined fields has been reached for the Custom Report Universe". This message will be displayed even if other Reporting IDs are still available to be assigned to a UDF. This is a known issue. As a workaround, we recommend not assigning the Reporting ID number 250 until all other Reporting IDs have been assigned to other UDFs.

Types of User-defined Fields

When creating user-defined fields in Onboarding (Transitions) Administration, the following types can be created:

User-defined Field Type Description
Boolean User-defined field of type True/False. In a user-defined form, it is represented with a check box. With regard to reporting, this type of user-defined field will not be supported. Instead, customers can create user-defined fields with two selections: "True" and "False".
Date User-defined field containing a date.
Date and Time Zone User-defined field containing a date and a time. With regard to reporting, this type of user-defined field will not be supported.
Multilingual Text User-defined field containing more than one value in different languages.
Numerical User-defined field containing whole numbers. Numerical fields can only accept digits, not commas, decimal points nor leading zeros. If a field is intended to capture numbers that will contain this type of punctuation, then the Onboarding (Transitions) administrator who creates the form should create and use a UDF of type Text instead.
Text User-defined field containing numbers and letters.

Multi-row Fields

Some UDFs are multi-row fields. They are used within a form to gather or display information that requires several different rows. (Whether this type of field will be supported for reporting purposes has not been determined.) For details, see multi-row fields in the "User-defined Form" section.