Candidate Duplicate Check and Merge After Job Offers

After a candidate accepts a job offer and is moved to the HR phase, a check can be automatically done to verify if the candidate is a duplicate of any person in the database.

When moving into the HR phase, each external candidate can be checked against all workers, ex-workers, contingent workers, ex-contingent workers, and even against contacts and beneficiaries who have information in the database. This duplicate check complements another duplicate check that is done earlier in the recruiting lifecycle. This earlier check searches for potential duplicates by comparing a candidate against all other candidates and ex-workers, but not against any current workers. This earlier check can be initiated by users or can be configured to happen automatically in the candidate selection workflow.

Before creating a job offer for an external candidate, the recruiting user can merge the candidate's record and job applications with any ex-worker or candidate. This is important if the user determines that the candidate already has an additional separate record in the database. After a job offer has been created, however, the duplicate check and merging capability is automated. The check is performed against workers and ex-workers, and the criteria used are slightly different.

Candidates and National Identifier Uniqueness

The enterprise profile option National Identifier Uniqueness Validation Mode is available to check the uniqueness of national ID numbers for all workers and people throughout your company. Checking this value prevents mistakenly tracking the same person twice using the same national identifier. When creating or updating pending workers and workers the national identifiers must be unique when this option is configured, but candidates aren't affected.

In Recruiting, candidates can provide their national identifier, if this is part of their job application process, or a Hiring Team member with the necessary privilege can provide it for them. Any national ID number can be entered, even if it isn't unique. A non unique national identifier likely means that this candidate already has a record in the database, either as an ex-worker or even as a current worker. The flow of the job application won't be interrupted and there is no request to correct the number entered, even if it's configured as a required field.

However, if the profile option National Identifier Uniqueness Validation Mode is enabled, then candidates who are selected to be hired can't get transformed into pending workers using a non unique ID number. A candidate can become a pending worker without providing a national ID number. But this number is likely configured to be required to complete the pending worker record and convert them into a worker. If the new pending worker's ID number is entered as a duplicate of an existing person, this value can't be saved in their pending worker record. The HR specialists will need to handle the situation manually.

Duplicate Checking and Person Creation

If an external candidate is discovered to be a duplicate of an ex-worker or candidate before any job offer has been created, the user can decide to merge the candidate's record and job applications with that person. This is important if the user determines that the candidate already has an additional separate record in the database. But after a job offer has been created, the duplicate checking and merging capability is slightly different to preserve the details of the job offer.

If you decide to use this automated feature to check for duplicates after the job offer, consider requiring external candidates to provide date of birth or national identifier during their job application process. These values will allow the duplicate check, if configured, to find better matches with any existing people in the database before creating a pending worker.

National identifier and date of birth are sensitive fields, so you might want to configure the application process to gather these fields in a custom phase after the candidate has accepted their offer. But after the job offer, the only opportunity to merge this candidate with a duplicate record is during the Move to HR.

At the moment of moving into the HR phase, this feature can check whether the candidate is a potential duplicate of any existing person in the database, relying upon the configured definition of a duplicate record. If one or more possible matches are identified, the candidate's job application will not move smoothly into the status HR - Processing In Progress. Rather users will be notified that it has moved into the status HR - Error During Processing. A user must decide whether or not to act upon the information by:

Merging the candidate record with a newly discovered duplicate person record and recreating the candidate's offer on the pre-existing worker. Or,
Proceeding with the original candidate by creating a pending worker.

If this check doesn't identify any possible matches, then the external candidate will be transformed into a pending worker upon their move to HR, on their way to becoming a new worker.

In case a duplicate exists but isn't found at this moment, perhaps due to incomplete or incorrect candidate information, then an HR specialist will need to handle the situation manually. This might include creating a new assignment directly on the existing person's record that resembles the candidate's offer, withdrawing this unneeded candidate job application from consideration, perhaps deleting the candidate record, and possibly closing the requisition manually as well.

HR Specialist VS Recruiter Privileges

Users who have the equivalent of the seeded HR Specialist role can see candidate job applications in the status HR - Error During Processing, can read the banner explaining that they might be a duplicate, and can reach the list of possible duplicates. To perform the merge with a selected existing person record, these users need to be granted the following:

Functional privilege Perform Candidate Duplicate Check and Merge (IRC_PERFORM_CANDIDATE_DUPLICATE_CHECK_AND_MERGE_PRIV )
Role for tracking purposes Perform Candidate Duplicate Check and Merge (IRC_PERFORM_CANDIDATE_DUPLICATE_CHECK_AND_MERGE_PRIV_OBI)

After performing a merge, these HR specialists will rely on Recruiting users to recreate the job offer for the merged person, because by default HR specialists don't have the necessary additional privileges or duty roles such as Update Job Offer (ORA_IRC_UPDATE_JOB_OFFER). HR users will return to the main list of job offers in the Manage Job Offers work area after they perform a candidate merge, and an alert can be sent automatically to inform the recruiter that a draft offer is waiting to be reviewed.