Michael Domingo - Michael Domingo -->

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About me

Hello

I'mMichael Domingo

HR Systems Professional

I'm a Agile evangelist, PMP Certified, HR Systems professional with over 12 years experience specializing in HR Systems/ERP Implementations and Project Management, Compensation, Vendor Selection/Business Case Development, ATS/Careers Site Integration, and Strategic HRIS Planning. Workday PRO Accredited on Studio and Compensation.

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HOW CAN I HELP?

Career Sites

Project Manager for several fortune 500 career sites. Backend integrations support with Workday Recruiting.

Integrations/BIRT/Workday Studio

Builds integrations in Workday Studio, Core Connectors, EIB

Workday Certified Professional

Workday Certified Pro - Compensation, Studio, Recruiting

Project Management

PMP Certified Project Manager, License 1799775

HR Systems Support/Consulting

Over a dozen years experience in HR Systems.

500000

LINES OF CODE

20

BIRT PROJECTS

3

Workday Pro Certifications

13

YEARS EXPERIENCE

Blog Posts

Workday 202R1 - Recruiting - My favorite things


These are a few of my favorite things...

 As a kid, I loved that song. It always made me feel happy remembering the things that made me happy. Now as a grown man, I can still appreciate raindrops and whiskers - but I also have a job. Part of that job is to make sure my organization continues to reap it's investment in its HCM system! After putting down the singing Austrian family for a bit - here's a list of my top 6 favorite recruiting "things" about 2020R1.

Let's start with the name: 2020R1. The name just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? In all seriousness, Workday did decide to change it's naming convention - and for good reason. Workday is more than HCM these days, and it is definitely beneficial to make sure everyone is talking about the same release across products. So my first favorite thing will be: Everyone deciding how to pronounce the new naming convention.  I've heard "2020R1", "2020 Round 1", "2020 Release 1". I'm guessing it's going to be a little bit before we all settle on a name.

Now, let's get to the meat and potatoes here. You come to this blog to hear about Workday recruiting, so I'll deliver for the next 5 items. Number 2 is Prevent Duplicate Records During Hiring and Contracting. For my organization, this has been a huge struggle. We've added condition rules to block Duplicate SSNs, but there's always been a loophole. I think Workday's done a nice job in giving us a task in hire to search and return possible duplicates in the Hire Business Process. It's worth a look to see if it will work for your organization.

#3 - Autocomplete Staffing Processes. Previously, workday allowed an autocomplete of the Propose Compensation Hire Step, if it came from recruiting, but several other key sub-processes didn't get the same love. Things have changed with 2020R1. You'll be able to configure autocompletion of:

  • Add Additional Job
  • Contract Contingent Worker
  • One Time-Payment
  • Stock Grant
  • Propose Compensation Hire
  • Assign Pay Group
This is great for my organization, as we have been wishing to autocomplete the One-Time Payment and Stock Grant sub-processes, and I can remove some condition rules that I had in those sub-processes that skipped approvals when the business process was launched from Recruiting.

#4 - Suggested Skills for External Candidates  It's no surprise that Workday has jumped into Machine Learning with both feet. Dave and Aneel have been talking about it the last two years at Rising. Recruiting's first dive will be through skills. You will have to opt-in to innovation services in order to get this feature, but an external resume will be parsed and skills suggested. Getting skills for candidates only helps talent down the road, so consider this feature as you look at how machine learning is going to shape your tenant down the road.

#5 - Task Consolidation for Review Offer If you have any high volume recruiting, you know when your inbox gets into the 3 (sometimes 4) digits, things can get a little scary. Workday has been focusing on High-volume recruiting for several releases now, but this one may be my favorite. Approvals now get the workbook treatment!  Your high-volume managers and HR Partners can consolidate those offer steps into a workbook and review/approve up to 200 in a single workbook. When you are testing, remember, proxy doesn't work with workbooks, so be prepared to do some password changes in that preview tenant.

#6 - Regenerate Candidate Offer Documents This one is my fav.  It's always been a pain to change something simple like a start date on an offer letter. This new Business Process will allow you to correct that Offer, and regenerate the doc for those changes that you used to end up processing an Undo Move From Hire. Make sure you read the What's new for this, as there's lots of things to consider when choosing this feature, but I believe it will be a true game-changer for recruiter efficiency.

There you have it - my favorite things for 2020R1 - now, how are you going to pronounce the new naming convention?

Recruiting Year End

Yes.  You read that right.  Year end planning for recruiting.  You might not think about it that way, because for many of us, the weather is getting a bit colder and Holiday season is nearing its full swing. In HR, this means the trials and tribulations of Year End processing. Our benefits partners are working though Open Enrollment issues, our Payroll team preparing for W2 season and all the new benefit deduction codes in the new year, and Recruiting is…Well, we’re still trying to find talent! But, is there something we should be doing to help ourselves in 2020 and beyond? 

Personally, I believe there’s a few things as a group we can look at to help leverage ourselves for a successful Year End and New Year. I like to look at things as a retrospective, a process I “borrowed” from Agile, which is a look back at a period with a focus on a few key questions.  First, let's lay out the questions and format of a retrospective and then perhaps list a few topics and some food for thought for your Recruiting Retrospective.

Completing a retrospective only requires you to answer 3 key questions:
1.What worked well?
2.What didn’t work well?
3.What are we going to try to do differently next time?

It’s a good idea to gather a group of key members of your Recruiting team together to help brainstorm this list. It’s also a great benefit to set some ground rules:

The Retrospective is not a blaming contest.  We’re not here to try and blame each other for misdeeds. We want to improve the overall process. Focus on improvement.

The Retrospective is not a “all talk/no action” meeting. We’re going to focus on key action items (see #3 above). This may dovetail into our goals for next year. It may be a quick win or two.
The Retrospective is a group effort. If everyone is talking, you're doing it right.

Personally I love answering #3 with 3 items. 
  • What I should Stop doing?
  • What I should Start doing?
  • Finally, what I should Continue doing?

 

Key items of Interest in a Workday® Recruiting Platform


Here’s a few things to help get you started as potential topics for your Recruiting Retrospective:

Job Distribution/Source Attribution

  • Is my source tracking list up to date in Workday®? Bring a copy of your Maintain Recruiting Sources screen and Applicant source Reference ID list (you can find this under Maintain Reference IDs->Applicant Source.) Make sure your list is up to date in your external careers site under Recruiting Sources for Auto-Tracking. And most importantly, if you're using auto source tracking in Workday®, your outbound feeds reflect the Reference ID of the source. More info can be found regarding auto-tracking of sources on community here. Now is also a great time to discuss your source effectiveness (run the Workday® delivered report Source Effectiveness), and if you need to, add or remove items from your source list.
  • Are we effectively distributing jobs? Does anything need to change? Do feeds need to be updated? How are we getting jobs to distributors (scraping vs feeds), and does anything need to change? Are you refreshing any Evergreen Requisitions on a regular basis? Remember, job distributors set your position in search partly based on the age of the requisition.

Employer Brand/Job alerts/EVP

You may use Workday to deliver some of this content and you may not.  Here’s a few thoughts to consider:
  • Workday now allows for internal and external Job Alerts. Are you utilizing this tool? Should you be?
    • Is your EVP and Employer Brand up to date? Have you utilized the branding tools available to you in Workday®? Do you need to update content on your career site and Workday® job search platforms? Are there new brand personas you want to leverage (due to acquisition, business win, or business lines change)? Are there new tools to help you do things better? Does your brand and EVP flow through Workday® and Candidate Home?

Recruiter Ease of Use/Knowledge

  • Are your recruiters getting everything the need from Recruiter Hub? Is there new functionality we can leverage?
  • Are we effectively training new recruiters? Remember, many of the key data items in Workday are generated during recruiting and hiring. How does your downstream data look? Are your job aids and/or process manuals up to date? How are you communicating changes to Recruiters?
  • How are you managing duplicates?

Goals/Aspirations

What are your goals for next year? Are there any implementations you wish to consider in this space such as:
  • CRM (ex. Phenom People)
  • Interview Setting/Calendar management automation (ex. GoodTime.io)
  • Background Check automation (ex. HireRight)
  • New tools for Culture/Team/Personality Fit automation (ex. Humantelligence)
  • New tools for Skills Testing/Skill Fit/Sourcing automation (ex. HiredScore)
  • Other?

Hopefully, this give you a start for designing your own Year End Recruiting Retrospective. Contact me if you have questions!

Workday Rising 2019 Thoughts



I'm fairly fresh off the plane from Orlando (and still thinking about the massive Uber mess in Philly when I got home), and I wanted to put down a few notes about my third Rising experience. Here's my top 8 list of take-aways from Workday's biggest user conference.


Sharing at the Share-a-thon
  1. If you're not Sharing, You're Doing it Wrong - This was my third Rising and my first as a speaker - and If you've never attended and want to make a business case for going to Workday Rising, this is it: You have 13,000+ people who are sharing your user experience on a product. Workday even gives you a space for Braindates with other customers. Have a novel use case? Share it - you never know who else could be having the same issue. Product Management is here too. Oh, and show up a day or two early and take advantage of David Epstein's Share-a-Thon. In all seriousness, I took away hundreds of hours of time savings in my time on Sunday alone. And that was before Jerry Seinfeld took the stage.
  2. Machine Learning is Here. In a Big Way. When Aneel Bhusri started his keynote on Tuesday, I believe the third or fourth time he said "Machine Learning" he also said, "you're going to get sick of those words." What was future-lingo in the HR space is now very real.  And, Workday Skills Cloud is the spine of ML for Workday. I took the time to attend a few other sessions on Machine Learning and Skills Cloud.  The next 12 months are key for Workday, but if they can deliver on skills-as-a-infrastructure - things like Talent Acquisition, Learning, and Career Advancement in Workday are going to essentially become super powered. 
  3. Don't forget about Blockchain in HR.  I always thought of blockchain as a "web-enabled"
    safety deposit box where you can give people temporary access to "stuff".  Well, Workday thought of credentialing as the "stuff" you put in the box. 
    Great idea! Right now, in healthcare the acquisition and maintenance of credentials is big business, and a massive on-boarding time-suck. Giving prospective employees a place to put that data (which as employees we worked hard to get and own), and then giving a temporary "key" to employers, just makes sense. We got a preview of the Wayto app on our phones. There's not much there right now. I really hope this is a functional item by the time the next Rising comes around, and I'm loading up my PMP and Pro certs into Wayto (or even better, I have employees doing so).
  4. So are Bots. They're not coming for our jobs - yet.  The use cases for Chatbots are limited at this time. 
    Teams bot
    For the Slack/Teams integration, which is in a limited use beta, there's really only 4 use cases:  Time Off, a "whois" type integration, interview feedback, and "guides" - which is essentially a deep link into Workday. What I've been screaming about with regards to bots is that this is Transformational in HR. One of the issues we've experienced in HRIS is that in ESS/MSS this usually means "learning another system" or "lots-o-change management".  Placing ESS/MSS in a natural work space (like Slack) eliminates the change aspect. Just ask the bot when you want to take off, or your balance.
  5. And the UI is a-Changin' - User Journeys, People Experience, Tiles, Enterprise Search,
    Knowledge - all of this is heading to a much improved user experience when the new UI decides go grace us with its presence in 2020R2 and beyond. I, for one, welcome the change - as one of our experience pain points is being able to surface relevant information at the right time.  I'm definitely excited to be able to improve that experience. Additionally, Workday has introduced a knowledge platform. This is clearly a shot at other competitors (who recently coughed up a CEO). I'm quite interested to see if there's going to be opportunity to further consolidate our software portfolio.
  6. Cloud Platform seems to be ready for Prime-Time There's over 40 customers live.  Lots of use cases. I have two of my own. But the first organization to build a viable educational assistance app in Workday is going to have a large following. Workday-as-a-Service is definitely here.
  7. Workday Definitely Knows How to Have Fun - Now, we got there early and rushed to Diagon Alley for our Escape from Gringotts, but even though the lines may have reached 60 minutes, the trip to Universal Orlando was a blast. I didn't see too many frowns for my few hours at Universal, except for a report about gastric distress on the Jimmy Fallon ride...
  8. Socks?  Socks for some reason became a Thing at Workday Rising 2019.  Some companies were giving them away at booths. If you have a Pro cert, you got some in your swag-bag. I guess hosiery is where its at for conference-land in 2019?
    Socks?

Boomerang (Integrations) - With a hook



Our career site requires us to Geocode our numerous locations inside Workday. I've handled this process using several different methodologies (EIBs, manual), but after a recent acquisition we had our location count grow by > 500. Enter another boomerang integration!

Setup

Google's Maps API is a robust method of geocoding addresses.  Head on over to grab an API key. Look for the Get Started button in the upper right. Don't forget to read the documentation - as there's a cost if you make over a certain number of calls. Google allows for a generous monthly allowance. My .CLAR has a spot to add the key in the API call as an attribute. You can also find my report definition along with the .clar file. Don't forget to add the key!

The Integration - RaaS report, splitter, and first properties collection



The first thing we need to do is use a RaaS Workday Out to get the report details we need into some properties in studio. Next I split the message up by report entry, this allows us on the push side to submit each message to Google individually. Then, I grab the Location ID, address values, name, and a few other requirements like the location hierarchy assignments. Why? I learned when I did this via EIB those are the minimum requirements to put the location back into Workday. YMMV, be sure to find out what you need.

The Integration - URL Encoding and HTTP out


We're getting to where the rubber meets the road. After some experimentation, I learned that if the address is not URL encoded (i.e. - we replace the spaces with + in the URL), the call fails. I write the address to a variable using a write step and use java.net.URLEncoder.encode to properly encode the URL. Then I submit the entire string to google.

The Maps API call
Finally, the response is written to the message.

The Integration - Writing the response and Extracting the Lat/Lon



After we write the response to the message, we use a new eval step to pull out the latitude and longitude values, and call a subroutine to finally build the Put_Location API call.

The Integration - Re-Writing the Location and Error Handling




Finally, we use a write step to build the API call, call the Put, and get the SOAP response. I used an error handler to catch and report whatever mess I made in my sandbox tenant. What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, a lot. Firstly, Latitude and Longitude are limited to 6 decimal places of precision. I needed to reformat the output from the Maps API using a series of eval steps:
Formatting output to 6 decimal places


Originally I didn't account for Google not returning an address due to bad data. I needed to capture the first part of the response (the status node) add an MVEL Validation step to the output to ensure the response was OK. If not, I threw an error.

My original mediation (steps 8-10) became this...


Next Steps

Google's output includes a measure of precision of the location match. I may want to take that into account when geocoding, or at least log precision that is less than a perfect (Rooftop, in Google parlance) match.

Workday Studio on Pixelbooks


I recently decided to retire my aging MacBookPro. It was time. Buddy (my machines are named after my dogs) had lasted me 7 long years, had been dropped more than once (thanks to my 5 year old), and lived with a power cord so frayed, my next trip to an Apple store meant I had to drop another $90 on yet another new power adapter.

As a geek, my knee-jerk reaction was to rustle up the ~ $3000 for another new top-of-the-line MBP.  But then I hesitated. I've (mostly) left the Apple walled garden behind for Google. I have a Pixel 3 as my phone, my music is on Google Play Music, photos on Google Photos and edited with Snapseed. I hardly ever game anymore, and I don't really have a need for such a powerful machine. I knew I wasn't going to buy a Windows machine. Win 10 was a step in the right direction, but I didn't want to go back to crapware and virus scanners. Plus, I've been buying Chromebooks for the more mature members in my family. Why not one for me?

What made me make the jump finally was Crostini - the ability to run a Linux VM inside Chrome OS. It was released into the stable stream with ChromeOS 69. However, Crostini is limited to a few machines, and like the Pixel, the pixelbook gets you first dibs on the goods. Want to run a containered modified Debian Stretch distro by clicking a button? Sold. I put an i7 Pixelbook on my birthday list and waited for my birthday.

Mostly, I use my home machine for web surfing, email, etc. When I travel, I try to leave the work laptop at home - but something always comes up. I had Workday Studio installed on my MBP for just that reason. My last vacation I had to spend 15 minutes fixing a BIRT statement. So I spent the better part of a few evenings turning my brand new Pixelbook into a Workday dev machine. Here's what I learned:

Crostini has an amazing subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/wiki/index) to help guide you.  Use it, it's a lifesaver. Pretty much all of this content is from this subreddit. Make sure you've downloaded the latest Workday Studio JAR file from community.

NOTE:  Not all Chromebooks are compatible with Crostini. Check here for a current list of compatible machines.

Eclipse (the engine under Workday Studio) requires a Java JDK.To install:


Install the Java JDK

Next you'll have to install at least a core window toolkit and a browser.  Eclipse is based off of the GTK platform.  You'll also need to have a web browser installed.  You can take this one of two ways.  You can either install GTK and Firefox ESR, or just go whole-hog and install the Gnome IDE.  EDIT: I've been noticing error messages in my home directory. Installing GTK made it go away because Workday Studio was looking for some of the dependent libraries. I will test removing Gnome to see what happens, but my gut tells me that I may lose some of the web features on the application.

Install GTK

Now it's time to install Workday Studio. Do not create a desktop icon at the end. I'll explain why in the next step. NOTE: You'll still get a "penguin" icon, unless you change the icon to a .png file, as the icon is of an .XPM type and Crostini doesn't support .XPM icons (yet). I haven't tested a .PNG yet.

Install Workday Studio

I learned on the Crostini wiki that Eclipse's implementation of the Wayland UI rendering is at best "janky". I experienced it the first time I tried to install. You get flickering, odd window resizing, things not showing up. It's unusable. You have to force XWindows using a command sommelier. This also allows you to resize the windows to deal with the funky aspect ratio of the Pixelbook. If you created a desktop icon in the previous step, you'll have to find it and modify it. My suggestion is to just create one from scratch.

Here's my .desktop file:


Once you've completed this step, restart your Linux container, and click on your Workday Studio icon (HOUSEKEEPING NOTE:  Crostini only supports .png icons, so it will look like a penguin, unless you save the .xpm as a .png) to launch Workday Studio, set your workspace, and proceed as usual. Happy Developing, and thanks to the Crostini subreddit for all your help!

testimonials

I worked with Michael while he was at Phenom People. He was our Implementation Manager and all around "go to guy". I have worked with MANY vendors throughout the years and Michael is far and away one of the BEST! He's responsive, patient, and does what he says he's going to do in the time he says he's going to do it! Michael, thank you for your support while you were at Phenom. It made our experience a great one!!!

Debbie Amolsch

Principal TA Systems Analyst, Teradata

I have been working with Michael for past 2 years on multitude of projects. Michael is extremely user focused, has amazing business analyst skills and all projects initiated and managed by him were always delivered on time and were a great success all together. His skill set is impressive and he is a real expert in all he does, proven team player. It is a greatest pleasure to work with Michael on daily basis!

Anna Antonova

HR Systems, Kantar

If you experience a difficulty with Systems, Michael is simply the person you want to get on the other end of the line. His key strength is to combine an impeccable customer focus with a deep technical expertise. Where others would drown you under jargon, Michael will say "Leave it to me", where others would deny a request, Michael will look at your need and bring an efficient workaround. Michael's voluntary approach brings a great dynamic to any team he works in, bringing important debates on the table with a very constructive approach. Having him as a partner in our Support team from the start was definitely a key asset to our success.

Julien Denis

Group Rewards and HR Process Director, GEODIS

MICHAEL DOMINGO
+1 215 262 6635
Philadelphia, PA

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