Connecting Workday: what to expect

In this lesson

Describe what a Workday integration typically supplies to ProFinda
Anticipate the setup steps and common friction points during connection

Workday is the most common HR system feeding ProFinda among professional services firms, and connecting it is usually the first integration an organisation sets up, since it establishes the identity and structure everything else builds on.

What Workday typically supplies

A Workday connection usually feeds four kinds of field into ProFinda: identity details (name, employee ID, contact information), organisational structure (team, practice area, reporting line), grade or level, and often a starting set of skills or certifications already recorded in Workday. This becomes the backbone of a person’s ProFinda profile, which other integrations and the person’s own updates then build on.

What setup looks like

Field mapping. Your platform team and ProFinda agree which Workday fields map to which ProFinda fields - for example, which Workday organisational level becomes the “team” shown in ProFinda’s search filters.
A trial sync. Before going live, a limited or sandboxed sync runs so the mapped data can be checked against what people expect to see, rather than discovering mismatches after the whole organisation is connected.
Review and adjustment. Mismatches found in the trial - a grade that maps oddly, a team structure that does not match how work is actually resourced - are corrected in the mapping before the full sync goes live.
Go-live and scheduled refresh. Once confirmed, the integration runs on its ongoing schedule, refreshing ProFinda’s records automatically from that point.

The most common friction point

Workday’s organisational hierarchy is usually built for HR and reporting purposes - who reports to whom, cost centre structure - which does not always match how an organisation actually staffs work. A consulting firm might resource by practice area and skill, while Workday’s structure is built around legal entity and manager. When these differ, the trial sync is where this becomes visible, and the fix is usually to map a different Workday field, such as a custom organisational tag, rather than to force ProFinda’s team filters to follow Workday’s default hierarchy.

After go-live

Once connected, Workday becomes the source of truth for the fields it supplies - identity and structure should be corrected in Workday, not directly in ProFinda, since a direct ProFinda edit will be overwritten at the next scheduled sync. Skills and availability, by contrast, remain something individual users maintain in ProFinda itself, since Workday is rarely kept current enough for that purpose. Knowing this division is what the next lesson, on diagnosing a sync problem, builds on.

Key takeaways

Workday typically supplies identity, team structure, grade, and a starting skills baseline
Field mapping and a trial sync happen before the integration goes live, not after
The most common early friction is a mismatch between Workday's org structure and how the organisation actually resources work