Duplicating Candidates

Candidates sometimes create more than one candidate profile, and in that situation, a company needs to merge the profiles into a single profile.

This feature manifests in both the recruiting user view and, depending on permissions, in the administrative user view. In the recruiting user view, a user viewing a candidate profile may be warned if the profile appears to be a possible duplicate of another profile. This warning appears as a yellow Yield sign in the upper right-hand corner of the Candidate Profile record. If the recruiting user hovers a mouse over the profile a warning message stating Alert: This profile has been identified as a possible duplicate appears.

Users who have permissions to the Manage Duplicate Candidates option in Admin Tools can merge candidate profiles.

The sub-tabs are as follows:

• Potential Duplicate Candidate List
• Manually Merge Duplicate Candidates

It is recommended to be proactive about duplicate candidate management. A user can come to this tab, click Update List, and the system searches through the entire candidate database and attempt to find possible duplicate candidates. This comparison job can take a long time to run.

Selecting a line of matched candidates allows the user to compare the candidates' basic data side by side to help the user confirm that the candidates are actual duplicates.

Once a potential set of duplicate candidates is identified and selected, the user is presented with the question Are these duplicate candidates? If the user selects No, the candidates are marked off, so they do not continue to appear in the Potential Duplicate Candidate List, and they no longer show the duplicate candidate warning message on the Candidate Profile user interface. If the user selects Yes the user is then prompted to select which candidate becomes the master candidate. If merging an external and internal candidate, only the internal candidate may be made the Master Candidate.

Alternatively, if a specific duplicate appears, the user can come into the Manually Merge Duplicate Candidates tab, search for each of the candidate profiles and perform a merge. The recruiting user can specify whether to search for an internal or external candidate and then search by either email (contactEmail) or username (primaryEmail). The candidate's primaryEmail and contactEmail may be the same value, especially in clients who do have Use Email as Username checked in the back end of the system. The user is prompted to select which candidate becomes the master candidate.

If merging an external and internal candidate, only the internal candidate may be made the Master Candidate. The master candidate profile is the profile retained after the merge. If there is conflicting data, such as differing phone numbers stored in the same cell phone number field, the data from the master candidate record is retained. The primaryEmail (username) and password from the master candidate record is retained. If any fields on the master candidate profile are blank, but the secondary candidate profile has data in those fields, that data is transferred into the master candidate profile so the maximum amount of data is retained. If merging an internal and external candidate profile together, the internal candidate profile is necessarily the master candidate and the external candidate cannot be selected as the master.

Once the user selects a master candidate, the user is prompted to choose whether they want to notify the candidate of the merge activity by using email. There are options to notify the master candidate, secondary candidate, or both.

The user has the opportunity to edit the candidate notification email prior to sending. The default email language is set in Admin Center→E-Mail Notification Templates Setting under Candidate Merge Notification. Once merged, only the master candidate appears in the candidate search results. All applications associated with both profiles are now associated to the master profile. If the candidate applied to the same requisition twice with different profiles, the duplicate applications still exist. The client recruiting user should disposition one and proceed in the hiring process with the other.

Potential duplicate candidates are flagged based on the following criteria:

• First Name
• Last Name
• City
• Country
• First 10 letters of address or phone number or first 5 digit of zip code

The City, Address, Phone Number, and Zip Code fields are normalized to remove spaces, dashes, and periods.

Only the first 10 letters of the Address field are compared, which helps avoid missing a duplicate simply because the street address is spelled out differently, such as "Lane" vs. "Ln", "Street" vs. "St", "Boulevard" vs. "Blvd", and "Avenue" vs. "Ave", and so on.