SuccessFactors: Search for people in your organization based on custom ID

[sireeshpatil]

Introduction

SuccessFactors Home page offers a search bar which helps employees find other employees. You can use the search bar to find employees by first name, last name, person ID external, Username and other supported fields.

Organizations can adopt different People Search Strategies and configure the system to meet their business needs. You can enable fuzzy search, enable additional EC fields for search to auto-complete, or hide certain employments or content appearing in the search bar.

As you are aware, the field Person ID External is the unique identifier of a person within SuccessFactors. However, few customers have a requirement to identify a person with other kinds of IDs. E.g.: ‘Associate ID’.  

I recently had a customer requirement to enhance people search to include custom IDs. In this blog, we will deep dive into detailed requirement and the solution options.

Requirement

The ‘Associate ID’ is a unique field which identifies employees uniquely in the customers IT landscape. All the integrations, custom solutions, 3rd party products rely on ‘Associate ID’ to communicate and exchange data, and this information is also stored in SuccessFactors.

Requirement is to enable the search bar capability to enter ‘Associate ID’ and return the employee data as if a Personal ID, User ID had been entered. It has following benefits:

1. For troubleshooting issues in the landscape, users can easily search employees by ‘Associate ID’
2. Administrators, Data analysists and reporting teams will be able to co-relate the data effectively.
3. When high volume of results returned by first name, last name search, ‘Associate ID’ is the only way to filter the employees.

Workaround

Enable Employee Central Name Fields for Autocomplete Search. Link to help documentation here. This allows users to search for employees by the lot of other alternative names. Repurpose one of the un-used fields (For E.g.: Formal Name or Middle Name Alt2) to store ‘Associate ID’. 

Configuration:

Admin Center -> Company and Logo settings -> Enable ‘Search People by Employee Central Name Fields’

Testing

In my demo system, i have re-purposed Personal Information -> formal-name field to store ‘Associate ID’

When you type 891891 in the Global Header, the employee is displayed

As you can imagine, without this capability, users would have to run reports to find associated Person ID, User ID of the users and then perform search. 

I hope you find this blog useful. If you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to use the comment section