Using Merge to identify the same person in an ATS and an HRIS system
In certain situations, it may be useful to match people across disjunct systems. Consider the following scenarios:
Mike accepted his job offer through Greenhouse, and now needs an employee record in Workday
Jane is the Asana workspace admin, but also works heavily in Salesforce
Bill is an IT admin, and needs super-user access for Jira, Quickbooks, UKG Pro, and Salesforce
How do we reconcile data across these discreet systems?
In short: Merge will never detect if the same "person" exists in multiple systems. For security and privacy purposes, all objects in Merge are treated as unique and disjunct. Additionally, since few true cross-system data links exist, Merge cannot act as the source of truth in determining if Asana User A is the same person as Workday Employee Z, for example.
Demographic Matching
All reconciliation needs to be performed by the Merge customer, using internal business logic. Most often, key identifiers will be identical across the systems of interest.
For example:
In the case of reconciling Employee objects:
Most integrations that support the Employee common model will provide first_name, last_name, work_email. These values should be consistent across systems. Therefore, a combination of these fields is a good string to match on for employee records.
Fields such as employee.ssn are not recommended because they can be encrypted.
In the case of reconciling Candidate objects:
Most integrations that support the Candidate common model will provide first_name, last_name, personal_email. These values should be consistent across systems. Therefore, a combination of these fields is a good string to match on for candidate records.
In the case of reconciling a Ticketing/Accounting/CRM/File Storage/Marketing Automation User
Most integrations that support the User object will provide a name and email. These values should be consistent across systems.
Ticketing integrations may support username rather than name, so email_address should be used exlusively.