Workday and LinkedIn are two major players in the HR technology and professional networking spaces respectively. With Workday offering a leading enterprise cloud platform for finance and human resources, and LinkedIn operating the world’s largest professional networking platform, there is natural interest in whether these two systems can be integrated or linked together in some way.
In short, yes Workday does offer integration with LinkedIn, allowing mutual customers to connect their HR data in Workday with profile data in LinkedIn. However the level of integration is currently limited compared to what is possible. Workday customers can push basic worker profile data into LinkedIn, but more advanced synchronization of skills, goals, and full profile data is not supported.
We’ll explore the currently available Workday-LinkedIn integrations, the benefits and use cases for customers, and what expanded integration could potentially allow in the future.
Currently Available Workday-LinkedIn Integration
The main integration that Workday currently offers with LinkedIn is the ability to push basic worker profile data from Workday into the LinkedIn platform.
This includes the ability to push the following worker profile attributes from Workday into LinkedIn:
– Name
– Job title
– Company
– Location
– Headshot photo
– Department
– Phone number
– Email address
Pushing this basic profile data into LinkedIn saves workers that use both systems from having to manually maintain the same profile information in two locations. The integration can automatically sync the profile data in real-time.
This Workday-LinkedIn integration is enabled through LinkedIn’s Profile API, which provides the ability to create and update member professional profiles programmatically.
The integration is also only available for LinkedIn members who are on Team, Business, or Sales Navigator corporate licenses. The integration is not accessible to members on free or Premium personal licenses.
Benefits of Current Integration
The main benefits of the current basic Workday-LinkedIn profile integration include:
– **Improved profile accuracy** – Syncs key profile attributes directly from source system
– **Time savings** – Eliminates need to manually maintain same information in two systems
– **Enhanced engagement** – More complete profiles can lead to more opportunities
Use Cases
Some examples of how the current integration can be beneficial include:
– **Onboarding** – When new hires join a company, their LinkedIn profiles can be automatically populated with new job title, company, location etc.
– **Job changes** – When an employee gets a new role or promotion internally, the LinkedIn profile can automatically reflect the new title and department.
– ** photo** – The Workday headshot photo can propagate to LinkedIn to maintain consistency.
– **Leavers** – When an employee leaves a company, their LinkedIn profile can automatically be updated to reflect that they no longer work for that company.
Future Integration Possibilities
While the current integration between Workday and LinkedIn is useful, it is still fairly basic and limited in scope. There are many further ways these two systems could potentially integrate more deeply:
Skills and endorsements
Workday has detailed worker skills profiles, listing out all the skills each employee possesses. It would be extremely valuable to be able to push this skills data into LinkedIn, populating the Skills section of user profiles. This could also trigger endorsements from colleagues for those skills.
Goals and projects
In the Workday system, employees can list out professional goals and projects they are working on. Syncing this info into the LinkedIn profile could provide much richer context to colleagues and connections.
Interests
Worker interests captured in Workday, such as hobbies, sports, volunteer work, etc could feed into the LinkedIn Interests section to provide a fuller view of the individual.
Groups and associations
Group memberships and professional associations that employees are part of internally could sync to LinkedIn to showcase engagement.
Work samples
Examples of work output and deliverables could move from Workday into the media section of LinkedIn profiles. This shows tangible examples of an individual’s work.
Courses and certifications
Completion of training courses and programs could flow from Workday into LinkedIn as another rich source of professional context.
Full profile sync
Ideally, there could be an option for 2-way synchronization between Workday and LinkedIn, so that all profile data is kept in complete sync between the two systems. This removes duplication of effort in profile maintenance.
Syncing with company pages
Workday company information like descriptions, leadership profiles, values, and images could potentially sync with corresponding LinkedIn Company Pages to ensure consistency.
Challenges of Deeper Integration
While there is tremendous additional potential in deepening the Workday-LinkedIn integration, there are also some challenges that would need to be addressed:
– **Data privacy** – Syncing additional data between systems introduces privacy risks if sensitive data is exposed.
– **Data ownership** – LinkedIn profiles are owned by the individual, so pushing info from Workday requires employee consent.
– **Platform differences** – Workday and LinkedIn store data differently, so mapping attributes requires work.
– **Development effort** – Product engineers would need to build more robust sync capabilities on both sides.
– **Adoption** – Employees would need to be convinced of the value to integrate profiles more fully.
The Road Ahead
In summary, Workday and LinkedIn are currently integrated at a basic level to sync limited profile data, which does offer benefits around accuracy and time savings.
However, there is sizable opportunity to develop the integration much further, with the ability to sync skills, goals, interests, work samples, and more. This could dramatically increase the value of both platforms for joint customers.
Achieving the full potential of integration requires overcoming data, platform, and adoption challenges, but the long-term vision should focus on maximizing the synergies between these two important HR and talent systems.
The road ahead will be paved by product demand and vision, technical execution, and change management to drive user adoption. With concerted effort on all fronts, a deeply integrated Workday-LinkedIn experience could deliver tremendous value.
LinkedIn Company Page Table
Company | Industry | Headquarters | Employees |
---|---|---|---|
Internet | Sunnyvale, CA | 10,000+ | |
Workday | Software | Pleasanton, CA | 12,000+ |
Internet | Mountain View, CA | 135,000+ | |
Microsoft | Software | Redmond, WA | 180,000+ |
Conclusion
In closing, integrating Workday and LinkedIn more tightly offers strong value potential, but will require navigating product, technical and change management challenges. The extent to which these two HR tech leaders can collaboratively advance integration will impact how seamlessly companies can manage their talent data and processes across the two platforms. But the vision of a fully unified worker profile spanning both systems is a compelling one in this era of digital transformation.