Identify the Workday REST or SOAP API operation appropriate for creating a new Pre-Hire or converting an applicant to an employee; Workday's REST API uses OAuth 2.0 with tokens scoped to specific domains.
Authenticate using OAuth 2.0 client credentials for system-to-system integration; obtain YOUR_WORKDAY_TOKEN from the Workday tenant's API client configuration.
POST the new hire payload to the appropriate Workday endpoint with required fields: legal name, national ID or position details, hire date, primary work location, and business unit.
Use Workday's onboarding business process framework to assign onboarding task groups to the new hire; task assignment can be triggered via the API or configured to fire automatically based on hire event business process steps.
Monitor task completion status via Workday reporting or API queries; Workday's Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) can expose onboarding completion data for external dashboards.
Confirm all required onboarding steps (benefits enrollment, direct deposit, policy acknowledgments) are completed before the employee's start date using status queries against the onboarding business process.
Known gotchas
Workday REST API endpoints are tenant-specific and include the tenant name in the base URL; using a generic or wrong tenant URL causes authentication failures that look like credential problems.
Workday's business process framework means many actions are not instant API writes but rather process steps that may require approvals or multiple sequential stages; design integrations to poll or use event signals rather than assuming synchronous completion.
Workday field names and API schemas can vary between tenant configurations due to tenant-specific customizations; always test against the specific tenant's WSDL or OpenAPI spec rather than generic documentation examples.
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