These instructions are intended for PI customers preparing to improve your PI data by correcting all the current employees found there with updated information, either by using MagicTools for PI yourself or as part of our PI Data Cleanup Service.
You should export employee data as a “flat, delimited text file” or “comma-separated values” (CSV) file. The delimiter can be a comma, a semi-colon, a tab character, or a pipe (“|”) character. If any field values are expected to contain the delimiter character, the value should be enclosed in double quotes.
Employee Data Fields to Export
There are several employee data fields you should include, if available, in the data you export from your human resources system when preparing to update PI data.
Always include these fields, if available:
- First Name – the name you wish to become/remain the First Name in PI; Note: First Name is the person’s given name (not surname / family name)
- Middle Name – optional, but include it if you wish to correct/update the Middle Name in PI
- Last Name – the name you wish to become/remain the Last Name in PI; Note: Last Name is the person’s family name (not given name)
- Other First Name – optional, include if different from First Name – this is only used for matching purposes and will not be used to update the PI First Name field. This could be a preferred name or any other alternate name by which the person is currently or was previously known when they took an assessment.
- Other Last Name – optional, include if different from Last Name – this is only used for matching purposes and will not be used to update the PI Last Name field. This could be a previous or alternate style of last name that might have been used when they took an assessment.
- Current/Work Email – usually the employer-provided email you wish to store in PI for employees — may or may not already be present in PI for all employees.
- Previous/Personal Email – this is useful to identify an employee by the personal address used when they were a candidate taking an assessment or a previous work email address that uses a different domain name.
- Employee ID – this should be the unique, unchanging identifier of some kind assigned to each employee, possibly from your HRIS system; including this opens the door to using the PI Org Data Upload feature without creating duplicate data for existing persons
- ATS Candidate ID – optional, if you at some point used an integration with PI that placed a person identifier from your Applicant Tracking System, this can help correctly identify a former candidate
- Employment Status – is this a current employee or former employee? Note: If they are on leave of absence or a contract worker, decide whether PI should treat them as current or former because PI doesn’t recognize other statuses.
- Hire Date – this will not be stored in PI, but it can be useful when an employee matches more than one PI person and you wish to choose the right one by comparing the oldest or newest assessment date.
- Termination Date – optional, but may be necessary when applying time limits on the data you wish to keep or archive.
Optional but useful under some circumstances:
- Country/Division/Region/Department/Team – useful if you will be organizing employees using PI Folders that correspond to org structures like these
- Job/Position Title – only useful if you have defined PI Jobs for most of your employee position titles and wish to assign each employee to a specific PI Job Target. Note: If you intend to update PI Job assignment, all jobs titles in the HR data file must match exactly one and only one PI Job Target name (there cannot be two PI Job Targets with the same display name).
What about Former Employees?
Former employees may be useful to export, too, if you wish to identify former employees distinctly in your PI data. Export the same columns for Former Employees as you would for Employees with the exception of the Optional fields above.
Once matched/identified, you can decide what to do with them: update their person type to “Former Employee”, “Candidate” or “Other”
and keep them, or archive them. MagicTools for PI and the PI Data Cleanup Service support both options.
What about Past Candidates?
Previous candidate data exported from an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) may also be used to update PI data using MagicTools Sync, but there are admittedly fewer motives for doing this since everyone in your PI data that is not an employee is probably a current or former candidate. Export the same fields as for an employee with the exception of fields a candidate wouldn’t have (Employee ID, Employee Status, Hire Date, Employee Email).