5 Common Position Management Mistakes (and How to Solve Them)
“Wait, didn’t we just close that position?” 🤔
“Finance says we don’t have budget approval, but HR already started recruiting…again.” 🙄
“Why do our headcount numbers never match?” 😵💫
If these questions sound familiar, you’re not alone.
During our 14+ years of experience in Workday implementations, we’ve seen even the most sophisticated organizations struggle with these kinds of position management challenges. The troubling reality is that while 80% of Workday customers choose position management over job management for better headcount control, many end up in complete chaos.
But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
We’ve identified the five most common position management mistakes that derail organizations—and more importantly, how to fix them. If you’re a Workday customer, we hope these insights can help you transform position management into a strategic advantage no matter where you are in your implementation journey.
Mistake #1: Having an Unclear Definition of Position Management
One of the biggest and most common mistakes we see most organizations make is not clearly defining what position management is in their company. Position Management is the staffing model in Workday that provides the greatest control over hiring. It enables you to define hiring rules for each position.
From our experience, it’s HOW the positions are managed that can make or break the management of the positions, and this applies pre-hire, as well as in the hire-to-retire process.
For example, how do you manage positions when promoting within an organization? You may define an inline promotion as the employee staying in the same position and an out-of-line position as moving out of one position into a different position within the company.
If you’re defining the above and all other combinations of position movement, document it and set clear expectations with the team members transacting in Workday. That’s how you set up your position management for success. While there could be a right and a wrong, it’s more about consistency and definition.
The Problem
When you're transacting on multiple positions in a batch, things can get really messy really quickly. Many organizations get sucked into a black hole of data management and reconciliation instead of focusing on what moves the needle forward for their organization, all because position management isn’t clearly defined.
Your HR team members interacting and transacting in Workday should know exactly what to do no matter the hiring, change job, or termination scenario. Without clear definitions, everyone ends up doing something different, your positions get out of whack, and before you know it, you’re doing more data cleanup than you know how to handle.
The Solution
Though unclear position management can cause many problems within organizations, the fix is relatively simple—create a clear, foolproof framework that defines:
Protocols for opening and closing positions
Who will be responsible for creating and deleting positions
When positions can be opened and closed
As an example, when you hire someone, your framework can name one person who can create the position and one person who can close it.
Promotions are a bit more involved. When conducting inline promotions, such as a marketing manager becoming a senior marketing manager, your framework could keep them in the same position. However, if an employee is moving horizontally—say, a marketing manager becoming a Workday Analyst—that person would be moved out of their position into a completely new position. Then you’d need to decide on a protocol for creating or adjusting supervisory orgs as well.
These movements should be clearly defined by transactions in Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) with clear processing guidelines on what to do in each staffing transaction scenario. There will always be caveats, of course, but these guidelines should apply to most scenarios.
When used correctly, position management can aid strategic activities that move your business forward, such as making better sense of the positions so you can forecast better, helping HR, finance, and the business with their growth plans, and doing org modeling.
It can be an extremely complicated process. Here’s a simple framework we created to help you do just that:
Mistake #2: ATS Integration OR Headcount Planning?
There are two categories of position management in relation to hiring: prehire and the hire-to-retire process. We’ll discuss the latter later in this article. For now, let’s focus on common integration mistakes we see organizations make regarding position management for the prehire process.
The Problem
When you want to hire for a role, the typical process is:
Most companies integrate a third-party Applicant Tracking System (ATS) solution for this process and have to build a custom ATS-Workday integration. That isn’t bad in itself—in fact, it’s necessary to facilitate the prehire process end-to-end.
However, most organizations run into the same problem: only focusing on the ATS integration. We find that companies really hurt themselves if they don’t uplevel the conversation and think about headcount planning as a whole.
Why? Because when you’re only concerned with technical integrations, you miss the chance to build a unified headcount planning strategy that includes strategic elements like budget alignment and approval workflows. This leads to fragmented processes that waste time and create expensive mistakes like over-hiring or misaligned budgets.
The Solution
Really, organizations should ask themselves a series of questions when building these integrations, such as:
Where is finance involved?
What happens during annual planning? Do all positions go into a hiring tracker?
What happens with net new requests for headcount, and where are finance, recruiting, and HR involved?
What happens when offers come back through to Workday, and who is reviewing them?
What happens if compensation, a job, or a level elevates during the recruiting process? Is finance involved in that?
The list goes on, but the lesson is clear: You should elevate the conversation from just an ATS integration to your entire headcount planning process. When you do so, you can be confident that you have the right people and the right technologies—such as tailored headcount planning software—in place to optimize, not just integrations, but workforce planning as a whole.
Mistake #3: A Lack of Clear Ownership and Accountability for Position Management
We’ve seen this third mistake wreak havoc on hundreds of organizations.
A lack of ownership and accountability for position management isn’t just a case of “Whodunit” when someone gets moved to the wrong supervisory org or a position was closed that should have been left open. It’s specifically when finance, HR, and recruiting aren’t aligned on positions and headcount, creating a challenge on who creates, closes, or moves a position, and all the governance around it as well.
The Problem
Creating, moving, and closing positions are basic transactions in Workday.
However, if there’s no accountability regarding:
Who’s doing it
Why it’s being done
Oversight
Governance
The ability to audit
…then one person can throw off position management. They may not be paying attention, don’t understand the process, or don’t really know what to do.
No matter the reason, a lack of ownership and accountability can lead to mismatched headcount numbers, incorrect budget forecasts, compliance risks, and even audit findings. We’ve seen organizations waste countless hours untangling position data simply because multiple people were making changes without the right oversight or understanding of future impacts.
The Solution
We recommend a few tactics to keep things safe:
Set up guardrails for when positions are created or closed to prevent unauthorized changes and keep a clear audit trail of who made what changes and why.
Use validations in business processes to prevent users from making mistakes.
Choose one or two people to become headcount planning administrators responsible for the prehire position management process.
There are multiple ways to implement these steps in Workday, and we’ve seen dozens of highly successful cases. But the bottom line is that having clear accountability and ownership for position management in Workday helps keep it streamlined, accurate, and on track for the entire organization.
Mistake #4: Mismanagement of Data in the Hire to Retire Process
Now let’s move away from prehire to the hire-to-retire process. This is more closely tied to business processes for Change Job and Termination, among others. Here, again, data mismanagement is a very common issue for most organizations.
The Problem
Let’s go back to our example of a marketing manager being promoted to a senior marketing manager. In that inline promotion process, other transactions are at play that can raise tons of questions about what to do with positions when people move in and out of them.
For example, your company may define inline promotions as keeping employees in their existing seats and promoting them. But then other questions arise, such as:
Would they continue to be a manager if they were already a manager?
If they weren’t a manager and are becoming one, do we create a supervisory org and move certain people underneath them?
Before you know it, you’ve got a tangled mess of closed positions that should have been left open and people in the wrong department.
We also find that many organizations fail to clearly define who their end users are and their roles. End users are typically business partners and managers who use Manager Self-Service for job changes. If they have the option to close a position or move someone out of that position, then they can make a mistake.
In our experience, they do make mistakes—we all do, we are humans after all!—even when you clearly define position management and provide great training. The reality is that the more people with access to change positions, the higher the likelihood of error.
The Solution
Much like the prehire process, you need distinct definitions of what to do when people move positions within your organization. It’s also important to establish clear guardrails.
Change management training also becomes extremely important here because position changes impact multiple stakeholders across your organization. Without proper training, even managers with the best intentions can cause chaos for HR, Finance, and IT teams.
You also need to narrow the access and usage, clearly defining and documenting what to do. Understanding who the end users are and what they can do will help minimize position management mistakes.
We understand that carrying these strategies out can be difficult, so we’ve created a simple position management matrix to help give you ideas of where to start.
Mistake #5: Enabling Self-Service or Other Roles Outside of Defined Ownership
One of the most common mistakes companies make when implementing Workday is rolling out self-service to automate the process or throw it over the wall so that operations doesn’t have to manage it. But this seemingly efficient decision has surprisingly disastrous consequences.
The Problem
Enabling self-service during Workday implementation leads to more errors, and operations teams often have to get involved anyway to audit data and clean it up.
In most cases, organizations end up closing Manager Self-Service for these functions anyway. So in the end, you end up wasting much more time, energy, and dollars on fixing mistakes and scrapping the function rather than using it how it was intended.
The Solution
We always recommend starting slow and with a lot of intention for Workday’s self-service functions. As the organization matures you can add MSS features in an agile manager, just make sure to have an effective enablement and training plan alongside the implementation.
This way, those with access to position management—managers, business partners, operations, and administrators—are all trained and can support each other in keeping the positions accurate and clean. That’s the best time to roll out self-service because there’s a lot of support and change management training surrounding it, allowing you to operate more strategically.
You Can Avoid Position Management Pitfalls Before They Happen
These five pitfalls might seem insurmountable, but they’re entirely preventable with the right approach. The key is being proactive rather than reactive—implementing clear frameworks, establishing ownership, and creating proper guardrails before position management becomes a problem.
But this transformation doesn’t take place overnight. It takes the right combination of expertise and technology to build a position management structure that truly works. You need partners who understand Workday’s technical aspects and the human element of how your teams actually work.
Kandor Solutions is here to provide just that! Our team of Workday experts brings decades of hands-on experience and the robust, customized technology solutions needed to optimize your position management. We’ll work alongside your teams to implement sustainable solutions that prevent these common pitfalls while enhancing your existing processes.
Are you ready to make position management your strategic advantage? Get in touch with us today to schedule your free advisory call so we can talk about your unique challenges and how we can help you overcome them.