Sreevalli Mellacheruvu

Organizations are not only required to recruit, but to manage and retain people in an increasingly complex and competitive employment market. In this context, talent management and employee engagement have reached the top of many management agendas and the mission-critical priority is to connect these disparate applications (cloud and on premise) and leverage application collaboration across the enterprise.

Integration:   Taleo <——> Oracle HR

Why Taleo?

Lot of companies like and use Taleo, not just because of the cloud based solution or unrivaled functionality, but because it integrates with Internal HR systems in a way that most recruitment software can’t.

Why Oracle?

Undoubtedly, most promising ERP in the market.

Why Integration?

With the industry shifting and adopting Cloud computing in all its forms, a great deal of attention has been focused on enterprise users, as they have to make critical decisions related to the data consistency. While your chosen Cloud systems of engagement adds value to your enterprise, it is always important to consider pushing data continuously into your “systems of record” to keep your data alive.

When to Begin:

Think Integration when you begin Implementation and include it as part of the Implementation project plan. This will help you to build a unified system throughout and require fewer changes to the foundation data. Cloud implementations are usually fast, easy and less expensive than on-premise, as are Cloud Integrations if planned and executed properly.

What to Consider:

• Identify Touchpoint objects and types (data inbound or outbound)
• Ensure secure data transfer.
• Ensure the process is automated and runs asynchronous at desired frequency.
• Consider the data transfer volume limits when you are migrating data from other systems, like importing existing candidates from i Recruitment to Taleo. Planned exception framework can be requested with Oracle for a temporary period.
• Ensure the integration serves the purpose of bringing the delta and time the interfaces accordingly.

Setting up the stage:

• Make sure Taleo Connect Client is installed successfully on Unix/Windows box and a well-organized folder structure is created to manage the files. It is important to set a proper file name standard,especially if working with multiple touch points.

 Note:Taleo Connect Client (TCC) is the client-side tool of Taleo Connect Platform that was installed in the customer’s environment. It provides a UI to move data to and from Taleo and is mature, robust and widely used.

• Create an Integration user on Taleo with the following user type permissions.
  • System Integration(Administrator Web Top)
  • System Integrator(Smart Org)
  • System Integrator(Recruiting)
  • System Integrator(On Boarding)
• Create a user account in Oracle with the required responsibilities necessary to create employee records.
• Create Staging tables where the information fetched is held until the interface loads it into HR system.
• A process and process detail table to track and audit each object being processed with statuses like Initiated, Successful or Errored.
• Finally, have infrastructure in place for error handling, which includes the errors and warnings report, reprocessing, and notifications to appropriate users.

Now let’s understand various Business Cases for Integration:

Taleo ~~> Oracle:

• Enable Net change to let TCC auto detect and apply data changes.
• TCC expects a csv data file for input,so prepare the source system accordingly.
• Consider all your context and reporting requirements.
• Foundation Data Integration–
  • Organizations
    • In Taleo, organizations are structure as a hierarchy as Company/Sector/Department/Division/Sub-division. Therefore, it is important to check how current ERP is structured and convert it to map different levels defined.
    • Parent organizations are created before the child organizations. Each organization must have a unique code,while the parent would be identified as -1.
    • While creating the OLF elements, you will need to pass Taleo reference mapping.
    • Up to 20 levels allowed.
  • Locations
    • Geographical areas listed in hierarchical order(e.g., Country/State/Region/City/Work location).
    • Parent locations are created before the child locations.Each location code must be unique.
    • Require an associate reference location in Taleo.
    • Up to 5 levels allowed.
  • Job Fields
• Are employment sectors or domains that drive candidates to search for open positions.
• They need to be organized by Category/Function/Sector/Specialties.
• Require mapping to Taleo job field value.
• Up to 4 levels allowed.
  • Core HR Data-
  • Job Templates
  • Positions
  • User Accounts
    • Actual end users who access Taleo application. For example: Hiring managers, recruiters, collaborators.
    • User permissions (user type), coverage areas(user groups) and profile options(configuration profile) are part of this import.
    • Users must have a unique code and must make sure that the password, which was previously created, is not updatable.
  • Candidates (Internal Employees)
    • Current employees who,when set up on Taleo,can access internal career website to search new job openings using SSO.
    • Each candidate must have a unique code.

Oracle ~~>  Taleo:

• Most popular of this type is the New Hire export. It is important to 100% automate new hires from Taleo to Oracle and minimize manual effort to achieve complete application collaboration.
• This can be initiated either at the end of the Recruiting process when the candidate status changes to “Hired,” or at any given step/stage of the candidate Onboarding /Transitions process.
• Do an in-depth analysis of the target system and prepare the source system for the export. This is where including integration as part of the implementation is helpful.
  1. Identify all the forms and pages you want to automate in Oracle.
     • Person
       • Veteran Status
       • I-9 Details
       • Rehire Information
       • New Hire Reporting
       • Disability
       • Military service
       • Benefits
       • Background verification
     • Address
     • Phone
     • Ethnic Origin
     • Assignment
       • Employment category
       • Work Location
       • Payroll
       • Job
       • Grade
       • Supervisor Information
       • Salary Basis
       • GRE and Organization info.
       • People Group
       • Purchase order and expense account details.
     • Salary
     • W-4 and Tax rules
     • Personal Payments
     • Salary
     • Emergency Contacts
     • DFF and KFF

2. Identify all the necessary lookups and lookup codes in Oracle and setup the Taleo selection lists accordingly in order to minimize the formatting during the integration cycle.
   • Gender
   • Marital Status
   • Employment category
   • Job schedule
   • Job shifts
   • Ethnic Origin
   • Veteran status
   • Disability etc.,

3. Create required user defined fields in Taleo and contextualize them by looking at the mandatory DFF and KFF setups in Oracle.

4. Setup an EIT in Oracle if possible to store the Taleo New Hire Inbound interface details for future reconciliation or auditing. Or you may want to switch back to original candidate information after the employee Termination as part of your off boarding process.
   • Candidate Number
   • Requisition Number
   • Personal email address
   • ACE information
   • Screening results/answers etc.,

5. Make sure the New Hire Integration is designed to take into consideration all the business scenarios of Oracle People Management –
   • If no SSN and date of birth is on file, process him as a new hire and load his personal Information.
   • If SSN is already in the system, if person type is employee, assignment status is active, process him as Internal Transfer if org/position has changed by end dating old assignment.
   • If not above case, error and abandon any action.
   • If SSN is already in the system, if person type is ex-employee, then process as Re-hire.
   • If SSN is already in the system and person type is non-employee say contingent/contact/student etc., create employment.

6. Automating the personal address record creation in Oracle always ends up with validation errors, as the system tries to check a valid vertex combination of city, county, state and zip. However, all these are text fields in Taleo and are prone to misspellings and dual spellings.

Optionally, you could run a scheduled integration that pulls Candidate ID and Zip code of profiles modified since last run, use the zip code value to retrieve the city, state, and country values from a table (or web service) and import them back in.

Another option is to base it on candidate submissions that have reached a particular status in the recruiting or onboarding process prior to hitting the point of hire export.

Or create a 2-step hire integration that performs the zip code validation/ data overwrite before extracting the data for hire.

Beyond that, this would make a great enhancement request for the candidate application to auto-populate location values based on the zip code entry.

How we can help:

As you have seen, the design is simple and clear but with custom needs piling up and specific characteristics to track, you can conclude it’s time to build your own interface. However, the thought of that the billable hours or staff time  makes you cringe.Our team of experts at EIS can help you configure this solution, which is ideal for companies thinking of adding Taleo to their landscape and can easily work with other ERP systems.