When your company reuses employee emails, how do you handle it when Eightfold uses email as the key?

Hi ​@rmiller, Yes, this has come up with other customers. The main recommendation is to avoid allowing the same email to remain associated with two different people in the Eightfold data flow. If your company must reuse emails, the operational workaround is to “release” the email from the prior profile before assigning it to the new employee. Practically, that means sending the prior employee record through your HRIS/ATS/file ingest with a unique alternate email address, then sending the new employee with the reused corporate email. If the prior record simply drops out of the feed, Eightfold may still retain the email association and the new employee can land on the existing profile. For cases that have already occurred, Support usually needs to help with a data correction to separate the profiles and move any incorrectly associated data. Longer term, the cleanest solution would be a more stable unique identifier-based matching approach, but today the safest customer-side process is to ensure the reused email is explicitly released in the source system before reuse.

Also the most reliable workaround I’ve seen is:

1. Release the email from the prior profile before the email is reused
   • Update the prior profile’s email to a unique non-shared value, such as a personal email or a unique placeholder email.
   • This needs to happen in the source system first — HRIS / ATS / employee file — not only manually in Eightfold.
2. Send that updated prior profile through the ingest
   • The key is that Eightfold must receive an update that moves the old profile away from the reused email.
   • If the old record simply disappears from the file, the email may remain attached in Eightfold and the new employee can inherit the existing profile association. 
3. Then send the new employee with the reused corporate email
   • Once the original email has been released, the new employee should get a fresh, separate profile / Career Hub onboarding experience.
4. Keep all systems in sync
   • In one similar case, the issue happened because Workday had reassigned the email but the ATS still had that email tied to the prior record, which led to duplicate/deduping problems.
   • Internal guidance from another case was to update the source system first, then have Eightfold run an overwriting sync to update the Eightfold side.
5. For already-impacted profiles, raise a Support case
   • These usually require data repair: split/unlink profiles, move incorrectly linked applications or profile records, and ensure the two profiles are not treated as duplicates going forward.