SuccessFactors Onboarding (aka Onboarding 2.0) is gaining popularity, with many customers going live, many more are in flight, and a lot more are in planning, kick-off stage. The product has definitely matured in its offerings compared to even a year ago. Every upgrade is bringing in new innovations, and it is one of the exciting products in SuccessFactors suite, today.
Cancel Onboarding
When you try to cancel onboarding, from the Onboarding dashboard either due to a no-show or other cancellation reasons, if you run into an error message “[COE0018]The cancellation request for new recruit * has failed. Please contact your administrator.”.
There is a published KBA https://userapps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/en/2970817, which explains the cause: The reason being that this is happening is that a required field has no data which causes the system to throw an error.
The resolution provided by the KBA is
- Kindly go to Admin Center -> Manage Business Configuration -> employmentInfo and check if the fields that are set there are Mandatory and the Onboardee has provided a data in it.
- Also make sure “okToRehire” field is enabled. It does not need to be mandatory.
Any one who has done Onboarding will tell you, that the
- HRIS element employmentInfo require those mandatory fields to support the Termination event.
- In Onboarding, when you are in New Hire Data Review step, it is not possible for you to enter data for for fields like End Date, etc.
A quick and dirty workaround will be to make all the mandatory fields in the HRIS element employmentInfo to be non-mandatory. Save the changes. Initiate Cancel Onboarding. Once the onboarding record is cancelled, revisit the HRIS element employmentInfo and roll back the changes ie: make the fields as mandatory again. This is not a permanent solution, and can potentially cause fatigue and human error.
This blog explains how to get around this pain-point, and support your Employee Central requirements, as well fulfill the business need to cancel onboarding.
As a first step, goto the config step Manage business configuration. In the displayed screen go to the HRIS element employmentInfo.
Identify all the fields that are marked as “mandatory” in employmentInfo. It is these fields that require data, when you cancel onboarding.
The workaround is to develop a business rule.
For one of my customer’s we developed a business rule similar to :
Base Object: Employment Details Model
Business Rule
In this rule, Termination Date is the label for the HRIS field end-date
Last Date Worked is the label for lastDateWorked
The rule says, If end-date is not null, then make lastDateWorked as Mandatory.
You can get creative with the business rule, and can include other fields to make them mandatory, and populate them with default values (if any).
After you have created the business rule, attach the business rule to the HRIS field end-date, with the Event Type = onChange.
After this configuration change, you should not run into any issues related to Cancel Onboarding.
