The 2026R1 release introduces targeted enhancements across Recruiting, focused on strengthening visibility, governance, and user experience. These updates streamline administrative controls, improve reporting accuracy, enhance onboarding oversight, and support more secure and compliant hiring processes.
Take a look at the recent updates in Workday Recruiting that improve hiring and recruiting workflows.
Workstream |
Key Updates |
Feature Description |
Business Impact |
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Recruiting |
With this release, Workday enhances the Recruiter Hub by providing recruiters with a centralised workspace that serves as a single point of access to job requisitions, candidates, tasks, and reports across the hiring pipeline. |
Administrators can use the Maintain Hubs task to configure and manage hub cards, enabling quick access to relevant tasks under each Recruiting stage. Depending on the domain’s security and configuration, users will see only the cards they have access to. Configurable hub cards allow organisations to tailor the Recruiter Hub to their specific processes while maintaining appropriate security controls. Additionally, for improved clarity, the section previously labeled Inbox Items Awaiting Processing User Pipeline for Hub Card Content has been renamed to My Inbox Tasks. |
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Workday expands language support for Candidate Engagement discovery boards. Users can now view and interact with discovery boards in eight additional languages, improving accessibility and usability across different regions. |
Discovery boards for Candidate Engagement are now supported in the following languages:
These languages are in addition to existing support for French Canadian, Japanese, and Korean. |
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Workday updates the Primary Work Location report field to restrict returned locations to those configured with a business site location usage. This enhancement strengthens data controls and improves reporting accuracy. |
The Primary Work Location report field on the Job Applications, Prospects, and Referrals business object will now return only locations that are configured with a business site location usage. Locations not designated as a business site will no longer appear in report results. |
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With this release, Workday introduces new configuration options to provide greater visibility into job applications submitted through External Career Sites. Organisations can enable candidate signal data reporting to gain insights into device and location-related signals associated with job applications. Additionally, administrators now have the option to prevent candidates from updating their personal information after submission. |
1. Collect Candidate Signal Data Level Enables new report fields that capture technical identifiers during the external application process. These fields are secured to the Candidate Data Job: Application domain and include:
Some jurisdictions may consider certain collected data to be personally identifiable information (PII). Organisations should review privacy policies and consult legal counsel prior to enabling this option. 2. Disable Candidate Personal Information Editing on Candidate Home These enhancements provide additional tools to help organisations identify potentially fraudulent applications and strengthen application data controls. |
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Workday introduces effective-dated legal name fields for candidates. These fields allow organisations to report on and reference legal name values based on their effective dates. |
Workday delivers the following effective-dated legal name report fields on the Worker business object (secured to the Public Reporting Items domain), which can be used in custom reports and calculated fields:
This enhancement improves reporting flexibility and supports more accurate name tracking over time. |
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Candidate Engagement
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Workday updates the hover text within the Put Candidate to request personal information fields to improve accuracy and clarity.
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Workday updates the hover text for personal information fields within the Put Candidate request. The wording has been revised from referencing “External Committee Member” to “Candidate” for the following request hover text:
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Workday now automatically applies the redesigned profile layout to all users. The updated design introduces a cleaner, more streamlined interface with reduced visual clutter and neutral styling when custom branding is not applied. |
Workday removed the Opt-out for Profile Uplift check box from the Edit Tenant Setup – System task. As a result, the profile redesign is now enabled for all users by default. In addition, user profiles and candidate pages now display a silhouette image when a profile photo is not available. |
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Workday now allows the inactivation of Onboarding Plans. Inactivated plans can no longer be mapped to new audiences but can still be viewed, edited, copied, or previewed. Once inactivated, a plan cannot be reactivated. However, it is possible to copy an inactive plan to create a new version if needed. Users who are already assigned to an onboarding plan that is later inactivated can continue and complete their onboarding process without disruption. This enhancement improves onboarding plan management by allowing organisations to retire outdated plans without permanently deleting them, reducing clutter and preventing incorrect plan assignments. |
Onboarding Planner A new Inactive column is added to the Plans section in the Onboarding Planner to display plan status. A new Inactivate option is available in the Actions column, allowing users to inactivate plans directly from the grid. Plans can also be inactivated from the Related Actions menu. Updated Task The Examine for Onboarding Issues task now ignores inactivated plans, preventing unnecessary exception messages. The Inactive status is displayed for plans marked as inactive. Web Services Updates
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Workday enhances Onboarding Plans by integrating onboarding task visibility into the Manager Insights Hub. Managers can now monitor onboarding progress for their new hires directly through the new Onboarding tab that is available on the worker profile. Summary cards are also added to the Overview page to highlight overdue and upcoming tasks. These updates improve compliance, support proactive task management, and reduce the need for managers to navigate across multiple pages to track onboarding progress. |
Security Managers must have access to the following domains:
The Manager Insights Hub functional area must be enabled, and contextual security is used to ensure managers only see onboarding data for their direct reports. The security class Onboarding Assigned Business Process Content now inherits contextual security from the Onboarding Event to reinforce this restriction. Manager Insights Hub Overview New Onboarding Tasks Overdue and Due Soon sections are added to the Overview page. The new cards and tabs display only when managers have direct reports with active onboarding assignments that include overdue or upcoming tasks. This enhancement increases manager visibility into onboarding progress while maintaining appropriate security controls and data access restrictions. |
Conclusion
The 2026R1 release brings smarter capabilities to Workday Recruiting, helping teams hire more efficiently and scale with confidence.
Our next blog will explore the key Workday Integrations & Extend updates and their impact on your business.
Enhance your 2026 hiring processes this Workday Release! Get your free Workday Release Strategy Template to adopt new features and optimise your hiring workflows.
