Use Workday Illuminate to Surface Internal Candidates Before You Source Externally

What This Does

Before you spend two to four hours building a Boolean string and sourcing passive candidates, Workday's Skills Cloud can check whether a qualified employee is already inside the company. It matches a requisition's skill profile against employee skill data and surfaces internal candidates you might not have thought to search for, often faster and cheaper to hire than an external search.

Before You Start

• Your Workday admin has enabled Skills Cloud and opted into the HCM Machine Learning GA Features service; this is org-level setup, not something you turn on yourself
• Your requisition has a clear skills profile attached (the more specific, the better the matches)
• If your company also has HiredScore licensed as a separate add-on, some of what's described below may look different or more advanced; check with your TA ops team which version you have

Steps

1. Find the AI feature

Open a requisition you're staffing and look for a "Find Internal Candidates" option or an internal-mobility panel alongside the applicant list. Employees who match the role's skill profile appear here, ranked by how closely their recorded skills line up with what the requisition asks for.

2. Tell it what you need

There's no prompt to write here. The matching runs off the skills already attached to the requisition and the skills recorded in each employee's Workday profile through Skills Cloud's taxonomy. If the matches look thin, check that the requisition's skill tags are specific rather than generic, vague tags produce vague matches.

3. Review and use the result

Treat the ranked list as a starting point, not a final answer. Skill-match scores reflect what's recorded in the system, which may lag what someone actually knows. Reach out to a handful of the top matches, or loop in their current manager, before ruling external sourcing in or out.

Real Example

Scenario: You open a Senior Data Analyst requisition and, before building a sourcing strategy in LinkedIn Recruiter, you check internal mobility first.

What you type/do: You open the requisition's "Find Internal Candidates" panel and review the ranked skill matches.

What you get: Three internal employees show up with relevant skill tags, forecasting tools and stakeholder communication among them. A quick conversation with one of them turns into an internal transfer, closing the req without ever posting externally.

Tips

• If your organization also gets an automation-likelihood or fraud signal on incoming applications, it typically shows up as a tag or score on the candidate's profile rather than as a Workday-native feature; many companies get this through a separate vetting integration rather than out of the box. Ask your recruiting ops team what's actually wired into your instance before you assume every candidate list carries this flag.
• Fraud and skill-matching scores are both trained models, not certainties. Cross-check a flagged application or a high skill-match score against the actual resume or a conversation before you act on it alone; the underlying matching technology has drawn regulatory attention over exactly this kind of unverified reliance.
• Internal mobility searches work best as a five-minute first step before external sourcing, not a replacement for it. Move to external search as soon as the internal list comes up empty or thin.

Tool interfaces change. If a button has moved, look for similar AI/magic/smart options in the same menu area.