Most companies using Workday Position Management will tell you the same thing: they technically have it set up, but the real hiring plan still lives in a spreadsheet.
Positions get loaded during annual planning and not touched again until hiring is complete. Change requests happen in Slack. Finance is working off a spreadsheet that's three updates behind. And by the time you get through a long reconciliation at quarter-end, no one can agree on which version of the plan is actually correct.
The problem isn't Workday. Workday is great at being a system of record. But when it comes to taking action on a live headcount plan? Workday falls behind.
Every time a hiring manager wants to change a level, shift a start date, or swap a location, they skip Workday’s clunky workflows and just update their spreadsheet instead, then get TA to update the ATS. This usually leaves People Ops or Recruiting Ops playing the human API between systems, chasing approvals through email, going back later to update Workday if they remember, and hoping nothing falls through the cracks.
TeamOhana is the fully integrated collaboration layer your business leaders, TA, HR, and Finance have been waiting for.
Headcount requests start in TeamOhana. Approvals flow through TeamOhana. Changes happen in TeamOhana. And once something is approved, your downstream systems, Workday positions (and optionally, requisitions), ATS jobs and openings, your FP&A tool, update automatically. No manual syncing. No version drift. No one playing middleman.
In this demo, we'll walk through:
- Positions Dashboard: See every position: planned, open, filled, and backfill, in one live view.
- Headcount Requests & Creating New Positions: From the moment a hiring manager submits a request, TeamOhana routes it through the right approval chain and automatically creates the corresponding Workday position once it's approved. Whether your workflow uses Workday requisitions or not, we've got you covered.
- Backfills: When an employee leaves, TeamOhana makes it easy to keep the position open and kick off a backfill — without anyone having to remember to update Workday.
- Creating Jobs & Openings in your ATS: When a position is ready to recruit, TA creates the job and opening directly through TeamOhana. Changes to title, level, location, or comp flow back automatically — no ghost jobs, no reconciliation headaches.
Key Highlights
What You'll Learn
- Why Workday requisitions create adoption problems and what teams typically do to work around them
- How the disconnect between Workday, your ATS, and your FP&A tool produces conflicting headcount numbers across Finance, TA, and HR
- What the "front door" architecture looks like in practice — and how it keeps Workday as the system of record without forcing everyone to live in it
- How to request and approve headcount in a simplified flow that notifies approvers directly in Slack
- How TA uses the recruiting workboard to manage the approved headcount plan and control exactly when a role opens in Greenhouse
- How Finance can set a budget envelope at the start of the year and let business leaders run scenario changes independently — without involving a Finance Business Partner for every what-if
Takeaway 1: Your hiring plan lives in a spreadsheet because Workday wasn't built for the business
Workday Position Management was designed for HR admins to maintain a system of record — not for engineering leads, sales managers, and department heads to make active hiring decisions. Because the position and req workflow is too rigid for day-to-day use, most companies end up maintaining a separate spreadsheet as the real plan. That spreadsheet drifts. Positions in Workday go stale. When it's time to hire, the data doesn't match.
Takeaway 2: The Workday requisition was never meant for what you're using it for
Workday requisitions were purpose-built for the Workday ATS. If your company runs Greenhouse, Ashby, or SmartRecruiters, the req is an extra step that adds friction without adding value. Hiring managers don't want to log into Workday to create one. TA ops often ends up doing it for them. And because the req and the position are managed separately, changes in one don't reliably update the other.
Takeaway 3: Every team needs a different view of the same headcount data and right now nobody has it
Finance needs to know headcount impact on operating expense. TA needs to know which approved roles to start recruiting. Hiring managers need to know what's approved, what's in progress, and what's at risk. HRIS needs to know that positions are clean. Today, each of those needs gets answered differently — with different data, from different systems, at different points in time. The result is chronic reconciliation work and a loss of trust in the numbers.
Takeaway 4: Scenario planning should be self-serve for business leaders, not a Finance Business Partner dependency
Today, if an engineering VP wants to model what happens if she pushes three start dates, backfills at a different level, or adds a role in a lower-cost location, she has to work through a Finance Business Partner to get the answer. That's slow, and it creates a bottleneck that discourages proactive planning. When it takes a week to run a what-if, leaders stop running them.
A headcount plan is a live, living document where changes are happening all the time, especially for leaders of high-volume hiring or high-growth organizations. But if they're working in a tool like Workday position management, there's really no view for them to go and see what is my accurate list of open positions, and if I want to make a change, how is that going to impact my financial forecast?" — Virginia Hyland, Head of Solutions Engineering, TeamOhana
