Workday + Rival: Unlock More Value from Your HRIS
It’s nearly impossible to run an effective HR function without a digital system of record. And for many companies, Workday is that backbone. Over the course of 20 years, Workday has earned a reputation for being secure, compliant, and enterprise-grade. Just last month, Workday unveiled new capabilities to make enterprise data more accessible for CIOs and data teams, further cementing itself as a data backbone.
But here’s the catch (and it’s a big one for HR): When they rely on Workday alone for employee journeys, HR teams often run into rigid workflows, clunky portals, and slow change cycles. Workday delivers the data, but it’s not meant to support on-demand HR business process automation. Each change and tweak turns into a complex project that can get slotted at the end of an ever-growing list of priorities. Ultimately, that means end users don’t have the flexibility to take control and solve issues as they should in 2025.
That’s where Rival comes in, connecting the dots between HR, IT, payroll, managers, and employees in one seamless, no-code flow. In this blog, we’ll show you how Rival can help you get more out of your Workday investment by turning data into action.
What Workday Does Well
Here’s why HR and IT leaders trust Workday as their cloud HCM:
✔️ Enterprise-grade and compliant: Workday is trusted by Fortune 500s and regulated industries.
✔️ Strong data repository: Workday integrates HR and finance data into one system of record.
✔️ Future-proof: Workday is seen as a long-term investment.
In the eyes of your CIO, CHRO, and board members, it’s a safe choice that stores and secures your workforce data at scale.
Where HR Teams Hit Friction
Workday is a strong foundation for your HR tech stack, but HR teams run into challenges with candidate experience and complex workflows. Examples include:
⚠️ Rigid workflows: Seemingly small changes turn into an IT project, especially when involving different types of workforce changes in the organization such as M&A or reorgs.
⚠️ Costly integrations: Workday has a growing set of integrations, but most require significant, and at times costly, IT or consulting support, leaving HR in limbo waiting for improvements.
⚠️ Clunky candidate portals: First impressions and overall employee engagement take a hit with an interface that is not mobile-friendly or welcoming.
⚠️ The preboarding blackhole: Once an offer is accepted, there’s silence until day one.
⚠️ Manual onboarding: IT setup, compliance checks, and equipment provisioning can get delayed.
⚠️ Manager headaches: With limited visibility, managers end up chasing HR and IT.
⚠️ Reports without insight: Static dashboards describe problems without solving them.
⚠️ Slow to adapt: Changes to workflows can take months to reconfigure.
Because Workday was built as a data-first platform, day-to-day usability for employees and managers falls by the wayside. What you need is an experience and orchestration layer on top of Workday.
How Rival Complements Workday
When you use Rival and Workday together, you get the best of both: stability and engagement. Workday secures the data. Rival powers the experience.
Here’s how Rival fills the gaps HR teams feel most:
⚡ Find candidates fast with outbound sourcing and outreach: Rival imports jobs from Workday, layering in AI-powered candidate sourcing, matching, and outreach.
⚡ Agility without IT: Rival adapts workflows in days, not months. No coding or expensive consultants are required.
⚡ Seamless candidate journeys: Personalized, mobile-first experiences reduce drop-offs and build excitement from day one.
⚡ Preboarding delivered: Maximize the time between offer accepted and day one with automated tasks and reminders.
⚡ Automated yet flexible onboarding: Deeply personalized compliance checks, IT provisioning, and other assignments can be embedded directly into workflows and changed quickly as needed.
⚡ Manager visibility: Dashboards and nudges keep managers accountable.
⚡ Self-service insights: Get answers to questions like, “Who hasn’t signed their compliance documents yet?” and allow employees to ask HR-specific questions with ROSI (Rival OS Intelligence), a handy conversational AI.
⚡ Experience-first design: Rival is built for HR, not data engineers, so you can build and manage these processes yourself or with dedicated support from Rival.
Rival and Workday together turn your workforce data into action and deliver a more powerful employee experience.
Unlock More Value From Your Workday Investment
Workday is a solid foundation for your HR data. But to get Workday to do what HR teams actually need, companies often pile on manual workarounds or hire expensive consultants for every workflow tweak. That’s why you hear horror stories about delays and costs spiraling out of control.
Rival eliminates the need for those stopgaps. With Rival, HR can design and launch automated workflows themselves, keeping processes like preboarding and compliance checks moving and your employees and managers engaged.
Together, Rival and Workday provide you a powerful system of record and a workflow engine that keeps your business running.
