PeopleSoft HRMS Interview Questions and Answers

A regulatory region is a region which has laws and regulations that are used by functionality in PeopleSoft HRMS. A lot of transactions are driven by regulatory requirements. These requirements include areas like ethnicity, disability, and health and safety. When driven by Regulatory Region, the regulatory codes, People Code edits, and set processing in the system can vary by country and for each transaction.

Checklist is a handout type of a utility for the user that can be referenced to ensure that all the tasks the user has to accomplish are done and noted. Say, a recruiter or HR admin wants to a hire a new joinee in HRMS system, there is a recruitment checklist the user can use. When the user is done with all the data entry, he can refer to this checklist in the system. Checklist has a bunch of tasks like passport and documents verified, bank documents sent, offer pack issued, identity check etc. User can put the status against each task like initiated, completed etc. This is a way of tracking that all formalities related to hire are completed. Admin can create new checklists also from Setup HRMS -> Common Definitions -> Checklists -> Checklist. If needed new checklist items can also be created from Setup HRMS -> Common Definitions -> Checklists -> Checklist items

Different organization relationships a person can have are: Employee, Contingent worker or Person of Interest as per the person model. Employee is a permanent staff member of the firm who is paid by company payroll and has a hire row in job with all associated information like company, department, location and paygroup etc. Example is a permanent position for a chief executive or sales manager in the firm. Contingent worker is a contractor in the organization mostly on an assignment. Personal information and job information is stored for a contractor in the system but person is not on the company payroll. Example can be a person from a third party company which is acting as a vendor for the firm to conduct a project for the firm needs. This person is a part of the project and working in the firm till the end of the project. Person of interest has many flavors. There are various types of POI – Pension payee, external trainee, external instructor or board member. They are members who are connected to the firm due to some business purpose. There are two types of POIs- who have a row in job data and others who do not have. POIs who do not have job information have a separate mechanism in PS to maintain their data security.

Effective date concept is used in multiple core tables in PS HRMS. For example, in job this is a primary key. Purpose of this field is to differentiate multiple transaction rows for same employee that has happened on two different dates. Effective date is also used in a lot of setup tables for example location. A location is say active as of today but 5 days later if I wish to make it inactive how does the system recognize the current status of location 5 days in future. It will be done by using the most effective dated row for that location.

Global assignments enable the organization to assign employees to a global assignment and to monitor, compensate and track education, qualifications for the employee and dependents as they move to multiple locations in the organization having presence in different geographies. Employees are based in a Home location. The employee data, benefits and payroll information is maintained at the home location. The new location where the employee moves is the Host location.

PeopleSoft delivers three options for International Security:

• Home can see Host
• Host can see Home
• Both

International Security can be setup by navigating to: Setup HRMS -> Security -> Core Row Level Security -> Security Installation Settings

Effective sequence concept is used in some key tables like Job. Job table has high volume of employee transaction data. There are multiple types of transactions and they are all action driven. It is very likely in a business scenario that employee has same type of transaction more than once in the same day. For example: Employee can have a data change action happening on the same day more than once. In such a situation, for the same employment instance, we now have more than one row with the same effective date. In order to uniquely store this second transaction, we need another primary key which is where effective sequence comes into play. Hence Job table has a primary key structure: Employee id, employee record number, effective date and effective sequence.

A termination action can be followed by a data change action row or a rehire row. DTA action row would be added if some correction needs to happen to the data of the employee who is terminated and you don’t want to update the current row then you can add a new DTA row. Rehire action is the most logical one to follow a TER action row this will happen when an employee post termination again wishes to join the organization and the organization wants to consider this as a rehire with same employee id and other details.

If the organization is not fit to be position driven, then the other options available are:

By Person: In this approach, job codes are used to classify job data into groups. Job codes have one to many relationships with employees, i.e. multiple employees can have the same job code. Jobs to be performed are identified in the organization. Job codes can be shared across departments, locations or companies.

Partial Position: There might be a situation wherein the system has to be driven by both the approaches – by person and by position. In this case, partial position management can be implemented. Driving by position might work for certain departments or executive levels whereas others can be person driven.

EMPLOYEES table is a current employee information table. This is primarily used in interfacing with third party systems or in business reporting as well in conjunction with EMPLOYMENT which is now a view. EMPLOYEES table is populated by running a delivered process called Employee refers, the job name is PERS099. This process will populate EMPLOYEES table by first truncating the whole table and then re inserting the data. This table will only store information for active employees in the system and it will have only one row corresponding to each employee’s most recent personal and job details.

To determine the reporting hierarchy for an employee in PS the delivered options are as follows:

• If the organization is position driven and uses full position management then the reporting is based on reports to field.
• If the organization is not position driven then the reporting can be driven based on supervisor id defined in job as one option.
• If the organization is not position driven then the reporting hierarchy can be driven based on the department tree structure as well. Example: In job if the employee is in department X then the line manager will be the manager of that Department X. If the employee happens to be the manager of that department as well, then the line manager will be the manager of the parent department to X in the department tree structure.

To identify a particular job in PS HRMS we use job code. Example: You can have a job code representing Administrative assistant. This jobcode will have a defaulted salary grade and standard hours. A collection of multiple such jobs grouped together which use this job code will make a job family.

When a user logs in PS the system scans through the user profile to see the associated primary permission list. There is a setup called org defaults by permission list. Setup HRMS -> Foundation tables -> Organization -> Org Defaults by Permission list. For every permission list following field defaults are set here: Business unit, Setid, Company, Country, Regulatory region, Currency and name format.

A person can have multiple jobs when:

• More than one active contingent worker or employment instance exists
• A substantive job and an additional assignment exists when the substantive job is not suspended

A person will not have multiple jobs when:

• Has a contingent worker instance and an employment instance
• A substantive job and a temporary job when the substantive job is suspended

Last hire date is the date a person is hired or rehired in the organization. Hire date is the date associated with a hire action job row. For example, if a person is hired on 1st May 2010 first time in the company and then terminated on 1st May 2011. Hire date and last hire date both will be 1st May 2010. Let’s say now the person is rehired on 5th May 2011 then the hire date will still remain as 1st May 2010 but the last hire date will now be 5th May 2011.

Yes POI can have a job record. There are two types of POI- one is with job and other is without job. For example, a board member holding stocks can be added as a POI with a job record.