Workday People Search With Real-Time Sync and Mobile Access

Employees look up colleagues by name, and they also ask questions a directory cannot answer, such as who in the Frankfurt office knows SAP pricing. In most large companies the answer sits in Workday.

A people search tool built on Workday has to pull the right fields, keep them current, hide what should stay private and reach people on their phones. This guide covers the options Workday and Microsoft document for each of those jobs.

What people search needs from Workday

Start with a short field list: identity and work contact details, job title and department, office location, the manager relationship behind the org chart, and skills. Microsoft's Workday connector for Microsoft 365 maps a similar set by default from Workday's Get_Workers operation, according to Microsoft Learn.

Skills are often self-reported and uneven between departments. Measure how complete they are before you promise skill search, because a search that finds nobody for a common skill loses trust fast.

Integration options Workday documents

Workday describes its SOAP API as an open, standards-based interface on its SOAP API reference page. Four routes come up in people search projects.

• SOAP web services. Get_Workers in the Human_Resources service, listed in Workday's Public Web Services API Directory, returns worker records. Its response group flags let the caller request only the data sets it needs, as Microsoft's Entra and Workday integration reference shows.
• REST APIs. Workday also publishes a REST API directory. Microsoft's Employee Self-Service agent calls the REST /workers/me endpoint through an OAuth connection that uses the signed-in user's identity, according to Microsoft Learn.
• Reports as a Service. Workday lets you enable advanced and search reports as web services with output that includes JSON and CSV, and advises copying a standard report to a custom one first, according to Workday's RaaS documentation. The report defines exactly which columns leave Workday, which helps the privacy review.
• Prebuilt connectors. Microsoft 365 Organizational Data Service reads Get_Workers for tenants of up to 100,000 users, and larger tenants can send RaaS output instead. Microsoft's people data connectors bring HR attributes into Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Search, profile cards and Org Explorer.

For change detection, Workday's Integrations web service lists subscription operations tied to business process types. Confirm with your Workday administrator whether your tenant can push those events to an outside endpoint before you design around push updates.

Sync frequency versus real-time lookups

A search index holds a copy of the data, so decide how stale that copy may be. Microsoft's Organizational Data Service connector for Workday imports weekly or monthly, and validation can take up to three days. That suits skills and departments. It is too slow for a new hire who needs to be findable on day one.

Microsoft Entra's Workday provisioning runs incremental cycles that query Workday's transaction log for changes since the last run, including future-dated hires. If Workday already feeds Microsoft Entra ID, fields such as department and manager may already be current there, and the search tool can read them from Microsoft Graph.

Real-time lookups solve freshness another way. The index keeps stable fields, and the tool calls Workday when someone opens a profile or asks something the index cannot answer. Sensitive fields never enter the index. The cost is latency and API load, so cache briefly and fall back to the indexed record when Workday is slow.

Permissions and privacy

By default, people data brought in through a Copilot connector is visible to all users in the tenant, according to Microsoft's people data connector documentation. Anything you sync that way is effectively published company-wide, so agree the field list with HR and legal first. The same page says these connectors comply with Microsoft Purview information barriers. At a minimum, keep the following out of any company-wide index.

• Compensation and pay group data
• Home addresses and personal contact details
• Dates of birth, national IDs, passports and visas
• Performance reviews and succession data
• Leave reasons and benefits elections
• Dependents and emergency contacts

Use a dedicated integration system user with Get-only access to the domains you need. Microsoft's Workday connector setup grants Get Only access to five domains, including Worker Data: Public Worker Reports and Person Data: Skills. Microsoft's Entra guidance adds that constrained integration system security groups can limit which workers an integration sees.

Mobile access through Teams or the intranet

Most employees already carry Teams on their phone. Microsoft lists profile cards as available in Teams on web and mobile, so profile data you load into Microsoft 365 can reach phones through the same cards, according to Microsoft Support.

A Copilot Studio people finder can be published to Teams and Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft notes that installation links do not work in the Teams mobile app, so publish the agent to the Teams app store, where admins can install and pin it through app setup policies (Microsoft Learn). An intranet search page should use the same index and permission checks as Teams, so answers do not change with the channel.

Test before rollout

• Compare 200 profiles field by field against Workday, including people hired or transferred last month.
• Change a manager in a test tenant and time how long the org chart takes to update.
• Search for every excluded field by name and by value to confirm nothing reached the index.
• Run the same queries on a phone in Teams and on the intranet.
• Ask HR to review twenty skill searches for accuracy.

Our guide to enterprise AI search explains permission-aware search across several systems. The enterprise search pricing comparison covers what packaged products charge if you would rather buy than build.

Where to start

Settle the field list and the freshness requirement first, because together they decide the integration pattern. A weekly import may suit a skills directory, while a new-starter lookup needs Entra-fed fields or a live call.

QueryNow builds AI workflows and agents in your own environment. We scope one workflow with you, such as a people finder over Workday data in Teams, build it in two weeks, and you pay $10,000 only after it meets the acceptance criteria you signed off on.

Questions HR and IT teams ask

Can people search show Workday changes in real time?

Indexed fields are only as fresh as the last sync. For live answers, the tool calls Workday at query time for the fields that change most and keeps the rest in the index.

Which Workday interface should we use?

A RaaS report contains only the columns you approve, which simplifies the privacy review. Get_Workers is the call Microsoft's own connectors use, and it supports incremental change queries through the transaction log.

Will employees see the data on their phones?

Yes, if it lands in Microsoft 365 profiles or in an agent published to the Teams app store. Installation links do not work in the Teams mobile app, so plan on the store route.