Extended Enterprise used for giving new hires access before start date

So long as the user name is the same your CSV file can update them when they start.  You can manually merge accounts, but then also have to delete one and it’s something I’d recommend doing at high volumes.

Merging profiles is time consuming and cannot really be done in large volumes. If the username is set as the proper username your company uses for your employees, the email field can be whatever you like. Once that user starts work, you can then update their email to the company email with your CSV import. No need to merge any profiles. You can also maintain the personal email in an additional field for historical or audit purposes.

Do you have Docebo Connect? 

Yes, we’ve done this using native Workday and it worked well.

We created candidate accounts in the platform prior to start date and treated them as a pre‑hire population. These candidates were either loaded separately or came in ahead of the employee record and were granted access only to pre‑hire training. Candidate accounts were clearly segmented and did not use the official employee identifier yet.

Once the associate officially started and the Workday user record was created via the native integration, we used an automation recipe to manage the transition:

• The recipe matched the candidate account to the Workday employee account using a consistent identifier (email).
• It then merged the candidate account into the employee account, ensuring all pre‑hire learning history and completions carried forward.
• After a successful merge, the candidate account was automatically deleted to prevent duplicates.

This allowed us to deliver training before day one while still ending up with a single, clean Workday‑based employee record in the system.

Key things that made this work:

• Clear separation of candidate vs employee populations.
• Tight permissions for pre‑hire access.
• Very deliberate merge logic in the recipe to avoid bad matches.
• Full automation so there was no manual cleanup required.

Happy to share more detail if helpful, but conceptually this pattern worked reliably for us with native Workday.  I know you said you don’t have it but I think the concepts are similar enough it was valuable to share. 

Hey ​@bhorishny !

Before going down the path of merging accounts, I'd highly recommend avoiding that if you are relying on CSV imports. Manual merging is a 1-to-1 process in the UI, and while you can automate merges via Docebo Connect, it adds unnecessary complexity since you don't currently have the native Workday integration in place.

In my experience helping organizations map Workday data to Docebo without an API integration, the cleanest and most scalable approach is an "update-in-place" strategy. Here is how you can do it without ever having to merge a profile:

1. Use a Permanent Username: When you import the pre-hires via your Workday CSV, use their permanent Workday Employee ID as their Docebo Username.

2. Use Personal Email Temporarily: Map their personal email to the standard Docebo Email field so they receive their welcome notifications and pre-boarding access.

3. The "Start Date" Update: When the employee officially starts, your Workday CSV export will begin outputting their new corporate email. When you run your standard CSV import into Docebo, the system matches the record based on the Username. It will simply update their existing profile, swapping the personal email for the corporate one. All pre-hire learning history remains perfectly intact because it's the exact same user account.

4. Preserve the Personal Email (Optional): Create a User Additional Field called "Personal Email". Map the personal email there during the initial import so you don't lose that data once the primary email field is overwritten by the corporate address.

If you are using Extended Enterprise to give them a customized pre-boarding login page and branding, that works perfectly with this data model. Just ensure your CSV import maps them to the branch associated with your pre-hire Extended Enterprise client, and then moves them to the permanent employee branch upon their start date.

You can read more on how Docebo updates existing user profiles via CSV matching here: Importing and managing users via CSV files – Docebo Help Center

Hope this saves you a massive amount of manual admin work!