Your users in your Confirm instance should be an accurate reflection of your organization’s actual users. To maintain this state without using an HRIS integration, you’ll need to know how to import users into Confirm with CSV files, both to add new employees and to perform batches of updates to employee data.
Additionally, you may also want to export employee data from Confirm for various reasons.
Let’s learn how to perform both of these administrator capabilities!
Import New Employees
For individual users, you can use the “Add” button in People Administration to add a single profile.
However, you might also want to add or update multiple profiles at once. For organizations that do not use an HRIS sync with Confirm, this is easiest to do by uploading a CSV with the new or updated user data you wish to add, using the “Import people from CSV” button:
For best results, please ensure that your CSV is completed and structured correctly to ensure a smooth upload process and avoid errors and duplicate account creation.
When you click the “Import people from CSV” button, you’ll see a pop-up window with options to Download Template and Start Importing.
For your first employee data upload, we highly recommend downloading the CSV template file using the blue “Download file” button. This will guide you on the various data fields we need (as many as are available in your data set) and using the template will also ensure that the column names match during the Import process.
Here is a list of the most common things to be aware of when creating or editing a CSV with employee data for Confirm:
Use the same column names as in our sample CSV
Fill in data for every cell for which it is available when adding users for the first time
Employee email cannot be blank and HRIS ID (External ID) cannot be blank if your organization will use employee ID numbers in Confirm (almost all of our customers do)
Please check carefully for any typos in email addresses prior to uploading, as this could create duplicate profiles
Please use all lowercase letters for email addresses in data CSVs for upload, and omit any punctuation such as apostrophes even if your email provider allows them
Please include the managers’ email address for every employee added, as this will be needed for surveys
Once you have created your CSV, click the blue “Start importing” button to begin the upload process.
The file upload tool will accept multiple spreadsheet formats, but we recommend always using .csv files for best results. Most spreadsheet programs allow you to save any spreadsheet as a .csv file using the Save As or Download functionality.
Once you have uploaded the file, Confirm will analyze your CSV and attempt to match its columns to our data fields that we ingest. By using the same column names in your CSV as in our template, you’ll likely see that everything matches (indicated by green check marks).
Click the Next button to continue to preview your data. Confirm will highlight any fields that are missing data that you should be aware of, which looks like this:
We also recommend using the “Show only rows with errors” toggle to quickly see if any required information is missing, which will be highlighted in red. Missing required information will cause the upload to fail with the following error message:
Once the toggle shows that there are no rows with errors, press “Confirm & Upload” to complete the upload process.
Batch Update Existing Employees
In addition to adding a batch of new employees, a CSV upload is also a convenient way to update a batch of existing employee data for organizations that do not have an HRIS integrated with Confirm.
Just as with adding new employees, we need to ensure that the CSV is completed and structured correctly to ensure a smooth upload process and avoid errors and duplicate account creation:
Use the same column names as in our sample CSV
Perform new employee additions and data updates to existing features in separate upload batches if possible - this is usually easier to troubleshoot if there are any issues
Employee email cannot be blank and HRIS ID (External ID) cannot be blank if your organization uses employee ID numbers in Confirm (almost all of our customers do). If your organization uses employee ID numbers, it is a best practice to always include them when altering employee data to ensure they remain up to date and complete.
It is ok to upload a CSV that only contains the columns you want to update for existing profiles only, but one of those columns must be the email address so that the correct profiles are updated. (For example, if we want to change a batch of employees to a “terminated” status, then we can upload only those employees’ email addresses, a Status column containing a “T” for each employee signifying a “terminated” status, a termination date for each employee, and the employee’s ID number. This will change the Status to terminated and supply a term date, but leave other fields unchanged.)
Please check carefully for any typos in email addresses prior to uploading - the email address must match exactly to update the employee record’s data
Please use all lowercase letters for email addresses in data CSVs for upload, and omit any punctuation such as apostrophes even if your email provider allows them
Please include managers’ email addresses for employees in every employee data update as a best practice - this is a good way to ensure these relationships are kept up to date, which makes creating cycle snapshots easier!
Export User Data to CSV
Exporting users to CSV is an excellent way to generate a spreadsheet of your users that you can edit to then use for importing to batch update users (for example, for manager reassignments or department name changes) in the process described above.
The People Administration panel offers the ability to export your Confirm user data to CSV. You can export data for everyone in the organization, or you can use the “Filter this list” button to create a smaller list of individuals or teams to export data for, then export the data using the “Export people to CSV” button: