Best Practice for Contractor Access to EC Pro & HR Cases Without HR Profile Creation?

[ASHU_1]

Hi Everyone,

Looking for some guidance on a contractor access scenario in HRSD.

More than half of our workforce (~5,000 workers) are contractors and need access to a limited set of HR services in Employee Center Pro, primarily Employee Data Management requests (e.g., name changes, address updates, personal information changes, document requests, etc.).

Our concern is that using standard HR Cases may create HR Profiles for these contractors, which could have licensing implications at this scale.

Has anyone implemented a solution that allows contractors to securely authenticate (or otherwise validate identity), submit HR requests, and have HR agents process them in ServiceNow without creating HR Profiles or significantly impacting HRSD licensing?

We are exploring options such as:

• Local ServiceNow authentication with OTP
• Public catalog with identity validation
• Custom intake/case tables
• SAP-integrated approaches

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has solved a similar challenge, particularly regarding HR Profile creation behavior and licensing considerations.

Thanks in advance!

[ASHU_1]

@Susan Britt @johnzhang @Rob Sestito 

[Susan Britt]

Hi @ASHU_1  - I have not attempted (and would not recommend) to bypass the baseline functionality of HR Profile being created for those that open HR cases.  The security around HR cases hinges around the Opened for and Subject person, which require HR profile.  If the user opens a case, or one opened on their behalf, the profile is automatically created.

Your company could work with their ServiceNow account executive on the pricing, because the additional 5,000 may put them in a different tier for lower costs...? 

[ASHU_1]

Hi Susan,

Thank you for confirming. That's very helpful.

Yes, we are planning to engage our ServiceNow Account Executive to better understand the licensing implications and whether a different pricing tier may be available, considering that more than half of the workforce (~5,000 workers) are contractors.

At the same time, we are also evaluating an alternative architecture that would avoid using the standard HR Case model altogether. One option under consideration is a dedicated Contractor Services application with a custom case table extending Task, providing a separate intake and servicing model for contractors while allowing the same HR Operations team to process both employee and contractor requests.

Contractors would access a separate contractor-facing HR portal (rather than Employee Center Pro), purpose-built for their use cases such as Employee Data Management requests. This would avoid the standard HR Case security model and HR Profile creation entirely, while still enabling capabilities such as SLAs, approvals, AWA, notifications, and custom workspace experiences for HR agents. We recognize this would involve higher implementation effort and governance upfront, but it may provide a more strategic, scalable, and future-proof approach if licensing discussions do not lead to a commercially viable solution.

[jbulat]

Creating HR cases without an HR profile, it is just not possible (unless you would like to create huge customizations).

I would rather turn to leveraging, perhaps CSM or ITSM, to raise contractor's requests.

But.. this will not allow you for contractors to enter Employee Center and HR related articles. ( but that then depends also how the HR and User criteria are built for the Knowledge Management)

Summarizing, I would suggest to speak with account exec on the pricing - especially if that has recently been changed. If this is not an option, leverage ITSM?