Subject person defaulting to "Guest Guest"

[Janne47]

We have 2 scenarios when Guest Guest is being used in HRC when there are issues with locating the Subject Person. I'd be keen to hear from others are to how you manage these 2 situations.

1. When a new hire case is created and the personal email has been used previously, the system can't create the case under that subject person because there is already a user with that email to the case is created with Subject Person as "Guest Guest". This happens when:

• Workday sends personal email for a candidate
• A temporary or older user record already exists in SN with that same personal email
• SN tries to create a New Candidate user but fails
• Subject Person = empty → system defaults to Guest Guest

2. If a case is triggered for someone who is Inactive / Terminated the ServiceNow cannot map then so creates as Guest Guest

[Max Dore]

1.  By default, the email field in sys_user is not set to be unique, which allows the same email address to be assigned to multiple users and duplicate emails are not a valid practice. When Workday sends a new hire record using a personal email, if that email already exists on another sys_user record the creation logic hits a conflict and fails silently, leaving subject_person empty which I believe then defaults to Guest Guest.

The key dependency is that an HR Profile cannot be created without a user record first, and that sys_user record is what drives the Subject Person field — it's a reference to the HR Profile, which links back through the user.

I would say to try enforcing email uniqueness upstream. Work with your Workday integration team/admin to ensure the matching/deduplication logic uses a more stable identifier, specifically the employee ID or worker ID rather than personal email as the primary lookup key. If you're using the Workday spoke review the transform map to confirm the coalesce field is set to something stable and not just email.

If you can't get that to work then maybe try a post-creation remediation script? I believe some orgs run a scheduled job or business rule that detects HR cases where subject_person is null (or points to Guest Guest) and attempts a secondary lookup, matching on first name, last name, start date against pending HR Profile records. I still prefer the 1st option though.

2. This is a well documented platform-level behavior and not a bug. OOTB user queries are limited to active users only for users without admin or user_admin roles which is controlled by the "user query" Business Rule. When the integration or a case creation flow tries to set Subject Person to an inactive employee, the reference lookup fails to resolve the inactive record, and the case either comes in blank or defaults to Guest Guest.

I would say you either reference sn_hr_core_profile instead of sys_user for Subject Person lookups since HR profiles persist even after a user is deactivated) or update the Case Creation Configuration's filter.