Participant Import Automation
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About Participant Import Automation
With Employee Lifecycle and Pulse projects, you can automatically add participants or dashboard users to the project from the Global Employee Directory on a schedule. This is helpful when you are running an ongoing program. For example, while onboarding, you can upload new employees to the directory and expect that they will be uploaded to your onboarding Lifecycle project right away.
Adding Participants Automatically on a Schedule
Qtip: This section describes functionality available to Lifecycle and Pulse projects, but not Engagement or Ad Hoc Employee Research projects. For more details on each, see Types of Employee Experience Projects.
This option allows you to automatically add participants from the Global Employee Directory to your project on a chosen schedule. Limit the participants that are added to your project by metadata.
Example: You want to survey employees whenever they leave the company to ask about their experience. So long as there’s metadata such as End Date attached to each employee in the directory, you could filter your participant automation to only include employees with upcoming end dates.
Go to the Participants tab.
Click Add participants.
Select Automatically on a schedule (participants).
If you’d like the automation to be enabled as soon as you save your changes at the end, select On. If you don’t want your automation to start yet, select Off.
Choose the recurring days of the week you’d like this automation to run.
Choose the time of day you’d like the automation to run.
Specify the time zone.
Use the dropdown to set the conditions under which participants are added to the project. You will first select participant metadata, then define the value(s) this metadata should or should not have in order to include participants.
Qtip: You must add at least one condition.
Qtip: See the Setting Participant Automation Conditions section below for more information.
When you’re finished, click Save.
Adding Dashboard Users Automatically on a Schedule
Qtip: This section describes functionality available to Lifecycle projects, but not Engagement, Ad Hoc Employee Research, or Pulse projects. For more details on each, see Types of Employee Experience Projects.
This option lets you add dashboard users from the Global Employee Directory to your project on a chosen schedule. Dashboard users don’t participate in the Lifecycle survey. Instead, they only access the results on the dashboard.
A dashboard user automation is especially useful when it’s paired with automatic role assignment. Using both features at once allows you to give permissions to your lifecycle dashboards automatically based on changes in your organization.
Example: All Human Resource Business Partners (HRBPs) in your organization see onboarding dashboards. You can set up the dashboard participant automation to pull in HRBPs from your employee directory based on a metadata field, such as Role = HRBP. You can then setup an automatic role assignment to pull in all HRBPs into a dashboard role, based on Role = HRBP. When new HRBPs come into your organization, they will automatically be pulled into the lifecycle project and be assigned a dashboard role, which gives them access to the onboarding dashboard.
Go to your Employee Lifecycle’s Participants tab.
Click Add participants.
Select Automatically on a schedule (dashboard users).
If you’d like the automation to be enabled as soon as you save your changes at the end, select On. If you don’t want your automation to start yet, select Off.
Choose the recurring days of the week you’d like this automation to run.
Choose the time of day you’d like the automation to run.
Specify the time zone.
Use the dropdown to set the conditions under which participants are added to the project. You will first select participant metadata, then define the value(s) this metadata should or should not have in order to include participants.
Qtip: You must add at least one condition.
Qtip: See the Setting Participant Automation Conditions section below for more information.
Decide whether to select Update the metadata for all non-respondents on the schedule you selected even if they don’t meet these conditions. By checking this box, the automation will automatically pull in the latest metadata from the employee directory and update all non-respondent participant metadata, regardless of whether they meet the criteria or not.
Qtip: This applies both to participants who were previously imported and those who were manually added as non-respondent participants.
When you’re finished, click Save.
Qtip: If a participant is marked as a respondent and they meet the criteria for the dashboard user import automation, they will not be changed from a respondent to non-respondent. Once a participant is marked as a respondent, they will stay that way unless manually changed to a non-respondent. Please be aware that updating a participant from respondent to non-respondent will impact the numbers reflected in the response rate in the dashboard.
Setting Participant Import Conditions
Qtip: This section describes functionality that we intend to release starting November 18, 2026. Qualtrics may, in its sole discretion and without liability, change the timing of any product feature rollout, change the functionality for any in preview or in development product feature, or choose not to release a product feature or functionality for any reason or for no reason.
When deciding how participants or dashboard users are added on a schedule, you can set filters to capture specific groups of people. Below, we’ll cover how to build condition sets that fit your program’s needs.
All vs. Any
At the start of a condition set, you’ll see the phrase Any/All of the following are true. This decides how many of the following conditions a participant has to meet to be included in the automation.
“All” ensures a participant must meet every condition nested below.
“Any” means a participant can meet just one of the conditions nested below.
Conditions vs. Condition Sets
Click the 3 dots next to a condition to add a new condition or condition set below.
A condition will be combined with the same any/all set. You can add up to 20 conditions in total.
Example: This participant automation has two conditions: participants must be actively employed and based in Canada.
Example: This participant automation has two conditions: participants can either be from the country of Canada or have their region set to North America.
A condition set creates another Any/All statement nested under the first. This helps you create more complex criteria.
Example: In the filter below, participants will only be included in the automation if they have an active employment status and either one of the following:
- “Region” equal to North America.
- “Country” equal to Canada.
Actively employed North Americans and actively employed Canadians will both be captured by this filter. If for whatever reason a participant doesn’t have both region and country set, that’s fine; so long as they have one or the other, they will be included, so long as they are also actively employed.
You can nest a maximum of 2 condition sets. In the above example, you could add another condition set that comes after the Any Region/Country set, but you cannot nest another condition set underneath it.
Clicking the 3 dots next to a condition then Delete lets you remove that condition. Selecting Delete from the menu next to Any/All will remove the entire condition set underneath it.
Standard Operators
The following is a list of operators available when building conditions for any participant metadata field, regardless of format.
- Equal to
- Not equal to
- Is any of
- Is none of
- Empty
- Not empty
- Contains
- Greater than
- Greater than or equal to
- Less than
- Less than or equal to
- Starts with
- Ends with
“Equal to” only includes participants with an exact value match. “Not Equal to” will exclude anything with that exact text.
Example: You only want to include employees whose “Department” is equal to “Engineering.” Only employees whose Department is equal to Engineering will be included. Not only would Sales and Marketing be excluded, but if you have a separate department named “Sales Engineering,” that would be excluded, too, because it’s not an exact match.
Qtip: If “Not Equal to” is used, participants who have no value for the specified field will be included. For example, if criteria is set to import participants based on the metadata field “Manager” is Not Equal to “Yes,” participants with no value for the “Manager” metadata field as well as participants for which “Manager” does not equal “Yes” will be imported.
You can use the standard operator “Is Any Of” to eliminate the need to build complex condition sets. With this operator, you can select multiple values for a metadata condition. Participants that have any of your selected values will be included in your automation.
Qtip: With “Is any of” and ”Is none of,” you can select up to 20 values.
Example: This search will return participants that match any of the countries that have been selected.
Date Operators
Underneath the list of standard operators is a list of date-related operators.
Attention: Date operators only appear if your metadata has a confirmed date format. Learn how to set metadata date formats.
- On / On or after / Before: Then choose from the following:
- The past (e.g., the past 1 week)
- The current
- The next
- A specific date
- Between: Then choose a time period that is either set between specific dates or general time periods.
- In the past / in the next: Then choose from the following:
- Day
- Week
- Calendar month
- Calendar year
If you’re not sure what time period your filter captures, hover over the info icon.
Example: Today is October 27. This automation imports participants with a start date before the past 1 week. This means only participants whose start date is before October 19 will be imported.
Operators in Data Isolated Organizations
If your organization has data isolation, you will only have the following operators:
- Equal to
- Not equal to
- Is any of
- Is none of
- Empty
- Not empty
- On
- Between
- In the past / in the next
Date operators can only use the day period. Date operators can only capture a maximum range of 200 days.
Preview Filtered Participants
You can preview whether you’re capturing the correct participants in your automation. Click Preview participants (or Preview dashboard users).
A new modal will open with a searchable list of all participants captured by this filter.
Qtip: Each filter or search can only show a maximum of 10,000 participants who match the criteria. If you don’t see an expected participant in the list, try another search term.
Managing Existing Participant Automations
Existing participant automations will be listed at the top of the Participants section of the Participants tab. Here, you can see whether the automation is currently on or off. You can also click the menu next to the automation in order to choose from a couple options.
- Preview participants and start now: Preview the participants that will be included as part of this first automation run. Then start the automation.
- Manage: Edit the automation. This lets you turn the automation on or off, edit the conditions, and change the timeframe.
FAQs
How do I specify a date format for my EX participant metadata?
How do I specify a date format for my EX participant metadata?
To set date format for EX metadata, see Manage Date Metadata Formats.
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