This article is meant to provide recommendations, tips and and other helpful advice when using the Bulk Manage Answer Set tool. There is an assumed understanding of the basics of Answer Sets configurability within LiveHire.
File Safety & Disaster Recovery
Managing your Answer Sets in bulk via file upload will save you significant time when compared to making these changes in the UI but this gain in efficiency also comes with risk.
LiveHire recommends that you always save a copy of your Answer Set configuration file as a record of the Answer Set before you upload your changes.
Having this file will help you to restore the Answer Set if you encounter issues with the data after saving the Answer Set changes.
Answer Set File Column Headers
The Answer Set File has mandatory column headers that are required for a valid file upload. If you are creating a file from scratch, the column headers in the file must be:
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ID (Do Not Modify Values)
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Order
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Label
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Value
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External Value
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Is Deactivated
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Is New?
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Parent Answers
ID (Do Not Modify Values)
When you open the Answer Set configuration file, you'll see that Column A has the header "ID (Do Not Modify Values)". The data in this column will be the answer values unique identifier that has been saved to database.
This ID can not be modified or removed. If you attempt to upload and Answer Set configuration file that does not contain all of the existing IDs, you will get a validation message that lets you know the file is missing value IDs.
Order
When you download an Answer Set file, this column will have the order value starting from 0. If you upload the file without any order data, the answer set will order will be based on the order of the rows in the file. Duplicate Order values are not accepted.
Label, Value & External Value
The Label is what a user will see in the UI when choosing an answer to a question. Labels must be unique within the Answer Set.
The Value and External Values are additional attributes of the answer and are not visible in the UI. Values and External Values must be unique within the answer set.
An answers Value and/or External Value may be the exact same as the Label but this is not required.
An example where they may be the same might be a simple Answer Set for capturing Yes or No responses to questions. This could be set up like this:
| Label | Value | External Value |
| Yes | Yes |
Yes |
| No | No | No |
A example where the Value and Label are not the same would be where you have an Answer Set with Position Data. The Position Title may be commonly known but the Position ID is not so you might set the Answer up like this:
| Label | Value | External Value |
| Customer Service Rep | 123456 | 123456 |
Is Deactivated?
This is column refers to the status of the Answer. The status can be Active or Deactivated. This column requires data and this must be either a Y (Deactivated) or a N (Active).
Is New?
This column is used when to add new Answers. When you download the file, all rows will have N. If you add new answers to the Answer Set, this should have Y.
Parent Answers
If the Answer Set has been configured with Parent Answer Filtering, this column will have the Label(s) of the Parent Answer(s) that are required to display the Answer. If there are multiple Parent Answers, these should be semi-colon (;) separated. Here's an example of how multiple parent answers would be added to the cell:
Answer Label 1;Answer Label 2;Answer Label 3
Modifying the Order of the Answer Set
Modifying the order of the Answer Set can be done via two methods:
- Adding the order number in the Order column.
- Removing all values in the Order column and then ordering the sheet
A valid file for upload will either have all rows with a value in the Order column or all cells are empty in the Order column.
If you opt to keep all cells empty in the Order column, the answer set will be ordered based on the row order of the file.
IMPORTANT WARNING: If you use the sorting tools in your spreadsheet application, be sure that you sort the entire sheet including the "ID (Do Not Modify Values)" column or you run the risk of uploading an Answer Set file that passes all validation check but misaligns your company data. An example of how this might manifest would be a Department Answer Set where you only sorted the Answer Label column to reorder the answers. This file would upload fine and could be saved but, when you checked your existing jobs and offers, the Departments would now all appear incorrectly because the Answer ID is now associated with different Answer Label.
I recommend selecting all data in the sheet and then clicking the Sort & Filter option in Excel and choosing "Custom Sort". This will open a dialog box where you can tick "My data has headers" and then sort the entire sheet.
A common custom sort would be to set 2 rows in the sort dialog. The first row to sort by should be "Is Deactivated" and the second row is "Label". Sort on should "Cell Values" for both row and the Order should be "A to Z". Clicking the okay button after setting it up this way would order the sheet so that all Active Values appeared first and, within the Active values, the Answers would be sorted alphabetically.
Pre Upload Checks
Before you upload your modified file, you should do a few things to reduce the risk of creating issues with existing job, offer or application question data.
- If you did not make a backup copy of the Answer Set file before making changes, Download the file here in case you need it.
- Make sure that all new Answers do not have anything in the ID (Do Not Modify Values) cell and have Y in the Is New cell
- Run a duplicate check on the Order, Label, Value and External Value columns. To do this in excel, select the entire column by clicking the C, D or E respectively. Now click the Conditional Formatting tool and then choose "Highlight Cell Rules". There will be an option to highlight duplicate values. Choose this and then click okay on the next dialog that appears. After clicking Ok, the column will have the Fill Color and Text Color that you've chosen if a duplicate exists. If the column has no colors, there are no duplicates. Now, click the Conditional Formatting button again and choose "Clear Rules" and then complete this process again on the next column.
- Check Parent Answer column to make sure that all semicolons don't have a trailing space. To do this, you can press CTRL + F to open the Find and Replace dialog and then search for a semicolon followed by a space character. If there are any results, click the Find All button and then go through each to make sure it's not a semicolon that is separating Parent Answers.
Post Upload Checks
After uploading the file successfully, you'll see a green message that shows the count of each type of change.
After clicking the Confirm button, the Bulk Manage Answer Set window will close and the changes that you've made will now be visible in the UI. If an Answer has been changed, it will appear in italicised text with a tooltip icon that can be hovered over to display what has changed. If more than one type of change has been made on a single answer, it will prioritise "Updated" in the tooltip text.
LiveHire recommends looking over the changes in the UI to make sure that they are displaying as you expect. This change still has not been committed to the database so you will have the opportunity to make additional changes or revert back to current saved version of the Answer Set by refreshing your browser page.
If everything looks correct, click the Save button and the Answer Set data will be modified instantly.