Manage profiles of "people" which might at some point become users

Question

My case is the following: In our company's Drupal "intranet", we need to manage prospective and actual Human Resources, and there's three kinds of them:

1) Candidates: HR people collect CVs and make their assessment after the interview. They want to store those information within an entity for future reference, without creating a User, obviously. On the other hand, when the person is hired, the user is created and it would be handy to link their existing profile

2) Real users: employees with an account on the intranet, with their user account accessible to them, and an HR profile managed by the HR

3) Employees without access: employee without web access, which only have an HR profile, but still need to be listed in orgcharts, have a job title, record training events and so on.

In short, everyone has an "identity", or "profile", but only a subset of them have a proper user account.

Any suggestions about how to go around it, or if there's a module out there for this? I have looked into Profile2 and Identity (RNG) but they do not seem cover my use case.

Answer 1

I have a solution for you:

You can create a role "candidate" and by default create all users of role candidate as blocked.. so they would never be able to access their account. and Then once they are hired/employed then depending on that condition you can trigger a rule which will change their role and status to ACTIVE. That will probably solve your problem.

Answer 2

Use "Decoupled User Authentication" (https://www.drupal.org/project/decoupled_auth) to treat everyone as users, even if they don't yet have login credentials. This way you have one consistent entity type you're working with all through the different stages of a candidates journey.