How can I get the User ID from a text field which has the user name? Can I get it using a formula field?

Question

I am trying to populate the "Recruiting Lead" field which a lookup field.

My use case is that when a new lead enters the system via referral, i.e Channel is Email Referral, Source is Email, Campaign is Referral by Employee and Medium is the name of the Employee (all of these fields are text fields)

I then want to assign the lead to the employee that referred him, so based on the Medium text field which has his name.

I am trying to add this to the process builder, to assign the recruiting lead if all the criteria match.

The issue I am facing is, the recruiting lead field is expecting an ID and I am providing it with Text Name.

So my question is how can I get the ID for the user, based on a text field value?

Can I do this using a formula field?

Answer 1

A formula won't get you there. You need to be able to query the user Id based on the name. This is a perfect use case for the Before Save Flow. In this flow, you first query the user to use with a Get Records element, then use an Assignment to assign the ID based on the Get Records by name. As a bonus, the Before Save Flow does not trigger a recursive save call, making it much faster than Process Builder (up to 10x faster, according to the Release Notes).