What we’ve learned building integrations with Applicant Tracking Systems
Setting up a seamless technology ecosystem is challenging. You need to establish which solutions you want to enable to get which results, and then you need to find a way for everything to work together. And it can take time to get everything right. That’s why for us, paying attention to every detail during every integration is so important — it helps to ensure it’s faster and easier the next time around.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you want to integrate a new mobile solution into your existing ATS because that is what we have experience building. But these learnings can apply to integrations beyond that.
Make sure you have a path forward
If you are looking to integrate a new tool, one of the first roadblocks you may come across is your current system not offering an easy way to do that. If you are already working with an ATS that you love but are simply looking to enhance certain workflows, then the onus of the integration is likely going to rest on whatever new solution you are bringing in. But it’s important to make sure they have a clear path forward to building that integration. Building out an entirely new ecosystem will be a different kind of challenge, but you may be able to better ensure a seamless experience.
If integrating with an existing system:
o Ask your ATS customer success representative to connect you with someone on their technical team. Ideally they’ll offer a time for technical representatives from both companies to get together and discuss the integration immediately so there’s an open dialogue about intentions and a path to how to make it happen.
If sourcing new tech:
o If you are revaluating your entire tech stack, or starting out and building something from the ground up, building an integrated ecosystem will be easier if you work with solutions with open APIs (this basically just means that the two software solutions can speak to each other easily). This will allow development teams to work more independently from each other and speed up the process by eliminating the need for constant communication.
Provide access to the system you need to integrate with right away
It’s not enough to simply learn what your employees goes through in a day to understand how your systems need to integrate. If someone is building an integration for you they need to get hands on with your other system(s). If you are able, provide access to your ATS right away and offer to walk your mobile customer success rep through your actions.
Walk through your workflows in depth
Anyone providing you with a tech solution should have a good day to day understanding of your work and systems. If they don’t, they can’t possibly expect to know how their tool is going to benefit you and bring value accordingly. But building an integration requires an even deeper knowledge. Building an integration isn’t just about pulling data fields from one system to another — it’s about knowing where the unique value lies in each system. This helps you identify which workflows should take place in which systems and not just how but when and why info should get passed back and forth.
For this, we need to understand not just what you do in a day, but why you do it. It can be pretty simple to understand that a client’s address field or employee’s communication record need to be brought back and forth between systems. But what about more complicated things like employee statuses. When, and why, does a candidate status change from consideration to hired? How do workflows change for certain job statuses? How are recruiter commissions calculated? Knowing the answers to these questions early on will ensure a clearer path to fitting everything together.
Align on what those workflows should be
Learning workflows also means learning intended versus actual usage of the systems you have in place. Your team might use the system in a different way than you originall intended, and recruiters in different branches might use the system differently than each other. The company who built the software might even have a different idea of its intended uses (and therefore their online guides will advise certain things). Make sure everyone is aligned on how the system is to be used. This might require a quick stakeholder meeting before you sit down with your new product’s customer success team.
Define and document your scope
Make sure you have detailed documentation that defines the scope of your integration. This will usually include at least a data mapping chart which identifies what pieces of information you need to pass back and forth between systems. It should also include a list of specifically what statuses or classification of information you want flowing between systems. Perhaps you want to start using a mobile app to communicate only with workers on assignment, or only for certain types of job reqs. Make sure to detail that from the very beginning.
This will make it easy for the development team building the integration to translate into their internal systems. Whether it’s used to create JIRA tickets or something else, it will make it fast to translate your ideas into actionable requests. These documents can then be used to verify completion of the integration when you finished and give you something to test against. Keep in mind things will likely be added to these documents along the way, but start out with as defined a scope as possible.
Make sure you know what success looks like
While you are documenting your scope, also make sure you are communicating the results you wish to see. Ideally the team you are working with should be asking you this. They should be obsessed with helping you reach your three month, six month, one year goals using their system, and having a good idea of this going into the integration might help them make suggestions for how it will work best. Are you really hoping to impact the number of workers you communicate with on a weekly basis? Are you hoping to lower your time to fill? Establishing goals will help the team identify which system is better able to deliver on which metrics and build accordingly.
Clean up your data
As with any system we use, it’s easy for an ATS to house incorrect, out-of-date or irrelevant data (like having thousands of unread emails in your inbox). Make sure you do some digging to figure out what this data might be, and be open to a type of system “spring cleaning” when you begin your integration. There may even be certain things the integration can actually help you clean up. For example, in the past we’ve offered the use of Google’s Places API to correct address data coming in from integrated systems. Rest assured that limiting the passage of bad data between systems will make everyone’s lives easier.
Communicate
You’ll be most successful in building an integration when you have a line to someone you are comfortable raising questions and concerns to (and who is fast to respond). Ask questions about what you see, request progress meetings, and keep track of what’s been accomplished.
Get in there and try to mess things up
When all is said and done, you’re going to need to test the results. Nothing is going to be perfect right away, but it’s not about that. It’s about how the team you are working with responds to the issues you surface. Give yourself a few weeks to use the system(s) internally before putting your roll out plan into action so you can limit the amount of friction when the system is finally put in use.
Then, take those scope documents you put together and get to testing.
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Checklist for building out an integrated tech stack
o Source systems with open APIs
o Look for responsive customer success teams and create a path forward together
o Offer access to systems you want to integrate with
o Identify the value you see in both systems: how you see them bringing value alone and how you see them working together
o Map the data points you want to see reflected between systems
o Walk through your workflows in great detail
o Align intended workflows across all levels in the company
o Identify any improvements that may need to be made to data or housekeeping
o Be detailed about the results you want to see
o Ask questions
o Test everything with your team
