Picking a new HR software vendor is not a decision you take lightly, which is why the RFP processes that large enterprises follow are so rigorous. Mature buyers know the negative impact of making the wrong choice when it comes to technology, which is why investment in the decision-making process tends to be high.
As well as assessing a long list of technology requirements and asking important questions to get to know the vendor, our conversations with the Avature community highlighted technology integrations as one of the key concerns for buyers. You will likely be incorporating the new software into your existing tech stack, so ensuring everything works together seamlessly is essential.
Vendors often highlight their official partnerships with third parties, so it is likely that you will evaluate them as a part of your RFP process, considering how they stack up compared to the rest of the market.
However, focusing on current partnerships might leave you open to future risk. While they might suit your current tech stack, this approach doesn’t guarantee compatibility in the future if you want to invest in new solutions.
This is why our biggest recommendation to IT teams is to look beyond current partnerships offered by vendors and assess the HR technology integration framework they offer. After all, this will determine the ease and scalability of the implementation they are about to embark on.
The Long-Term Perks of Flexible HR Technology Integrations
Your choices today should not condition your ability to act in the future. Which is why you can’t fully rely on vendor partnerships since they might limit your ability to adopt new technologies at a future date.
In the talent acquisition sphere, there’s an extra level of complexity, and that can be explained as “the domino effect.” A blip in your ability to acquire talent is a blip that will affect every department within your organization. So, compromising on your ability to incorporate new technology into your talent acquisition stack is not recommended.
Instead of simply looking for a vendor with many technology partnerships, you need to find a provider with a proven track record of integrating and adapting to whatever challenges customers have presented thrown their way. For example, at Avature, our next-generation integration frameworkis designed to adapt to any organization’s needs, today and in the future.
We have more than 1,000 integrations in production—used globally by customers of all sizes and across various industries— that fully satisfy their business needs while meeting the specific requirements of any third-party vendors they choose to work with.
This way, they can pick whichever solutions are best suited to their organization and the partners they want to work with. Combining self-service, full-service and off-the-shelf options, our framework empowers our customers to take control of their data flow and vendor ecosystem.
A Technology Integrations Framework Designed For the Unexpected
As more and more organizations look to replace outdated, on-premise applications with cloud applications, HR leaders are in need of a flexible, functional and reliable integration framework that can support agile practices and deliver complementary services without degrading the candidate experience. Avature can create custom integrations quickly and seamlessly thanks to our integration experts’ technical capabilities and our platform’s robust integration framework.
Our custom API endpoints are highly flexible and support a broad range of data formats (e.g. XML, JSON, CSV), all of which have major data transfer protocols (e.g. SOAP, REST, FTP) and authentication protocols (e.g. OAuth, TLS, PGP). Data stored in one format in your system (e.g., CSV) can be transformed into any other format (e.g., XML, JSON), eliminating the need for developing custom connections on your end to meet the requirements of third-party vendors, saving you time and maintenance costs.
In addition, to ensure low-risk and low-cost execution, our Integrations Service Team provides technical support on demand based on their experience and expertise in building integrations with our platform.
We also believe in delivering flexibility without compromising in other areas. Interoperability often comes at the expense of ease of adoption and use, but since our integration framework wasn’t designed around a single use case, it has the ability to adapt to many different situations.
Often, our customers want relatively simple integrations. With Avature, non-technical users can create custom API endpoints from a simple interface and select any fields from their custom data model. This way, they can make them readable or writable from the endpoint without needing any technical knowledge or intervention from Avature or their IT department.
To enhance data control and privacy, our platform avoids the use of standard APIs that may expose too much data to a specific vendor and provides administrator users with data flow monitoring and control from the UI.
For technology integrations with popular third-party services, Avature offers an off-the-shelf integrations catalog, that we can enable and disable based on any customer’s request.
This library features integrations to all major job boards, ATS, HRIS, background checks and assessment vendors from our predefined catalog from the user interface. With more than 300 out-of-the-box integrations regularly increasing, we ensure our platform responds to our customers’ current and future needs.
Setting Your Implementation Up For Future Success
Integrations are an inevitable part of any successful HR technology implementation. The best strategies are holistic rather than occurring in isolation, so a seamlessly connected tech stack provides the solid foundation that determines the long-term success of leading talent programs. Though official vendor partnerships might offer benefits in the short term, the Avature community consistently comments on the value of our flexible integration framework.
Putting you in the driving seat to choose which third-party vendors you want to work with can help you adopt an agile approach to recruiting and talent management and future-proof your teams for any upcoming scenarios.