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With the rise of data-driven recruitment, it is imperative for each recruitment tool, including candidate sourcing and screening tools, to integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) for enabling centralized data management for end users. 

However, there are hundreds of ATS applications available in the market today. To integrate with each one of these applications with different ATS APIs is next to impossible. 

That is why more and more recruitment tools are looking for a better (and faster) way to scale their ATS integrations. Unified ATS APIs are one such cost-effective solution that can cut down your integration building and maintenance time by 80%. 

Before moving on to how companies can leverage unified ATS API to streamline candidate sourcing and screening, let’s look at the workflow and how ATS API helps. 

Candidate sourcing and screening workflow

Here’s a quick snapshot of the candidate sourcing and screening workflow: 

1) Job posting/ data entry from job boards

Posting job requirements/ details about open positions to create widespread outreach about the roles you are hiring for. 

2) Candidate sourcing from different platforms/ referrals

Collecting and fetching candidate profiles/ resumes from different platforms—job sites, social media, referrals—to create a pool of potential candidates for the open positions.

3) Resume parsing 

Taking out all relevant data—skills, relevant experience, expected salary, etc. —from a candidate’s resume and updating it based on the company’s requirement in a specific format.

4) Profile screening

Eliminating profiles which are not relevant for the role by mapping profiles to the job requirements.  

5) Background checks 

Conducting a preliminary check to ensure there are no immediate red flags. 

6) Assessment, testing, interviews

Setting up and administering assessments, setting up interviews to ensure role suitability and collating evaluation for final decision making. 

7) Selection 

Sharing feedback and evaluation, communicating decisions to the candidates and continuing the process in case the position doesn’t close. 

How ATS API helps streamline candidate sourcing and screening

Here are some of the top use cases of how ATS API can help streamline candidate sourcing and screening.

Centralized data management and communication

All candidate details from all job boards and portals can be automatically collected and stored at one centralized place for communication and processing and future leverage. 

Automated profile import

ATS APIs ensure real time, automated candidate profile import, reducing manual data entry errors and risk of duplication. 

Customize screening workflows 

ATS APIs can help automate screening workflows by automating resume parsing and screening as well as ensuring that once a step like background checks is complete, assessments and then interview set up are triggered automatically. 

Automated candidate updates within the ATS in real time

ATS APIs facilitate real time data sync and event-based triggers between different applications to ensure that all candidate information available with the company is always up to date and all application updates are captured ASAP.  

Candidate engagement data, insights and patterns using ATS data

ATS APIs help analyze and draw insights from ATS engagement data — like application rate, response to job postings, interview scheduling — to finetune future screening.

Integrations with assessment, interview scheduling and onboarding applications

ATS API can further integrate with other assessment, interview scheduling and onboarding applications enabling faster movement of candidates across different  recruitment stages. 

Personalized outreach based on historical ATS data

ATS API integrations can help companies with automated, personalized and targeted outreach and candidate communication to improve candidate engagement, improve hiring efficiency and facilitate better employer branding. 

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Undoubtedly, using ATS API integration can effectively streamline the candidate sourcing and screening process by automating several parts of the way. However, there are several roadblocks to integrating ATS APIs at scale because of which companies refrain from leveraging the benefits that come along. Try our ROI calculator to see how much building integrations in-house can he.

In the next section we will discuss how to solve the common challenges for SaaS products trying to scale and accelerate their ATS integration strategy.

Addressing challenges of ATS API integration with Unified API

Let's discuss how the roadblocks can be removed with unified ATS API: just one API for all ATS integrations. Learn more about unified APIs here

Challenge 1: Loss of data during data transformation 

When data is being exchanged between different ATS applications and your system, it needs to be normalized and transformed. Since the same details from different applications can have different fields and nuances, chances are if not normalized well, you will end up losing critical data which may not be mapped to specific fields between systems. 

This will hamper centralized data storage, initiate duplication and require manual mapping not to mention screening workflow disruption. At the same time, normalizing each data field from each different API requires developers to understand the nuances of each API. This is a time and resource intensive process and can take months of developer time.

How unified ATS API solves this: One data model to prevent data loss

Unified APIs like Knit help companies normalize different ATS data by mapping different data schemas from different applications into a single, unified data model for all ATS APIs. Data normalization takes place in real time and is almost 10X faster, enabling companies to save tech bandwidth and skip the complex processes that might lead to data loss due to poor mapping.

Bonus: Knit also offers an custom data fields for data that is not included in the unified model, but you may need for your specific use case. It also allows you to to request data directly from the source app via its Passthrough Request feature. Learn more

Challenge 2: Delayed recruitment due to inability of real-time sync and bulk transfers

Second, some ATS API integration has a polling infrastructure which requires recruiters to manually request candidate data from time to time. This lack of automated data updation in real time can lead to delayed sourcing and screening of applicants, delaying the entire recruitment process. This can negatively impact the efficiency that is expected from ATS integration. 

Furthermore, Most ATS platforms receive 1000s of applications in a matter of a few minutes. The data load for transfer can be exceptionally high at times, especially when a new role is posted or there is any update.

As your number of integrated platforms increases, managing such bulk data transfers efficiently as well as eliminating delays becomes a huge challenge for engineering teams with limited bandwidth

How unified ATS API solves this: Sync data in real-time irrespective of data load/ volume

Knit as a unified ATS API ensures that you don’t lose out on even one candidate application or be delayed in receiving them. To achieve this, Knit works on a  webhooks based system with event-based triggers. As soon as an event happens, data syncs automatically via webhooks. 

Read: How webhooks work and how to register one?

Knit manages all the heavy lifting of polling data from ATS apps, dealing with different API calls, rate limits, formats etc. It automatically retrieves new applications from all connected ATS platforms, eliminating the need to make API calls or manual data syncs for candidate sourcing and screening. 

At the same time, Knit comes with retry and resiliency guarantees to ensure that no application is missed irrespective of the data load. Thus, handling data at scale. 

This ensures that recruiters get access to all candidate data in real time to fill positions faster with automated alerts as and when new applications are retrieved for screening. 

Challenge 3: Compliance and candidate privacy concerns

Since the ATS and other connected platforms have access to sensitive data, protecting candidate data from attacks, ensuring constant monitoring and right permission/ access is crucial yet challenging to put in practice.

How unified ATS API solves this: Secure candidate data effectively

Knit unified ATS API enables companies to effectively secure the sensitive candidate data they have access to in multiple ways. 

• First, all data is doubly encrypted, both at rest and in transit. At the same time, all PII and user credentials are encrypted with an additional layer of application security. 

• Second, having an events-driven webhooks architecture, Knit is the only unified ATS API which does not store any copy of the customer data in its server. Thus, reducing changes of data misuse further. 

• Third, Knit is GDPR, SOC II and ISO27001 compliant to make sure all industry security standards are met. So, there’s one less thing for you to worry about.

Challenge 4: Long deployment duration and resource intensive maintenance

Finally, ATS API integration can be a long drawn process. It can take 2 weeks to 3 months and thousands of dollars to build integration with  just a single ATS provider. 

With different end points, data models, nuances, documentation etc. ATS API integration can be a long deployment project, diverting away engineering resources from core functions.

It’s not uncommon for companies to lose valuable deals due to this delay in setting up customer requested ATS integrations. 

Furthermore, the maintenance, documentation, monitoring as well as error handling further drains engineering bandwidth and resources. This can be a major deterrent for smaller companies that need to scale their integration stack to remain competitive.  

How unified ATS API solves this: Instant scalability

A unified ATS API like Knit allows you to connect with 30+ ATS platforms in one go helping you expand your integration stack overnight. 

All you have to do is embed Knit’s UI component into your frontend once. All heavy lifting of auth, endpoints, credential management, verification, token generations, etc. is then taken care of by Knit. 

Other benefits of using a Unified ATS API

Fortunately, companies can easily address the challenges mentioned above and streamline their candidate sourcing and screening process with a unified ATS API. Here are some of the top benefits you get with a unified ATS API:

Effective monitoring and logging for all APIs

Once you have scaled your integrations, it can be difficult to monitor the health of each integration and stay on top of user data and security threats. Unified API like Knit provides a detailed Logs and Issues dashboard i.e. a one page overview of all your integrations, webhooks and API calls. With smart filtering options for Logs and Issues,  Knit helps you get a quick glimpse of the API's status, extract historical data and take necessary action as needed.

Extensive range of Read and Write APIs

Along with Read APIs, Knit also provides a range of Write APIs for ATS integrations so that you can not only fetch data from the apps, you can also update the changes — updating candidate’s stage, rejecting an application etc. — directly into the ATS application's system. See docs

Save countless developer hours and cost

For an average SaaS company, each new integration takes about 6 weeks to 3 months to build and deploy. For maintenance, it takes minimum of 10 developer hours per week. Thus, building each new integration in-house can cost a SaaS business ~USD 15,000. Imagine doing that for 30+ integrations or 200!

On the other hand, by building and maintaining integrations for you, Knit can bring down your annual cost of integrations by as much as 20X. Calculate ROI yourself

In short, an API aggregator is non negotiable if you want to scale your ATS integration stack without compromising valuable in-house engineering bandwidth.

How to improve your screening workflow with Knit unified ATS API

Get Job details from different job boards

Fetch job IDs from your users Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) using Knit’s job data models along with other necessary job information such as departments, offices, hiring managers etc.

Get applicant details

Use the job ID to fetch all and individual applicant details associated with the job posting. This would give you information about the candidate such as contact details, experience, links, location, experience, current stage etc. These data fields will help you screen the candidates in one easy step.

Complete screening activities

Next is where you take care of screening activities on your end after getting required candidate and job details. Based on your use case, you parse CVs, conduct background checks and/or administer assessment procedures.

Push back results into the ATS

Once you have your results, you can progmmatically push data back directly within the ATS system of your users using Knit’s write APIs to ensure a centralized, seamless user experience. For example, based on screening results, you can —

• Update candidate stage using <update stage> API See docs
• Match scores for CV parsing or add a quick tag to your applicant See docs
• Reject an application See docs and much more

Thus, Knit ensures that your entire screening process is smooth and requires minimum intervention.

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Get started with Unified ATS API

If you are looking to quickly connect with 30+ ATS applications — including Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite and more — get your Knit API keys today.

You may talk to our one of our experts to help you build a customized solution for your ATS API use case. 

The best part? You can also make a specific ATS integration request. We would be happy to prioritize your request. 

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Today, recruitment without ATS applications seems almost impossible. From candidate sourcing and screening to communication and onboarding — every part of the recruitment workflow is tied to ATS apps. 

Research shows that 78% of recruiters using an ATS report that it has improved the quality of the candidates they hire. 

Hiring qualified talent for an organization can be a resource intensive and long drawn process. The entire recruitment workflow has multiple steps and layers, which when accomplished manually can be extremely time consuming. However, companies which leverage recruitment workflow automation by using ATS APIs can save 100s of hours spent in heavy lifting. 

Recruitment workflow and automation with ATS APIs

Let’s start with understanding the various stages of recruitment workflow and how automation with ATS APIs can help. 

Job requisition and posting

The first step involves creating job requisitions based on hiring needs across different teams. This is followed by creating appropriate job descriptions and posting on job boards to attract candidates. 

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With ATS APIs, this entire process can be automated. ATS APIs come with pre-defined templates to create job requisitions and job descriptions. They also have integrations with leading job boarding to facilitate automatic posting and role promotion of job boards. 

Candidate sourcing and screening

Next, most recruitment professionals focus on collecting data on candidate profiles from different job boards. Then, they engage in screening and shortlisting the resumes following a manual process, which takes a long time. 

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ATS APIs automate the collection of candidate data, resume and other basic information. It goes a step beyond with resume parsing to automate extraction of relevant candidate data from the resume and facilitate storage in a ready to use format for easy screening. 

Interview scheduling

Once the screening is complete, interview scheduling for the shortlisted candidates is the next step. Manually, the process requires a lot of back and forth with interviewers and interviewees, managing schedules, sending invitations and reminders, etc. 

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ATS APIs led automation takes care of all scheduling struggles and automates the process of sending invitations, reminders and other candidate communication in the process. 

Candidate assessment

Scheduling interviews/ tests is followed by conducted assessments to gauge the candidate's aptitude, skills, knowledge, personality and cognitive abilities for the role. 

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ATS APIs can easily automate test assessment via online proctored solutions and even record scores and present it to the decision makers in a streamlined and easy to understand format. 

Decision making

When it comes to decision making, ATS APIs can collate evaluation, assessment results and feedback of all candidates and even rank them based on comprehensive scores to help decision makers with data-driven insights on the best candidate for the role. 

Job offer and onboarding

Once a candidate has been selected, the ATS API can automatically send the offer letter based on pre-defined templates. Acceptance of the offer letter by the candidate can automatically trigger document signing digitally, thereby automating the entire onboarding process. Bi-directional data sync will ensure that all steps of employee onboarding are conducted automatically. 

Managing information

An ATS API also enables recruitment professionals to automatically capture, manage and update all the relevant information about the candidate, application and status in a common platform, which can be accessed as and when needed. 

Candidate communication

Throughout the recruitment workflow, there are several touchpoints with the candidate. ATS API: can help recruitment professionals with personalized communication templates for candidates based on their application status, interview performance, feedback, etc. 

Post-recruitment evaluation

Finally, the ATS API can provide recruitment professionals with key data points and metrics to gauge recruitment performance. Metrics like time to hire, source, open positions, candidate diversity, interview to hire ratio, can all be collated in one report by the ATS API and presented. 

Process of automating the recruitment workflow with ATS APIs 

With understanding of the recruitment workflow, let’s understand the process of automating the same with ATS API. 

Identify the recruitment stages to automate

To begin with, you need to understand the recruitment stages in your organization and identify the ones which require a lot of heavy lifting and can be automated. For instance, while conducting the interviews cannot be automated, scheduling them and compiling the feedback and evaluation can be. Thus, identify the stages to automate and what benefits you seek to achieve as a result of automation. 

Choose the ATS APIs 

There are multiple ATS APIs in the market today. While each one of them comes with multiple functionalities across the recruitment workflow, some are likely to be better over others for particular use cases. Therefore, to leverage automation with ATS API, choose the ones that best suit your industry and requirements. You might even choose multiple ATS APIs and integrate them to your system for different purposes, while also integrating one with another. 

Obtain the necessary API credentials from the ATS provider.

Once you have selected the ATS APIs, it’s time to get into the technical aspects of getting the integration in place. To integrate the ATS API, you need to get access to specific credentials and authentication from the ATS provider. These include API key, access tokens, client ID, client secret, endpoints, etc. Once you have these, only then can the integration process begin. Also, ensure you understand the authentication process well.  

Integrate with the ATS APIs

Once you have the necessary credentials, get started with the integration. This will require coding and engineering effort as you will be building the integration from scratch. Understand the data models, endpoints, authorization by going through the API documentation for each ATS API you choose. Simultaneously get started with data mapping, authentication, error handling, etc. followed by testing to gauge the effectiveness of your integration. Each integration can take anywhere between a few weeks to a few months. 

Monitor, manage and maintain your ATS APIs

Post integration, you need to keep track of your data exchange and transformation process. Ensure that data synchronization is happening as per your expectations. Your need to keep track of unstable APIs or any updates in the same, error logging challenges, expiry or deactivation of webhooks, management of large data volume, among others. At the same time, monitor any security threats or unauthorized access push. 

Optimize processes

Finally, optimize your ATS API integration process. Identify the major challenges from the maintenance and management standpoint and focus on fixing the issues to create a better integration experience for your teams. 

Limitations of using different ATS APIs for automating recruitment workflow  

While using multiple ATS APIs to power different functionalities is enticing, it can be challenging and a major burden on your engineering and other teams. Here are a few limitations that might face while trying to integrate different ATS API for recruitment workflow automation. 

Scale and optimization challenges 

Each ATS API comes with different data fields, documentation and processes that need to be followed for integration. Integrating each one requires a steep learning curve for the engineering team. From a resource standpoint, each ATS API integration can take an average of four weeks, costing ~USD 10K. As you scale, there is an exponential time and monetary cost that comes along, which is applicable to each API you add. After a certain time, chances are that the costs and efforts associated with integration scale will significantly surpass the savings and benefits from automation. 

Data transformation challenges 

Each API, even within the same category of ATS will have different data models. For instance, the field of candidate name may be categorized as cand_name for one ATS API, while candidate_name for another one. To ensure that data from all APIs is consolidated for processing, you need to engage in data normalization and data transformation to process the data from different ATS APIs. 

Data synchronization challenges 

Next, data synchronization in real time can be a big challenge. If you are using a polling infrastructure, you will have to request data sync time and again, that too across multiple APIs. At the same time, data sync can be a challenge with scalability, when the data load becomes unmanageable. The inability to facilitate real time data synchronization can lead to delays in the entire recruitment process or exclusion of applications during a particular round. 

Monitoring and management 

Error handling, monitoring and management is extremely resource intensive. It is extremely important to maintain the health of your integrations, by constantly logging their performance. It is important to keep track of API calls, log errors, data sync requests, etc. This is required to catch any potential errors early on and manage integrations better. However, monitoring each API for every second is manually very burdensome. 

Compliance and security challenges

Compliance and security is a big challenge when it comes to integrations. Since you are dealing with a lot of personal data, you need to be on your toes when it comes to security. At the same time, each API will have a different authentication methodology as well as separate policies that you need to keep pace with.  

Custom workflows 

Finally, you might need custom workflows from your ATS APIs, especially during data exchange between them. Building these custom workflows can be an engineering nightmare, let alone maintaining and monitoring them. 

How unified API can help integrate with multiple ATS APIs for recruitment automation 

Don’t get apprehensive about using different ATS APIs for automating your recruitment workflows. A unified API like Knit can help you integrate different ATS APIs effortlessly and in less than half the time. Here are the top benefits of using a unified API.

Easy scalability

Unified API enables you to scale product integrations faster. You can easily add hundreds of ATS applications to your systems by just learning about the unified API. You no longer have to go through the API documentation of multiple applications or understand the nuances, processes, etc. It is highly time and cost effective from a scale and optimization lens.  

Seamless data transformation with custom fields

A unified API like Knit can provide you with a common data model. You can easily eliminate the data transformation nuances and complex processes for different APIs. It enables you to map different data schemas from different ATS applications into a single, unified data model as normalized data. In addition, you can also incorporate custom data fields i.e. you can access any non-standard data you need, which may not be included in the common ATS data model.

Real time data sync

Following a webhooks based event driven architecture, unified APIs like Knit ensure real time data sync. Without the need for any polling infrastructure or request, Knit facilitates assured real time data sync, irrespective of the data load. Furthermore, it also sends automatic notifications and alerts when new data has been updated. 

High security

Knit, as a unified API, helps companies leveraging ATS integration ensure high levels of security. It is the only unified API which doesn’t store a copy of the customer data. Furthermore, being 100% webhook-based architecture, it facilitates greater security. You don’t have to navigate through different security policies for different APIs and can access OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication. Finally, all data with our unified API is doubly encrypted, when in rest and when in transit. 

Easy integration management

With a unified API like Knit, integration management also becomes seamless. It enables you to monitor and manage all ATS integrations using a detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page. ‍Furthermore, the fully searchable Logs keep track of API calls, data syncs and requests and status of each webhook registered. This effectively streamlines integration management and error resolution 5x faster. 

TL:DR

Recruitment professionals and leaders involved in different stages of the recruitment lifecycle can leverage ATS integrations to automate their workflows. With the right ATS API, each stage of the recruitment workflow can be automated to a certain extent to save time and effort. However, building and maintaining different ATS API can be challenging with issues of scale, data transformation, synchronization, etc. Fortunately, with a unified API, companies can address these issues for seamless scalability, data transformation with a unified data model supported by custom data fields, high security with double encryption, webhook architecture for real time data sync, irrespective of workload and easy integration management with detailed logs, issues, etc.  Get started with a unified API to integrate all your preferred ATS applications to automate and streamline your recruitment workflows.

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Marketing automation tools are like superchargers for marketers, propelling their campaigns to new heights. Yet, there's a secret ingredient that can take this power to the next level: the right audience data. 

What better than an organization’s CRM to power it? 

The good news is that many marketing automation tools are embracing CRM API integrations to drive greater adoption and results. However, with the increasing number of CRM systems underplay, building and managing CRM integrations is becoming a huge challenge. 

Fortunately, the rise of unified CRM APIs is bridging this gap, making CRM integration seamless for marketing automation tools. But, before delving into how marketing automation tools can power integrations with unified CRM APIs, let’s explore the business benefits of CRM APIs. 

10 ways marketing automation tools can maximize results with CRM API integration

Here’s a quick snapshot of how CRM APIs can bring out the best of marketing automation tools, making the most of the audience data for customers. 

1. Customer segmentation and content personalization  

Research shows that 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging. CRM integration with marketing automation tools can enable the users to create personalized messaging based on customer segmentation. 

Users can segment customers based on their likelihood of conversion and personalize content for each campaign. Slicing and dicing of customer data, including demographics, preferences, interactions, etc. can further help in customizing content with higher chances of consumption and engagement. Customer segmentation powered by CRM API data can help create content that customers resonate with. 

2. Enhanced lead nurturing for higher conversion 

CRM integration provides the marketing automation tool with every tiny detail of every lead to adjust and customize communication and campaigns that facilitate better nurturing. At the same time, real time conversation updates from CRM can help in timely marketing follow-ups for better chances of closure. 

2. Churn prediction and customer retention

As customer data from CRM and marketing automation tools is synched in real time, any early signs of churn like reduced engagement or changed consumer behavior can be captured. 

Real time alerts can also be automatically updated in the CRM for sales action. At the same time, marketing automation tools can leverage CRM data to predict which customers are more likely to churn and create specific campaigns to facilitate retention. 

3. Upsell and cross-sell campaigns

Users can leverage customer preferences from the CRM data to design campaigns with specific recommendations and even identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 

For instance, customers with high engagement might be interested in upgrading their relationships and the marketing automation tools can use this information and CRM details on their historical trends to propose best options for upselling. 

Similarly, when details of customer transactions are captured in the CRM, they can be used to identify opportunities for complementary selling with dedicated campaigns. This leads to a clear increased revenue line. 

4. Automated campaign workflow to reduce operational overheads

In most marketing campaigns as the status of a lead changes, a new set of communication and campaign takes over. With CRM API integration, marketing automation tools can easily automate the campaign workflow in real time as soon as there is a status change in the CRM. This ensures greater engagement with the lead when their status changes. 

5. Event triggered campaigns for faster TAT

Marketing communication after events is an extremely important aspect of sales. With CRM integration in marketing automation tools, automated post-event communication or campaigns can be triggered based on lead status for attendance and participation in the event. 

This facilitates a faster turnaround time for engaging the customers just after the event, without any delays due to manual follow ups. 

6. Lead source automation

The integration can help automatically map the source of the lead from different marketing activities like webinars, social media posts, newsletters, etc. in your CRM to understand where your target audience engagement is higher. 

At the same time, it can facilitate tagging of leads to the right teams or personnels for follow ups and closures. With automated lead source tracking, users can track the ROI of different marketing activities. 

7. Tailored social media campaigns and multi-channel marketing

With CRM API integration, users can get access to customer preference insights to define their social media campaigns and audience. At the same time, they can customize scheduling based on customer’s geographical locations from CRM to facilitate maximum efficiency. 

8. Data enrichment for enhancing lead profiles

With bi-directional sync, CRM API integration with marketing automation tools can lead to enhancement of lead profiles. With more and more lead data coming in across both the platforms, users can have a rich and comprehensive profile of their customers, updates in real time across the CRM and marketing tools. 

9. Lifecycle marketing automation

Overall, integrating CRM API with marketing automation tools can help in automating the entire marketing lifecycle. It starts with getting a full customer view to stage-based automated marketing campaigns to personalized nurturing and lead scoring, predictive analytics and much more. Most of the aspects of marketing based on the sales journey of the customer can be automated and triggered in real time with CRM changes. 

10. Customer reporting and analytics for decision making

Data insights from CRM API integrated with those from marketing automation tools can greatly help in creating reports to analyze and track customer behavior. 

It can help ensure to understand consumer trends, identify the top marketing channels, improve customer segmentation and overall enhance the marketing strategy for more engagement. 

Real-world Struggles of CRM Integration in Marketing Automation

While the benefits of CRM API integration with marketing automation tools are many, there are also some roadblocks on the way. Since each CRM API is different and your customers might be using different CRM systems, building and maintaining a plethora of CRM APIs can be challenging due to:

Data transformation inconsistency and campaign blunders

When data is exchanged between two applications, it needs to undergo transformation to become normalized with data fields compatible across both. Since each CRM API has diverse data models, syntax and nuances, inconsistency during data transfer is a big challenge. 

If the data is not correctly normalized or transformed, chances are it might get corrupt or lost, leading to gaps in integration. At the same time, any inconsistency in data transformation and sync might lead to sending incorrect campaigns and triggers to customers, compromising on the experience. 

Delays in campaigns 

While inconsistency in data transformation is one challenge, a related concern comes in the form of delays or limited real-time sync capabilities. 

If the data sync between the CRM and the marketing automation tool is not happening in real time (across all CRMs being used), chances are that communication with end customers is being delayed, which can lead to loss of interest and lower engagement. 

Customer data privacy and security concerns

Any CRM is the beacon of sensitive customer data, often governed by GDPR and other compliances. However, integration and data transfer is always vulnerable to security threats like man in the middle attacks, DDoS, etc. which can lead to compromised privacy. This can lead to monetary and reputational risks. 

Scalability 

With the increasing number of CRM applications, scalability of integration becomes a huge challenge. Building new CRM integrations can be very time and resource consuming — building one integration from scratch can take up to 3 months or more — which either means compromising on the available CRM integrations or choking of engineering bandwidth. 

Moreover, as integrated CRM systems increase, the requirements for API calls and data exchange also grow exponentially, leading to delays in data sync and real time updates with increased data load. Invariably, scalability becomes a challenge.  

Integration management

Managing and maintaining integrations is a big challenge in itself. When end customers are using integrations, there are likely to be issues that require immediate action. 

At the same time, maintaining detailed logs, tracking API calls, API syncs manually can be very tedious. However, any lag in this can crumble the entire integration system. 

Vendor management

Finally, when integrating with different CRM APIs, managing the CRM vendors is a big challenge. Understanding API updates, managing different endpoints, ensuring zero downtime, error handling and coordinating with individual response teams is highly operational and time consuming. 

How Unified CRM API ensures maximum integration ROI

Don’t let the CRM API integration challenges prevent you from leveraging the multiple benefits mentioned above. A unified CRM API like the one offered by Knit, can help you access the benefits without breaking sweat over the challenges. 

If you want to know the technical details of how a unified API works, this will help

Integrate in minutes with multiple CRM APIs

A unified CRM API facilitates integration with marketing automation tools within minutes, not months, which is usually what it takes to build integrations. 

At the same time, it enables connecting with various CRM applications in one go. When it comes to Knit, marketing automation tools have to simply embed Knit’s UI component in their frontend to get access to Knit’s full catalog of CRM applications.

Consistent data transfer guaranteed with normalized data models

A unified CRM API can address all data transformation and normalization challenges easily. For instance, with Knit, different data models, nuances and schemas across CRM applications are mapped into a single and unified data model, facilitating data normalization in real time. 

At the same time, Knit allows users to map custom data fields to access non-standard data. 

Real time campaigns and data exchange

The right unified CRM API can help you sync data in real time, without any external polling requests. 

Take Knit for example, its webhooks and events driven architecture periodically polls data from all CRM applications, normalizing them and making them ready for use by the marketing automation tool. The latter doesn’t have to worry about the engineering intensive tasks of polling data, managing API calls, rate limits, data normalization, etc. 

Furthermore, this ensures that as soon as details about a customer are updated on the CRM, the associated campaigns or triggers are automatically set in motion for marketing success. 

Never miss a data update

There can be multiple CRM updates within a few minutes and as data load increases, a unified CRM API ensures guaranteed data sync in real time. As with Knit, its in-built retry mechanisms facilitate resilience and ensure that the marketing automation tools don’t miss out on any CRM updates, even at scale, as each lead is important. 

Moreover, as a user, you can set up sync frequency as per your convenience.

Scale as you go

With a unified CRM API, you only need to integrate once. As mentioned above, once you embed the UI component, every time you need to use a new CRM application or a new CRM API is added to Knit’s catalog, you can access it automatically with sync capabilities, without spending any engineering capabilities from your team. 

This ensures that you can scale in the most resource-lite and efficient manner, without diverting engineering productivity from your core product. From a data sync perspective as well, a unified CRM API ensures guaranteed scalability, irrespective of the data load. 

Security at scale

One of the biggest concerns of security and vulnerability to cyberattacks can be easily addressed with a unified CRM API across multiple facts. Let’s take the security provisions of Knit for example. 

• First, Knit ensures double encryption, i.e. it encrypts data at rest as well as when in transit for exchange. It also encrypts data with an additional layer of application security.
• Second, Knit is the only unified API that doesn’t store any copy of the data and acts as a pure passthrough proxy. Data is only processed in Knit’s server and is directly sent to the customer’s webhooks. Protection of end-user data like this helps you easily gain customer confidence during sales conversations.
• Third, Knit has wide ranging authorization capabilities, including, OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication. Irrespective of what authorization protocol the vendor has, it can integrate with Knit.

Catch potential errors early on

Finally, integration management to ensure that all your CRM APIs are healthy is well taken care of by a unified CRM API. 

• A unified CRM API like Knit provides access to a detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page for all integrations to monitor and track them along with possible RCA and solutions. This empowers your CX team to solve customer issues immediately without involving the tech team.
• Furthermore, it enables you to track every API call, data sync, etc. as well as the status of webhooks registered for real time visibility in errors — ensuring that you are always on top of your data and minimizes the chances of any errors.  

Constant monitoring and on demand customer support

Finally, when you are using a unified API, you don’t have to deal with multiple vendors, endpoints, etc. Rather, the heavy lifting is done by the unified CRM API provider. 

For instance, with Knit, you can access 24/7 support to securely manage your integrations. It also provides detailed documentation, links and easy to understand product walkthroughs for your developers and end users to ensure a smooth integration process.

Get started with unified CRM API

If you are looking to integrate multiple CRM APIs with your product, get your Knit API keys and see unified API in action. (Getting started with Knit is completely free)

You can also talk to one of our experts to see how you can customize Knit to solve your specific integration challenges.

Interview scheduling companies play an integral role in helping their partner organizations hire the right talent by streamlining the candidate communication and end-to-end interview process. 

The first step towards smooth interviews is getting a pool of candidates to choose from. Here, most companies rely on ATS or Application Tracking Systems to pull in candidate and job data. 

While building and maintaining all the ATS integrations is a tedious and resource-intensive process, it can be made simpler and faster with unified ATS APIs. We will get to that, first let’s look at all the use cases you can enable with ATS integrations.

ATS integration in interview scheduling workflow

Let’s quickly look at how ATS APIs can streamline the interview scheduling workflow. 

Step I: Integration setup

Essentially, the first step is to get the ATS integration in place leveraging popular ATS APIs. As an interview scheduling company, you can choose the appropriate approach to ATS integration via in-house integration building, embedded iPaaS, unified API or workflow automation tools. 

Read: Build vs Buy: Best way to build product integrations

Step II: Data synchronization

Once the integration setup is complete, data synchronization regarding the job requisition, interview schedule, candidate information can be commenced. 

This will ensure that whenever data from a new candidate is entered in the ATS, the interview scheduling company gets an automated alert to initiate the next steps to set up the interview and following processes. 

The right ATS integration approach will ensure that the interview scheduling company receives new candidate alerts automatically, without pushing for updates. 

Step III: Calendar and interview slot coordination

ATS APIs can help interview scheduling companies with real-time calendar and interview slot coordination. Once the applicant profile screening is complete and the profile has been shortlisted in the ATS, the interview scheduling company can automatically capture this update directly from the ATS app and identify potential slots for the interview based on the calendar availability for the candidate and the interviewer. 

Step IV: Candidate communication 

Once the interview slot has been decided, the interview scheduling company can extract ATS API data to automate interview invitations and reminders and even personalize candidate communication as per the role, position and context. 

The same information about the communication will be automatically updated in the ATS to ensure that the hiring organization using the API has a clear picture of the candidate status. 

Step V: Real time candidate status update

As soon as the interview is complete, the ATS API enables the interview scheduling company to update candidate status in real time. 

For instance, Knit WRITE APIs enable you to update candidate status about whether or not the candidate appeared for the interview, status in the interview process (selected, rejected, moved to next round, add notes etc.). See docs

This information is then reflected in real time in the ATS to help the HR and hiring managers understand where they stand for that particular position and whether they need to source more applications. 

Step VI: Interview feedback and evaluation

In addition to the status update, the ATS integration also enables the interview scheduling company to provide a detailed feedback and evaluation of the interview which can be captured directly in the ATS. 

In case the hiring organization prefers, they can share it with the candidate or keep it in their ATS records for future reference. 

Step VII: HR analytics 

Finally, the ATS integration can help interview scheduling companies  capture key hiring metrics and facilitate HR analytics. 

For instance, the integration can help capture the metrics including Application-to-Interview Conversion Rate, Interview Scheduling Efficiency, Interview-to-Hire Ratio, Time-to-Fill (TTF), Time-to-Hire (TTH), Offer Acceptance Rate, etc. 

Data from these metrics can help identify the gaps in the hiring process and facilitate better outcomes. 

ATS integration challenges

While scaling ATS integrations is crucial for any interview scheduling companies to close more deals, building and maintaining ATS integrations is not easy. Here’s why most companies struggle with scaling their integration efforts:

1. Data compatibility issues 

First, different ATS applications use different data fields, models and nuances, which may or may not be compatible with other ATS or even with the data models being used by the interview scheduling company. 

This can lead to data compatibility issues leading to larger bandwidth requirements to understand and use different ATS APIs, with the danger of data corruption as well. 

2. Candidate data sensitivity during transfer

Second, since both sides of the data transfer contain sensitive candidate information, the ATS integration must have robust security measures for authorization and authentication as well as others like rate limiting etc. to prevent unauthorized access or DDoS attacks, among others. 

With policies like GDPR and most recently the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) law (in India), any data misuse can lead to serious repercussions, especially because ATS and hiring processes use a lot of personal candidate data. 

3. Engineering and maintenance costs with increasing number of ATS being used

Third, as you scale and onboard more customers, you will be bound to further ATS integrations to their preferred ATS application. 

The engineering and maintenance costs associated with adding more ATS applications can be huge and difficult to maintain in-house. Each integration can cost an average 10K USD or 3 months of developer time just to build and deploy.

This can dilute your engineering team’s bandwidth from focusing on the core product. Scalability with the growing number of ATS applications to be added can pose a resource and cost challenge. 

4. Vendor (ATS) coordination and cooperation

In addition to the engineering costs, scaling ATS integrations also comes with additional coordination and cooperation with the ATS vendors. 

When you are building and managing ATS integrations in-house you have to take care of coordinating with every ATS vendor in case of any error or challenge in data transfer, security, etc. This can be highly time consuming and counter productive. 

5. Limited real time update capabilities

Next, if you use a polling infrastructure to power your ATS integration, you will need to take care of the heavy lifting of polling data from ATS applications, dealing with different API calls and rate limits. 

Invariably, this will prevent you from accessing data in real time as soon as there is any update in candidate information or a new candidate is onboarded to the system. This can lead to delays in interview scheduling and missed opportunities. 

How  interview scheduling companies can 10X their growth with unified ATS API

While there are certain operational challenges to using ATS integrations, unified APIs like Knit, can help address all such challenges and even achieve 10X growth. 

Centralized data management with one data model 

Knit periodically pulls data from all connected ATS platforms and processes the data coming from different platforms in different formats to convert them to one unified data model. 

The heavy lifting of pulling data from various ATS apps, dealing with different API calls, rate limits, formats etc are completely taken care of by Knit. 

Real-time data sync for higher productivity

Depending on the infrastructure used, your data sync frequencies can be set. A webhook driven architecture will facilitate real time data sync without requiring you to initiate polling. 

For instance, Knit, having a 100% event-driven webhook architecture, refreshes data in real time by periodically pulling data from all connected ATS platforms and processes the data coming from different platforms in different formats to convert them to our unified model. As a result, you won’t have to manage any polling infrastructure on your end or worry about missing any critical data update.

Faster time to market with quick deployment

Adding an ATS integration can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. But, with a unified API, you can add multiple ATS integrations in as little as one day. 

This quick deployment ensures that you are able to leverage the benefits of ATS integration faster. 

Easy scalability to integrate with multiple ATS APIs in one go

Not only is deployment faster with unified API, it also supports accelerated and unlimited scalability. You can connect with various ATS applications in one go. 

For example, as an interview scheduling company, you can simply embed the Knit’s UI component in your frontend to get access to the  full catalog of 20+ ATS applications, regardless of the auth type, credentials, nuances for the application. 

All credential management, verification, token generations become the responsibility of Knit in this case.

Not only that, each time a new app is integrated to the Knit’s ATS API category, you get immediate access and sync capabilities with the new app without writing a single line of code. Get your Knit unified ATS API key now! (Start for free)

Better reporting and analytics to manage integrations seamlessly

Reporting and analytics with a unified API like Knit can help facilitate high customer satisfaction. 

For instance, Knit allows interview scheduling companies to monitor and manage the health of all ATS  integrations for each connected customer using a detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page. 

Companies can keep track of all API calls, data syncs and requests made by users as well as status of each webhook registered on a single dashboard. 

Enhanced security 

A unified API helps interview scheduling companies facilitate better security and data privacy. 

For instance, Knit fosters double encryption for data—when it is at rest as well as when it is in transit.

At the same time, most unified APIs comply with the key security protocols such as HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR etc and ensure constant monitoring with top intrusion detection systems. A unified API generally supports all forms of authentication like OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication. 

Note: As a unified API, Knit goes a step further to promote end user security. Knit is the only unified API which considers your data sacrosanct and doesn’t store a copy of your data. The syncs happen over a 100% webhook-based architecture for enhanced data security. Furthermore, an additional layer of application security protects and prevents all PII from any security vulnerabilities. Learn more

Expand market reach and serve more customers

By providing instant ATS integration with multiple ATS applications, interview scheduling companies can leverage unified APIs to expand their market reach and acquire new customers.

They no longer have to worry about missed opportunities or make their prospects wait till they are able to build new ATS integrations. 

This allows interview scheduling companies to close deals faster and serve a higher number of customers, leading to increased revenue and greater profitability. 

What else do you get with Knit Unified API?

Interview scheduling companies using Knit as their unified API for ATS integration automatically retrieve new applications from all connected ATS platforms. 

Knit pulls the data and sends the relevant data to the interview scheduling tool, reducing the need for making API calls or manually starting data syncs. Owing to the webhooks architecture, Knit ensures high scalability and delivery, irrespective of the data load. 

You control when data syncs happen

While Knit supports real time data sync, it also allows users to control when syncs happen, which can be set by the CX team directly from the dashboard, without involving engineering resources. 

Furthermore, filters can be set on the information being retrieved from the source system to only consume the relevant data to save network cost and storage cost.

Get started with ATS APIs

Staying on top of ATS integrations can be overwhelming and time consuming due to the sheer number of the ATS APIs available in the market today. 

Knit helps you integrate with 30+ ATS and HR applications with a single unified API. Plus, we have built Knit with a developer friendly setup which requires minimal coding and maximum onboarding support. 

If you want to know more about Knit, talk to one of our experts or try our unified ATS API yourself, today. (Getting started is completely free)