Onboarding is Broken

For many ATS platforms, the hiring experience ends with an offer letter. But for their customers, that’s just the midpoint. Once a candidate is hired, the next critical step is onboarding, which is almost always owned and orchestrated inside the company’s HRIS.

Traditionally, HR teams had to manually copy new-hire data from the ATS to the HRIS—a slow, error-prone task that can mean hand-keying thousands of employee records per year in large enterprises. It’s tedious, high-stakes work, that modern buyers no longer tolerate.

Today, customers expect their ATS and HRIS to sync automatically. If the data hand-off feels clunky, onboarding stalls, and buyers turn to an all-in-one HCM suite, trading depth for convenience.

HRIS integration is no longer a bonus for point-solution ATS vendors.

It’s the cost of staying competitive.‍

"Our Customers simply expect seamless, bidirectional data flow from ATS to HRIS. Delivering on that expectation helped us close more deals and drive retention."

- Dave Edwards, Head of Integrations, Pinpoint

Building In-House Doesn’t Scale

It’s tempting to build HRIS integrations internally, especially for your first few customers. But most teams quickly realize it’s far from a simple API project, and a poor use of their engineering resources.

Each HRIS has its own quirks: inconsistent docs, unique auth flows, limited sandbox access, and unpredictable field logic.

On average, teams spend 120 engineering hours per HRIS integration, not counting ongoing maintenance. That’s time pulled from your core product, and a hidden cost that scales quickly as your customer base grows.

Why Leading ATS Teams rely on Kombo

Fast-growing ATS platforms like Gem, Pinpoint, and Recruitee use Kombo to streamline onboarding and eliminate the complexity of building HRIS integrations in-house.

With Kombo’s Create Employee endpoint, your team can support 80+ HRIS out of the box, even those with highly customized fields and edge-case requirements. That means no custom code, no painful schema mapping, and no waiting weeks for sandbox access.

Most unified APIs offer only basic connectivity. They provide simple write access, but lack validation, field discovery, and support for HRIS-specific workflows. Kombo was built from the ground up to handle the complexity of real-world HRIS integrations. We focused early on creating a highly tailored, flexible API that works across even the most customized systems.

As a result, Kombo delivers unmatched HRIS integration speed and reliability, cutting an average of 80 engineering hours per integration and saving ATS teams months of work.

What sets Kombo apart

• ‍Broadest HRIS coverage: 80+ systems supported, more than any other unified API
• ‍Dynamic HRIS templates: Instantly fetch the exact fields required by any target HRIS—no guesswork, no outdated docs
• ‍Smart field mapping: Kombo provides a unified key to enable auto-filling HRIS fields
• ‍Built-in validation: We catch issues before submission and ensure every record gets created cleanly, with no HRIS-specific code on your side, ever

"We chose Kombo because they offer the most comprehensive HRIS integration coverage, deepest HRIS-specific functionality, and best value of any unified API provider."

- Dave Edwards, Head of Integrations, Pinpoint

How the Create_Employee endpoint works

1. The process can be manually triggered by the recruiter or run automatically in batches.
2. The ATS fetches the required HRIS field schema via Kombo, along with a unified key used to map ATS data to HRIS fields.
3. Using the unified key, the ATS automatically pre-fills the HRIS fields with candidate data. Optionally, the recruiter can review and complete any required HRIS fields that aren't available in the ATS.
4. Once all required data is filled, the ATS sends it to Kombo, which creates an employee record in the HRIS.