iCIMS Hacks: API Integrations, MCP & Workflow Automation (6/12/26)

Integration specialist John Barth breaks down REST API vs. flat file vs. data stream, MCP capabilities, delayed email triggers, DocuSign in onboarding, and multi-vendor change management. Plus: UKG Gen 3 limitations, CXM email campaigns, and a hiring automation workflow question answered live.

https://systemadmininsights.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Great, welcome everybody to System Admin Insights. We are very excited to welcome John Barth to our call today. John was an implementation manager and integration specialist at ISIMS, and then he founded a company dedicated to helping orgs with their workflows via API called Harmonize HR, and we've known John for a while now, and we love speaking with him and working with him, and what we did is we wanted to have John address some of the integrations questions that we see popping up in Sai on a regular basis, but before we get started with that. Let's start with a little bit of gratitude. So, please drop something in chat today that you are grateful for. I am grateful for Greg Mendez, because Greg and I are collaborating on something that we're very excited to share. Greg, can I talk about a little bit?

Speaker 2  0:59  
Go for it.

Speaker 1  1:00  
Okay, so we're going to do a hackathon, a an HR TA specific hackathon, and this is going to be in September. september 12 is the day we're looking at. We'll have more details for you, but we're in the planning phase right now. And this came out of.. I went to a hackathon last month, and it was so cool, and I was thinking, boy, there should be one that is specific to our industry, so we are in the planning phases right now. We will keep you informed, but you know, if you're doing any AI coding and you're in the area, you want to come to the area, it's be a great thing for you to attend, either as an observer or a participant. I know some of community members are actively engaged in that. Also, it's, you know, we're imagining getting folks together who have different types of expertise, so you know, even if you haven't done a deep dive on AI coding, the folks who are highly skilled at that would really benefit from the practical business use cases that your experience would bring to the table, so we're very excited to let you know more about that. It's just a teaser, so stay tuned. And with that, to return to the subject at hand, what we did is we used speaking of AI, so we used Claude's MCP capability, and you know it's so hard to keep track of all the things that are going on with AI. This is one that I've known about for a while, but haven't turned on, because you know we've, we've been doing other stuff. But basically, MCP is a way to connect software. It's sort of more like just a USB-C cable, right? It's just all sort of plugged in together, and so it allows one software to read and write to other systems with context and natural language, so for example, I went to our cloud and I said, 'Hey, take a look at what people are talking about in Sai, and let me know what some good questions would be to ask John on this call today, and that's exactly what it did, it read through all of the posts. Let me drop it here in chat. It's a little long, so I have to truncate that and then put that back in. This is what it came up with as stuff that community members have been talking about, and I didn't have to go into SAI to get it right. This is just from using Claude and telling Claude to go do a thing right. In addition to getting that information, it can also write back information. So I also said, you know, it looks like the event post for SAI today is a little thin. Can you flesh it out with more information about what we're going to talk about that it wrote back to SAI? Now, obviously, something is this is something that you want to do very carefully, and so we're testing it to make sure, but it is always human in the loop. It always asks for permission to tell you exactly what it's going to do before it does it, but you know our minds have really been spinning with the possibilities here, because it really takes away so much context switching, right? It looks at the broader picture with much more depth than any of us could do alone. So, speaking of APIs, John, the first thing that it surfaced was talking about the different types of integration methods, so we've heard data stream, REST API, flat file, different API licensing terminology, and it can, it can get a little confusing. How do you frame this for customers, and what's the best way to think about these different techniques?

Speaker 3  4:24  
Yeah, this is a, I think, a great one to start. And first thing I'll say, as well, is if questions pop up along the way, by all means, please. I guess Alex, throw them in the chat, or just throw them in, throw them in chat, and I'll

Speaker 1  4:36  
surface them. Yep,

Speaker 3  4:37  
super. So you know, I know this one comes up from from time to time. I think it's more common to see a conversation about whether it's going to be using the rest api versus a flat file. I know the data stream is used less frequently, it's the newest capability in terms of the the items api, but. I'll just give a few things that I think are relevant and helpful in terms of, like, determining, okay, which, what should we be, what should we be using, and you know, what are the benefits, kind of pros and cons of each, and you know, starting with the data stream, I think this one is most important if you're really needing real-time syncing with a third-party system, like the common example I would be, I would, I would use would be integrating ISIMs with Tableau, Power BI, something to that effect, and you want or need those two systems to be as close to in sync as possible, right? So you know, if you're looking in Power BI, or maybe your, your folks, other folks internally are looking at Power BI, there's never going to be a - we might have like an hour delay on this, or 10 minutes, or whatever the case may be. So you can get more of that kind of real time at the field level, and that's really a critical piece, would be at the field level, like as an example, you know, needing to be able to sync when a job folder switches from open to closed filled, as in the old having that basically be in real time, and if you think about being over nice, and you see, oh, that job is closed filled, you jump over to your reporting tool and see that it's still open, it just kind of closing up, closing up some of those gaps, the rest API, I think this would be the more, more common approach that you would see. It's going to be, you still have some of the flexibility for the real-time capabilities, like alerts. I'm sure the folks here are pretty familiar, if with, like, a recruiting workflow status change, and sending out an alert from from ISIMS, and being able to come in and retrieve data and send it to another system. The most common scenario there would probably be, you know, you need someone that wants to be hired, like they've finished maybe onboarding in ISIMS, and you want to send them over to your HRS, doing that, doing that in real time for the rest API. Sometimes you can run into like maybe a field isn't available via the rest API that you would have available with a flat file, like you can add columns, right? I'm confident everybody here is very familiar with that, right? Being able to go through and basically select any field you want and being able to being able to output that into into the output of a search, you don't always have that same robustness within the rest api to get some of those more buried variables or fields within the system, kind of a trick there, and I would only use this in like limited scenarios, but you could set up a formula field to populate one of those fields that's not available traditionally by the REST API, and actually call into the formula field. So, formula fields are available via the API, and then flat file. Oh, sorry, good

Speaker 1  7:57  
question. Before we move to flat file, Vivian mentioned the data streams not actually being sold at this point, and Nina mentioned that they implement it in Q 2025 Do you know what the status is there?

Speaker 3  8:09  
I don't, you know, it could be the fact that it's.. I will tell you, for our business, we don't actually use it for any of our customers. The data stream essentially almost. I would guess 99% of the business is the rest API. You get a flat file like Edge Case here or there, but for the most part it's all REST API. It's a

Speaker 4  8:32  
resource hog, and it's very limited in the number of fields that it can access. It's not as open as REST, so I think that's one of the reasons it wasn't selling well, and they decided not to continue to support it.

Speaker 1  8:44  
Got it, got it. Great. So, you were going to move on to a flat file, John.

Speaker 3  8:49  
Yeah, flat file. The main reason for me on this one would be to be able to pull in all those fields that aren't necessarily available via the rest API. So, you know, one that I think about that comes up, like first in status, like a first in particular status, something to that effect. You don't get the don't have access to those, and I don't think I would even suggest, and trust me, I'm all about pushing the system and going and going as deep as possible for solutions, but I would even push back of like replicating all those first in status fields using formula fields. It's probably just not the best use case, and I, I suspect items might push back on that a little bit too. So, in that, that example for me, it would be the reason for the flat file would be to have those fields available to the, that you may not have access to via the rest API, for the flat file, you can only schedule those to be as frequent as hourly, so of course you might lose out on some of that real-time flexibility that you get, or capabilities that you get with the with the rest API. Got it?

Speaker 1  9:59  
Doesn't. Have questions about different types of APIs that are available on iSomes.

Speaker 2  10:06  
Quick question about for real time for the API. Know in practice, you know a lot of times we can, we can do things as almost real time, but when you're implementing with your with a client, have you had a situation where it wasn't necessary the number of calls that was a limiting factor, it was just more of the practical performance of the platform, like you could do it in near real time, but the platform just wasn't going to behave, and it was just going to take a more of a performance hit,

Speaker 3  10:43  
that's such an interesting question, and I wish the answer to that was like as simple as two plus two equals four, you know, like, like there's some bright line that when you cross over this that you're going to see some issues, I will tell you from a philosophical perspective, and I can tell you that this has served us well in the past, is you know, just because you could do something doesn't necessarily mean you should, and kind of translating here is just because you could hammer something and have it be absolutely real time, you should be thinking about what are your business requirements, and for us, we don't all the time run into something that, like, has to be real time, you know. We have customers who, where we have ATS and HRS integration, right, that they want to be in real time, because you actually want that user feedback, right? So, if someone were to trigger the HRS integration with a workflow status change, and you know, whether or not it was successful going over to, like, ADP or Workday, whatever the case may be. So, for me, it's you take a look at what are what are the business requirements. If it truly is real time, then that's something that you need to account for, and then even with that, do you have a, an approach or a method to be able to maybe limit the impact that you have on the API and the performance of a system, not to go down kind of rabbit holes, but you know you can have some creative solutions of like finding the profiles in real time, but maybe writing the IDs to a queue, which is very, should be very simple, right? You say just give me the ID and I'm going to write it over here, and then that queue is something that maybe works slower or has some rate limiting and things like that, that can help help ensure you don't run into those issues of like maybe performance or you know errors and those types of things, so does that, is that kind of get get at what you're asking?

Speaker 2  12:47  
Yeah, yeah, it does. Thank you.

Speaker 3  12:49  
Yeah,

Speaker 1  12:51  
great. So, John, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, and I'll demo this for everybody real quick. So, we have an attendance log for SAI. Sometimes we forget to do it, it's buried in Notion somewhere. So, here is our Claude, and I said, find the attendance log and update it with a record that 612 26 is 22 attendees, and it went into Notion, found the log, and did it right instead of us switching context, going to Notion, try to find again. So, John, I know you and I have talked a little bit about MCP, as what are the possibilities for practically speaking for enterprise customers? There,

Speaker 3  13:27  
yeah, that's a really good question. And this is something that we have been spending a decent amount of time in as well. So, I'll kind of selfishly speak to kind of what we're focusing on, but if you imagine that you have an integration set up between two systems, right, let's just say items to to work day, you could utilize, assuming that the system offered this an MCP, and you could ask the MCP, or like using Claude as an example, hey, what fields are included in the higher sync from ISIMS over to Workday? Right, like, your course, you can know, hey, first name, last name, so on, so forth. Like, hey, is X field, you know, included in the integration, and it can give you back that, that information, as opposed to, and I'm sure everybody's felt this pain before. Hey, let me go find that mapping work, the integration mapping work workbook that we set up during implementation, or maybe I inherited from a predecessor and I have no idea if it's updated. Getting that information in real time can be extraordinarily powerful. We've been working on and experiencing experimenting with being able to update integrations via the MCP as well, like say, for example, or to further further this example, and I'll use kind of a silly example, but maybe you wanted a field on the person profile T-shirt size, right? Hey. Send the T-shirt size for this person over into Workday. You could utilize a systems MCP and say, 'Hey, add the T-shirt size field from items off the person profile in the feed that goes over to Workday. You would need to indicate, like, 'Hey, this is the field that it goes to in Workday and whatnot, but that's a conversation that you can have with a tool in terms of doing that type of either investigation and or what I consider a configuration change to to an integration or or an automation as well,

Speaker 1  15:35  
and I think I didn't do full justice to the USB metaphor, right, so instead of every app building a custom integration, MCP gives them the common language to plug in, so one standard port works with anything built for it. Correct me if I'm wrong, you don't need a specialized MPA MCP API endpoint, right?

Speaker 3  15:58  
Correct, I mean the MCP we're where you get the kind of customization, would be like, what tools do you make available to the MCP, like, for us, right? That's an example, like, "Hey, tell me what fields are included as part of this integration, or what we refer to as a, as a flow, right? So, you, as your, as a platform owner, would have to be determining, like, what information do you want to make fail, what functionality and information do you want to make available, and then the MCP is actually, or Claude is using the MCP to look at that and determine, determine what's available, and like, what information they can, they can get

Speaker 1  16:39  
to. Got it. Thank you. All right, so the second question was lifecycle and edge cases. How do you disable integration removing off of a vendor?

Speaker 3  16:49  
Yeah, I think that in terms of kind of moving off, moving off a vendor. So, first things first, you want to have an understanding of what's currently in place, and that probably sounds pretty simple, but I've certainly been in part of projects where you're kind of pulling the plug on one, and it's almost a, like, well, we just have so many issues with this, and it's kind of been set to set to set to the side. I do think making sure that before you're kind of sunsetting anything, you have a really, really strong understanding of, you know, what is what does the integration do, what fields are included, how is it triggered, you know, how often does it run, whatever the case may be, and the benefit of that actually is, you know, nine times out of 10 you're going to be going and using that integration with another system, or whatever the case may be, and being able to kind of use that as your guide to the implementation of your new system, so doing that work kind of upfront, even when you don't, that you know you're going to be disabling integration, or whatever the case may be, so that's kind of the quick one, I think, I think for that particular topic,

Speaker 1  18:00  
got it, not actually referring back to the MCP conversation. She said, what tools would they need to have to use an MCP? For example, would an example would be that items UKG 3.0 integration can't send sign on bonus information, so trying to find another way to push that into UKG. John, do you have experience using MCP to get systems to talk like that.

Speaker 3  18:23  
Okay, so, so let's be there's an important distinction to be made. You have ISIMS and you have UKG, right? So we're talking about sign on bonus. So the most one of the most important things would be that the the method of sending data between the systems is still going to be their rest APIs, so if you told me, "Hey, UKG does not have a sign-on bonus field or fields related to sign-on bonus, then an MCP is not going to be able to somehow bridge that gap for you. The MCP should know, "Hey, that field's not available, and be able to talk that through with you, but it's you're still going to be using the API endpoints that exist, so it's almost like a context layer and a like a layer of expertise on top of the integration, and then that the tools within the MCP would be what would allow you to update those integrations, so I want to be clear that it's, it's not necessary, the MCP is not the like new way of transferring the data, it's kind of your way, your kind of very smart colleague that knows what's possible via the API of these systems, and then potentially being able to do it for you.

Speaker 4  19:48  
So, if sign on bonus isn't exposed to the API, what you're saying is that the MCP isn't going to be able to do a workaround to grab sign on bonus and send it to UKG, in her example,

Speaker 1  19:59  
correct? Right, there was some conversation sai about AI and Microsoft. One member was exploring whether items can integrate with the full version of Microsoft Copilot as part of a company-wide rollout, and there was an interest in Microsoft Teams integration use cases related to that. You see anything like that?

Speaker 3  20:22  
Yeah, this one's interesting. We tend to do a little bit more with Slack, I think. Maybe that's just because we use Slack a bit more, but it's the same concept, right? Slack or Microsoft Teams, whatever your internal messaging tool tool is. I find this particularly interesting because my belief is that you should go meet people where they work, and most oftentimes people are working within the Microsoft Teams and Slack more than they're actually working within a tool like iSomes, especially when you get to like a hiring manager or something to that effect, so you know what I think is most beneficial, and you could see some of this with the existing items and teams integration, were like related to approvals, but you could even start to kind of ask questions around. Actually, let me go simpler example, right? Would be like maybe you, when something happens within the system, like an offer is accepted, like send a notification into a channel or send it to a specific person, like you can see that the recruiter on the job, so go ahead and send something over into to Microsoft Teams or Slack. I think that my limiting factor on this is like, what, what, how much creativity do you have, like, what problems do you want to solve, and so you know, again, you're going to bump up into, you know, what's available with the ISIMS API, but I think this is from my vantage point one of the most impactful things that, like, what we can do from a TA system integration perspective is like meeting people where they work and making it, making it easy for them. So, I don't have necessarily like this is exactly the specific use case. I'd love to tease that out or kind of talk through it, but you know, there is a lot that you can get to that you can do in terms of sending information over to teams, and then even having that person, when they get the message, make some sort of response to be able to send data back into the into the source system, like, like ISIMS.

Speaker 1  22:28  
Got it? One of our members asked a couple weeks ago about scheduling notifications coming out of ISIMS via API, so that they're not just blasted out when such and such conditions are met. Is that possible, or emails, I should say, emails, not notification specific, but emails,

Speaker 3  22:49  
emails, and this is like at the time of something being scheduled, or was it,

Speaker 1  22:57  
you know, I don't remember the, the specific ask, do yeah, I will, yeah, but does anybody remember that use case? It was scheduling emails to go out at a cadence, right? So that whatever, and I'm not sure if this was a onboarding thing, it may have,

Speaker 3  23:27  
yeah, I'll speak to like what we, what we've done, and maybe this will kind of tease it out, or maybe kind of get people to start to kind of think through some different scenarios, you know, something that we see with with customers that we have would be like as people are going through onboarding, like sending them text message reminders, presumably they're not going through and completing onboarding, right? So, as an example, you know someone has not completed onboarding for more than 48 hours, send them a text message. Now, this is all done by the API. There is no trigger in this example, right? Like, there's not a someone getting, like, like having their onboarding or recruiting workflow statuses changes, changing. This is just simply that the person has not actually completed onboarding yet, or maybe moved into onboard in progress. And in that scenario, yes, you could using the API's send them a nudge or a push from a from a text message perspective. For us, typically what we rely on still for the email notifications would be dropping them into a recruiting workflow status, which then ties into an event notification that sends that email out, but the text message one I like a lot, and the customers that we work with that tend to have much higher volume, they like it as well, because it's an automated way just to kind of keep nudging people along versus maybe relying upon like dash. Board reports and things like that to kind of track where people are at in the process.

Speaker 1  25:05  
Got it all right. What about e-signature and onboarding? So Docusign has a standard integration in the offer module, but a member wanted a custom API built to use Docusign inside an onboarding workflow and was looking for somebody who'd done that. Have you seen that?

Speaker 3  25:20  
Yeah, we've, we've dabbled in this a little bit from a Docusign perspective. They have a very robust API, so it kind of depends on what the specific use case is, but being able to integrate with Offer APIs and the Docusign APIs, and I can't say this 100% certainty, but I suspect you know items, as you know, utilizing the same, those same endpoints and those same same APIs, and so, so, yes, I mean, I think it gets into like, like allowing someone to sign, like on behalf of someone else, and those types of things, like, which I don't think those use cases are captured within the kind of standard, standard integration that exists. So, again, this would be another one where it's like, okay, what are the, what are the requirements, like, what, what is it about the standard integration which doesn't meet the need, and then how, you know, is it possible to solve that through, through integration? Maybe another good use case for the claws of the world would be asking them, asking Claude or ChatGPT, ChatGPT around, like, what the capabilities are, and reviewing the API documentations. Documentation, I will asterix that with, they do make mistakes, trust me, they make mistakes and make assumptions, and whatnot. So definitely do not take that with 100% that it's rock solid information, but it can definitely get you closer to the answers and give you some so good information to go off, go off of, and provide you a good starting point, versus like, okay, I gotta go through all these, all this documentation, and hope that it's current or makes makes sense.

Speaker 1  27:02  
Gary from Cheesecake Factory mentioned that we do have that Docusign integration in place today for onboarding. Great, Claude did find it. So, the question was, is there a way to delay an email by a day or two? The use case was reminder emails for candidates who haven't completed background checks or assigned offer letters. The problem is hiring automation triggers are status based, so the email fires immediately when the status changes.

Speaker 3  27:25  
Yeah, so the answer, the question is yes, that's absolutely possible. I mean, it's the example I was providing, which is, you know, you could use the rest api to find that, you know, somebody has an offer that's been outstanding for more than, you know, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever the case may be. This, this would require some, like another system, or whatever the case may be, but it is possible to be able to do that. So, I don't know if you think that fills the gap, Alex. I feel like I kind of explained it,

Speaker 1  28:01  
I do

Speaker 3  28:02  
prior, but

Speaker 1  28:03  
yeah. Thank you. So, there's been a number of questions about HRS payroll handoffs. The biggest one is probably around UKG, and so one of our members hit rehire problems with a person profile carried old dates in UKG, told them they had to manually update items to move someone forward with no clean workaround, very specific.

Speaker 3  28:28  
Is this the like, was it the version 3.0 Like, it's the updated, so there were two UKG

Speaker 1  28:35  
things. What the other one that came up was around 3.0 and one of our members was just looking to connect with other members who have experience with it, because it's pretty new, and there's some gotchas there that are coming up for people,

Speaker 3  28:47  
yeah, yeah, I mean, for that one in particular, I would expect that those fields should be updating based off of what is the current or the rehire scenario, right? So somebody was hired in 2024 they're coming back in 2026 having the that updated data get passed over. I mean, for the UK integrations that we have, or for customers, yeah, passing that information. We haven't run into that challenge before. I don't know if it's pulling old data in terms of this particular use case, or if they're, you know, it's a mapping issue as well. I wish I had, like, this is exactly how to handle in this specific scenario, but

Speaker 1  29:30  
I'm not sure if that was yours. I know you brought up UKG a couple of times.

Speaker 5  29:36  
I don't think that one was mine. We, that integration is pretty smooth for us. I mean, other than adding some additional fields, that, that may have been.. I don't know, that that wasn't me.

Speaker 1  29:50  
Okay, got it. Anybody else on UKG with UKG isom specific questions, I. I'll open it up to other systems, day force work day one,

Speaker 6  30:08  
UKG and ISIMS. We had learned the hard way about data coming back from UKG into ISIMS for like original hire date, where it was rewriting that data for internal hires and internal transfers and internal promotions, where it's original, it's supposed to be their original hire date, the first time they're hired in the organization, but when we were sending people through the onboarding, it would overwrite that date somehow, and so we able, we just wrote in language that if something was there, not to overwrite it, but it seemed like a really unusual concern, like why that, why that would happen. Do you have any insight into,

Speaker 3  30:58  
and I assume it's the employee sync back over to items, right. That's the point. Yeah, yeah. I don't know for that one specifically. I would think that, like, I don't know if it's the, for that, for that population only, like the internal, I think you said internals or transfers, promotions, those types of things, and was it popping in the, with the, like, the transfer promotion date rather than the original?

Speaker 6  31:28  
Yeah, we're just overriding data, and it might have just been mapped wrong from the original implementation, right? But yeah, it was just kind of one of those unique things we never figured out what, what we're on, what we're having.

Speaker 3  31:41  
Yeah, it got fixed, but you don't know exactly how or why. Yeah, those are always like good, but you worry about them at the same time, like

Speaker 6  31:51  
right.

Speaker 3  31:51  
Yeah, yep,

Speaker 1  31:55  
great. All right, so we usually spend the first half of the call on a special presentation when we have one that we move to general questions, but I want us to open the floor and see if there are any other questions regarding integrations that you'd like to ask. John,

Speaker 2  32:10  
I do have one question, which is interesting. John, I don't know how much experience you've worked with when you were at ISIMS or just with others. When you have a situation where you have a third party sub processor that's kind of doing the lift, so let's take a kind of a prime connector to connect one application to another, and so you're kind of depending on another vendor to kind of set all the permissions, so I've been running into some challenges for interview scheduling module, and to ISIM's credit, it's really not them, it's really the third party they're working with, and the issue has been the vendor, the third party vendor is asking for a lot of extra permissions that norm that kind of scares our IT, and when we had a meeting with them, you know, they said they were, they're working on it, there weren't, they weren't quite sure either why this vendor was asking for some permissions, and I was wondering, you know, you know, outside of items, I'm seeing this kind of trend where third party vendors are sometimes asking for a lot more access, and when you start looking into it, it scares the heck out of a lot of it security teams, as they should.

Speaker 3  33:22  
Yeah, yeah. So, why did people ask for that? Yeah, why? Yeah,

Speaker 2  33:27  
I mean, a good example is like, and how to get around it, because a good example, if you just want to, I just want to look at someone's, you know, add a Zoom link to a calendar, it's pretty straightforward. We do this all the time, right? But then the vendor might say, but I need access to your recordings and the content. You're like, wait, what? Why do you need access recordings of your.. I just need a link.

Speaker 3  33:51  
Yeah, I mean, I think so. First things first, you should be adamant, persistent, and require them to give you good reasons why, right? Like, at some level, there has to be.. oh, this is why we need that type of, type of access, right? I'll tell you, in my experience, if someone is developing an integration or editing an integration, they want broad access, because then you don't run into like permissioning issues, or it's easier for testing, essentially, is what it is, right? Because I could tell you, even from my own experience, like, you know, you might be working on something, and then, like, they could be working on something, and they can't figure out what's wrong, and they're spending a few days on it, and then they surface it up to maybe you or ISIMS, whoever, and then you go, "Oh yeah, that feels just hidden, here you go, and then it's sold, all right? So they're they're trying to avoid some of that, some of that pain would be my, would be my assumption, right, and. There's some, there's some truth to that as well, like if you were, if you were in a complete sandbox, like no real data or anything like that, I would encourage, I say, yeah, just open it up, let them figure everything out with all those permissions, but at the same time, before you move into a, a real environment, you're going to want to limit the permissions down to what they actually need, and the reason for that is you could have a successful integration with all of the access, but then it doesn't work with limited, then you kind of have to work through that, but you definitely, again, I would only provide that kind of very broad access in the in the situation where again complete sandbox, no personal data, and then set the expectation, like, hey, we're not going to give you this level of access in the production environment or an environment with real data. Yeah, that's my kind of two cents on that. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2  35:55  
It does. It does, and it's something we're working through, and I know ISIMS is working through it as well, and it's just part of the journey, I guess.

Speaker 3  36:05  
Yeah, yeah, I would again. At some level, there is an engineer or an engineering team, if they're building or setting something up that is has to be saying, oh yeah, I need that field or that permission for this reason, right? And you, you very well, you very may well get that information. Go, yeah, that actually makes sense. And your IT team or security team may go, okay, yep, that makes sense. Why you actually need that, we are, we're okay with it, right? But yeah, if, if your IT and security team is, I think, rightfully concerned if people aren't voicing or get or communicating like why they need need that level of access

Speaker 1  36:50  
any other questions about integrations.

Speaker 7  36:55  
Hi Greg, this is Eris at UCI. We have the same issue with a vendor and it's for our Outlook integration. All we're asking for is send free or busy information, but the vendors looking for everything, and we have a medical center, we can't send everything to the to the vendor, so same issue. We're trying to work with the vendor directly.

Speaker 3  37:21  
I would also, and maybe you asked this question. I could absolutely see the scenario where, in this, like, a busier free time example, this party, this vendor may have built an integration already, and it pulls in everything.

Speaker 7  37:37  
Yes, so

Speaker 3  37:38  
that's what they want to do. So, another factor, this could be like, well, I don't want to spend my engineering resources on it, so that's.. I don't, as someone who has to manage that, their own engineering resources, I totally get it, but that's not necessarily the the answer that you, you can accept, I guess either.

Speaker 7  37:59  
No, we can't. We basically nix the project to integrate Outlook. Yeah,

Speaker 2  38:05  
it goes back to what you just said earlier, John. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I mean, that's the classic case of that.

Speaker 3  38:12  
Yeah, yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 1  38:14  
Yeah, John, I have a question for you about change management. So, I'm sure everybody's experienced the difficulty of trying to get two vendors to cooperate and collaborate, right? Do you have any tips for getting all the necessary stakeholders at the table at the right time in the right way?

Speaker 3  38:32  
So, what a great question. I assume everybody was nodding along as you were kind of talking about how that that can cause issues, I think. Earlier, Greg, the earlier the earlier the better, right? I think that not taking for granted the why behind something is really important, like if you get on a call, like, people may not have the context, they might not have the understanding, and so making sure that you know you, as probably the person that's trying to manage both sides, is setting those clear expectations and setting those up front and being clear about that. I think it's really important to under, like, try to get to be very upfront about, like, okay, each third party, what do you have a requirement for with the other third party, right? And that's really tough, because each side of the fence, they may be saying, hey, I know that I'm going to have my stuff done in two weeks, and then two weeks goes by, and then you realize, oh, well, actually, we needed something from somebody else, and then then it turns into this like finger pointing and blame game, and then everybody loses in that situation. It's so frustrating to work in those situations. So, absolutely, the expect, like, the why, the context. Getting everybody on the same page, and one of the most challenging parts is really mapping out what are those dependencies that are in place, and maybe I'll give a silly example here, where you know vendor A may be able to say, oh yeah, we're definitely like, we can do this in two weeks, and then vendor B is saying, hey, that sounds great to us, but vendor A then needs a field created or something that that affect by vendor B, and vendor B says, oh yeah, we'll put it in a sprint, and it's going to be three three weeks from now. Right now, you're you're this back and forth, that's really tough, that's tough, it's a challenge. So again, if I could wave a magic wand, that would be something that you know there would be a kind of a secret way to handle that, but yeah, for me it's mapping the dependencies, and then you know trying to figure out to a certain degree, you know what vendors are good to work with too, like the product might be one thing, but you know what does implementation look like? Have they been successful? Can you get references? All of those types of things I think are really, really helpful, and that work up front can save you some of the, some of the headache downstream.

Speaker 1  41:13  
Yeah, we always tell our customers to get to tell the vendor as soon as possible, and even if somebody's saying, 'Oh, you're not going to need anything, like, yes, you will. Yeah, Nina dropped it. I think something everybody can relate to. She had a two vendor challenge with items in UKG related to document manager integration, wasn't scoped properly on either side. We didn't know we'd need UKG resources to do the implementation, which delayed the project until UKG resource was assigned. On the kickoff call, we learned that we don't even have the module in UKG where Document Manager lives, yeah, and I mean, these are simple pieces of information that, if they're missing, can completely derail the project. I mean, I would love to get the necessary people in the Slack channel together and just say, hey, talk right, talk to each other, right? Don't do this async thing where one piece of information can push something back two weeks. I don't know, is anybody on the call had great experience with getting the right people together working under integration at the same time from all three sides, customer vendor A and vendor B?

Speaker 2  42:12  
I, some, it depends. I mean, I've had good experience and really bad experience. I'm having a little both right now. One good experience I'm having with an integration is kind of, I think we just said everything kind of matching people's expectations, being very clear what's not in scope without scope, but the other piece I like to do is put on the table what happens if a situation like we like Nina just mentioned that we need a resource, and then that's where I kind of like, you know, try to work with them and start the negotiation early with that, and say, what is that going to mean, what is that going to cost? Can we identify that early? So I like to have is in the very first meeting I kick off meeting, I'll have with the vendors is really kind of going to lay around what are what do we need to do this, and then set a cadence meeting with them, because you know, and it doesn't, and I would just tell them, like, if you can't make it, that's great. If you could just send a delegate or your backup, I don't tell them going to record it. Sometimes I record it. I find that if you record it, some people just don't show up. So I kind of use that as a tool. I do put it in companion, because that AI companion, or whatever your favorite tool is, along with notes, kind of puts people on notice, but not just next steps, or just realizing it's in writing somewhere that you said you were going to do this, so that helps a lot. And then just kind of like give everyone homework, like I get homework, you get homework, and then we could check in with, we can email each other if there's some issues or questions about clarification about that homework, but we at home, we have a homework assignment that's due by weekly or weekly, so when we come back, we're not wasting everyone's time, and then that kind of homework assignment approach seems to help, and it would help me during nice implementations initially, but it helps a lot with integrations, otherwise you kind of like just kind of spin your wheels, and everyone just got saying, oh, I thought you had that, you thought we're gonna do this, and then six weeks later you're still in the same place.

Speaker 3  44:07  
There's one other thing. Sorry, Alex, to jump in here too. I like to think about what can I control and what can't I control, because I know if I'm in control of something, then I can deprioritize other things and focus on something and I can, I'm in control of my own destiny. Destiny, where you might not be in control is like what those vendors are doing, right? So it's setting those expectations and trying to get ahead of that and give more time than you think you're going to need is critical. I think I learned that kind of this at ISIMS, where it was typically the like data migrations or integrations, like there were some things just outside of my control. So we're going to prioritize that, make sure everybody gets on the same page, and then we can kind of go back to, okay, what feels you want in your job profile, like I can, I can knock that out quickly and prioritize it, whereas those other resources are just harder to get. It get on the phone sometimes.

Speaker 1  45:04  
John, have you worked with UKG Gen three much yet?

Speaker 3  45:07  
No, because we don't. I mean, if we're working on integration, it's like actually our own integration that we're building. It would not be like working with a customer who has that as much as it would be like, oh, you need an integration between ISO and UKG, okay, yeah, run that through our, through our platform, so that's the, that's kind of a distinction there,

Speaker 1  45:25  
got it, John. Thank you so much for joining us today. If folks want to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that?

Speaker 3  45:31  
Email would be the best, yeah, John at Harmonize hr.com we'll just drop it in the chat there.

Speaker 1  45:38  
All right, and feel free to stick around, we're now going to pivot to questions that have been submitted in Sai. Start with Cordell. Cordell, you said you're looking for people to connect with regarding Connect or CXM. What's going on?

Speaker 8  45:54  
Yeah, and maybe your team can help me out. We have lost our TA marketing person who does our email campaigns, and we are in need of sending out a campaign to about 300,000 people, and they said, "Hey, Cordell, guess what? And so I'm trying to see if anybody else has had experience with either Connect or CXM, we have both of those products. I'm checking with items to see which one we're actually using or can send emails out from, but I'm just seeking anybody who may have had experience with large campaign email campaigns. I don't need an answer right this second, but if, if there are people out there who can DM me or respond back, that'd be helpful. Otherwise, I don't know, Alex, if I should try and schedule 15 minutes with the team and ask you guys about it, or that's certainly..

Speaker 1  47:00  
I do see a couple people on the call who have CXM, so if you'd like to talk to Cordell, and Cordell will reach out to you as well. Great. What's the timeline on it, by the way?

Speaker 8  47:11  
We're looking at two weeks, maybe the end of june, 28 of June, perhaps. I don't know if it's a hard deadline, but we still have a couple weeks.

Speaker 1  47:24  
Got it all right. Let's see, Vivian, you had a question about UKG Gen Three. Do you want to talk about that?

Speaker 4  47:34  
I honestly don't remember what my question was. That was

Speaker 1  47:37  
working on a UKG Gen Three integration with a client. I've been informed the API from UKG is not able to handle job template creation or maintenance via the integration.

Speaker 4  47:46  
Yeah, so we've actually come up with a workaround for this, but it is, it is not able to handle job templates. So, like most integrations with integrate with an HRIS will create a template per position or job code, there is no option to do that with the Gen Three integration, so what we're going to do, and I, this, I'm going to put a very big caveat on this, I'm still working with the ISIMS integration specialist to make sure this is possible, so not positive this is going to work, but instead of creating a job template, we're going to create a job code record using one of the orgs, there's four orgs available in the integration, or one through four, and the job code record is going to have all the relevant information that would be from the ACM, because I'm talking to another customer who already has the UKG integration and has been live for six months, and the biggest complaint about it is that there's no data governance when you're creating the requisition, so their users are creating the requisition with a bunch of disparate drop down fields, and when the job is hired, those drop down fields don't always match, so look at job code and department, and there's no nothing forcing job code and department to be the right job code and department, because you're not using a template, so if we can get the job code record itself on the org table to have all of the relevant relationships, then that will essentially solve some of this problem. So that's what I have the ISIMS integration specialist working on for us. I want the end user experience to be they pick job code and get the data that they need, and you're already using all org levels, any option that still works. Yeah, update and beef up one of your existing org levels. Are you using your org level for job code?

Speaker 6  49:41  
Oh no, we have like department job code team and division

Speaker 4  49:50  
job code. You said you have department team job code and division job code is what I'm saying.

Speaker 6  49:57  
No

Speaker 4  49:57  
update

Speaker 6  49:58  
job code as a org level.

Speaker 4  50:00  
Oh, you don't have a job code as an org level, and you're using all of them, you'd have to repurpose one, because they're it's limited to four, they won't even give you the option more.

Speaker 6  50:11  
I know

Speaker 4  50:12  
this is one of the most limited, and I don't want to rag back on it, but I'm, I keep running like butting my head against the wall. I've never run against one that's so limited, and it's not. I want to defend items here, because it's not ISIMS, it's UKG that is doing this. Um, UKG's just pretty much said we don't want to integrate with any of this stuff anymore, and I don't know where that's coming from.

Speaker 6  50:36  
Suggestion, this

Speaker 9  50:40  
is Terry with Cheesecake, and we have.. and forgive me, I am not a UKG expert. I try to stay outward as much as possible, but we have a job code integration that creates templates for us, just passing.. and Alex, if you don't mind, not happy to show one what it looks like.

Speaker 4  51:02  
Do you know if it's Gen Three or Gen Two?

Speaker 9  51:05  
That is an excellent question for somebody with a higher pay grade.

Speaker 4  51:10  
Gen Two created templates, they took it away, which is why I'm, I'm like, fingers crossed you found a workaround. But

Speaker 9  51:18  
so here's our job code, and it's passing as an active job template. It leaves the title TBD, doesn't include any job description, but includes all the pertinent information, job class, salary, working categories. It produces all the information into items that we need for a hire, at least from a job perspective, and then let's say, you know, we need, we need to create a job out of this job code 6616 My team will get sent the job description itself, and then get, you know, because then at that point you're giving it a title, you're giving it a description, and you're giving a location and they'll create the requisition for them. I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but we were able to at least create this type, and you'll see that we have, you know, 1300 job templates, for and some of them are named, and some of them are just simply TBD until we have a need for one of those positions,

Speaker 5  52:23  
so this would work if we find out if you have integration two or integration three. If you have integration three and you're able to do this, then that is what I need.

Speaker 9  52:34  
I'm happy to ask someone on the on our HRSS team which integration we have, and you're looking for UKG three.

Speaker 4  52:46  
Yeah, do you have three or two?

Speaker 9  52:48  
I don't have any idea, but I will be, I will be happy to check and get back with you.

Speaker 6  52:55  
How long ago you did the implementation?

Speaker 9  52:59  
We did the implementation in 2020

Speaker 4  53:03  
Oh, you have two. Okay, yeah, yeah. I, it's just crazy that they took functionality away, so and like basic functionality that's in every HRIS integration with every other vendor.

Speaker 1  53:16  
Bizarre.

Speaker 4  53:17  
Yeah, who made that

Speaker 1  53:18  
decision? Let's find that person,

Speaker 4  53:20  
UKG

Speaker 5  53:21  
into KG,

Speaker 4  53:22  
it's definitely UKG.

Speaker 1  53:25  
Well, we got a few more minutes. Any other questions for the group today? Going once.

Speaker 5  53:34  
If no one has any, I have a workflow automation, so I haven't gotten into this. I haven't been using it, but now I have a use case, and just wanted to see if I could run it by y'all and make sure I know what I'm doing when we update someone's status to submit it to hiring manager for two of our job families, we want it to automatically send the resume and like the little recap information, but we want it to be a different template than what the recruiters use when they're submitting a regular candidate, right? So recruiter typically will update the status to submit to hiring manager, you get the pop up, it has the template there, and you might modify a few things, but then you send that. What we want to do now is, if you're in one of those two, if the job is in one of those two job families, we want to, the recruiter will update it to submit it to hiring manager, and it will, if it's one of those two job families, it automatically sends the new template to the hiring manager. Is that a work? Is that a case for workflow automation? I have it built. I can show you what I have built. I just want to make sure, because my team wants to add another status, and I just said no, no, no, that breaks everything everywhere. To add a new status just to have a different template to send, and so I'm hoping workflow automation will do this.

Speaker 2  55:13  
Do you have a yeah, I mean, if you're doing the hiring automation, the search itself should pick it up the moment you change the status, so when you change the status, it's going to look at the search template, search template, that's what's going to use then to send it out. It's going to be immediate. The only thing is, as long as it can be linked and it's provided, it's available as a variable, then it could be included in your, in your email that you want to send out to your recruiters, but if you're looking for an attachment, and someone could correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't seen yet them releasing a functionality for any attachments or for or customer recipients yet, so it has to be someone from the recipient has to be like a recruiter, hiring manager, like someone you can check from the drop down, it can't be like I need to send it to the specific alias or to specific contact.

Speaker 5  56:07  
Okay, it's going to go to the hiring manager, so I think that's simple.

Speaker 2  56:11  
Yeah,

Speaker 5  56:12  
okay. And I have my search saved to say if it's a job and one of these two families that is in an active status, so either evergreen or approved job folder, that's my search, and then it says send this new template to the hiring manager. Is that

Speaker 10  56:30  
that should work? That should work.

Speaker 2  56:33  
Just, just to, just to make sure, what you should do is on your search template, you have to make sure you're referencing the status as well, just to make sure you're not sending too many recipients. So, if you're using any test candidates, so if you're looking for, say, the status is going to status A, and even though you're switching to status, you want to make sure the search you're that you're adding is an optional requirement to the heart, the automation that it also references that people placed in status A, and then you can, you could, you could refine, you know, does that be within a certain period of time or not, that that way they're there, they're gonna be sending to those individuals, and you

Speaker 10  57:13  
know, you can test this in your staging, and if, but if you don't have a staging, yeah, you could easily test is on stage, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2  57:22  
yeah. I actually encourage it.

Speaker 10  57:24  
Looks like it's gonna work. Sorry,

Speaker 2  57:26  
if you had no.. if you have courage in staging, I strongly encourage you to do it, because you know it worked when it worked. They work really well, but if you're not, like, you know, if it.. but you don't want to send like emails to the wrong group, stage is good, get it down, and then reproduce it in in production,

Speaker 5  57:43  
okay. Beautiful, I've got a built-in test. I'm going to show her this afternoon and see if we can get this to work. Thank you for verifying. Thank you.

Speaker 1  57:50  
Question, hey Cortel, we have a couple of ideas for you if you want to hang out after. Are you available?

Speaker 8  57:55  
Yeah, I've got a one on one with my boss. Okay, and I'm free from three to four. We can do something another day.

Speaker 1  58:04  
Great, I'll send you something after the call.

Speaker 8  58:05  
Okay. Thanks,

Speaker 1  58:06  
John. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure, as always. Super informative. John's company is Harmonize HR. If you're looking for support, APIs, integrations, we will be here next week, same time, same place, 1:30pm What's that?

Speaker 7  58:20  
We will not, Alex.

Speaker 1  58:22  
We will not be here next week, because apparently it's a holiday that I've forgotten. Thank you. That's right. So, we'll be here in two weeks, on the 26th 1:30pm Hope everybody has a restful and restorative weekend. Thank you so much.