Shallow Unified APIs vs Deep Native Integrations
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Ayan Barua, CEO of Ampersand, on going upmarket with deep native product integrations
You may not have to go deep; you just want to run analytics on top of your ATS and connect it to your payroll.
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This use case shows why unified APIs took off first in HR, because many software teams do not need every edge case in Workday or every custom payroll workflow, they just need a clean pipe between hiring data and employee data. That is enough to build recruiting funnel dashboards, headcount reports, and simple product features without spending months mapping each customer’s custom schema.
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In practice, a startup might pull candidate, interview, and hiring data from an ATS, match it with payroll or HRIS records, then show a manager where applicants drop off, how long hiring takes, or whether new hires stay. That is an analytics problem first, not a deep systems integration problem.
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That is where Merge and Finch fit. Their value is giving product teams a common set of fields and logs so they can integrate once and support many HR systems. The tradeoff is that the model starts with the most common fields, then gets harder as customers ask for custom objects, custom workflows, or extra fields.
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The deeper split in the market is analytical workload versus transactional workload. ETL and reverse ETL tools move data into warehouses and back for reporting. Unified HR APIs sit closer to the product team and power lightweight app features. Native integration infrastructure is built for heavy read, write, and real time sync inside customer facing products.
Going forward, the market is likely to separate more cleanly into shallow but fast cross system access, and deep but narrower native infrastructure. Unified HR APIs should keep winning the first layer of product analytics and simple workflow automation, then add more enterprise depth as larger customers push beyond the common model.