As the team at OneRange, a marketplace for learning and development for medium and large organizations, looked to move upmarket, they knew they needed to modernize their approach to integrating with HRIS solutions.

“Asking companies to go into their HRIS, export their roster, and upload it to a secure portal every time a new employee is hired or there’s a change in managers is a poor experience”, explains Houtan Fanisalek, the CTO and co-founder of OneRange.

He goes on,“this manual process can also lead to human errors that hurt core features and functionality in our platform. Inaccurate hierarchy reporting, for instance, can lead to employees  not receiving the appropriate set of learning resources or experiencing delays in accessing them.”

Given the drawbacks of file-based integrations, Houtan and his team looked for a solution that supported API-based integrations across the HRIS providers that their bigger customers and prospects used.

“Merge checked off all the boxes. They not only integrate with all of the HRIS solutions we would need, but they would also help fast-track our path to forming business partnerships with key HRIS providers,” says the veteran startup CTO.

After spending a few weeks building to Merge’s Unified API, OneRange was able to launch 50+ integrations, including Workday, Justworks, BambooHR, and Gusto.

Here’s how their HRIS integrations work:

1. From the homepage, a user would navigate to onboarding. They’d then select “Add Your Employees”, click on “Connect your HRIS System”, and, finally, click on “Set up your integration.”

2.  Merge Link, a UI component that guides OneRange’s user through setting up an integration, pops up. 

Within Merge Link, the user can select the HRIS solution they use and complete the authentication flow by following the steps provided.

3. Once the authentication flow is successful, employee data is initially synced to the customer’s instance of OneRange. This includes all of their employees’ first and last names, job titles, departments, divisions, work locations, managers, and more.

All of this employee data is also re-synced every 24 hours, ensuring that the data is consistently up to date.

Based on the employee fields that are synced, OneRange can display the appropriate set of learning resources for a given employee. 

For example, if an employee is a mid-level UX designer, they’d have access to learning resources that cater to their specific level of knowledge and interests in OneRange.

Moreover, using the organizational hierarchy data that’s synced (e.g., an employee’s manager), OneRange can automatically assign the appropriate approvers for employees.

Finally, a customer’s HR leadership (and leaders at large) can analyze how employees are consuming the learning resources in OneRange. 

They can even filter by departments, regions, job levels, and more to uncover key trends and action items for specific segments of employees.

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One of Houtan’s favorite features from Merge has been Field Mapping, as it allows their team to add and map additional custom fields beyond what Merge already normalizes.

He explains that “By using Field Mapping, we can provide incredibly flexible HRIS integrations that meet customer’s unique syncing requirements. For example, we can append custom fields, like “worker type” to distinguish between “Intern full-time” and “Intern part-time,” for a given customer and keep that data continually synced with their instance of OneRange.”

From a business impact perspective, Houtan’s investment in Merge has also exceeded their expectations.

“It would take more than 4 full-time engineers to build and maintain 50+ HRIS integrations. Since we can outsource this work to Merge, we’re able to save at least $700k per year.”

In addition, the HRIS integrations have helped their team improve their retention rate by not only adding the integrations their customers need but also helping their customers tie their training courses to employee performance.

“Using the job title fields that are synced, our customers’ leadership teams can connect their employees’ adoption of OneRange with promotions. This helps highlight our platform’s impact on their teams’ professional growth.”

The ease in which customers can draw this correlation has helped OneRange boost customer retention.

According to Houtan:

So, what’s next in OneRange’s integration journey with Merge?

”We’re working with Merge to expand our partnerships and integration offerings with key HRIS providers, like Rippling and Paylocity,” explains Houtan.

We look forward to helping Houtan and his team secure these strategic partnerships so that they can offer integrations with these vendors.