They say that when you marry someone you marry their entire family. And in business sometimes the same principle applies, when you pick a vendor you might also be committing yourself to a fistful of companies that they’ve chosen for you.
This won’t come as a surprise to most thorough decision-makers (or married couples). You probably asked your vendors about their partnerships and researched how they stack up compared to what the whole market has to offer. However, that’s not nearly enough.
Nobody can predict what technology will be capable of in the future. The only thing that we know for sure is that there will be new technological developments that we didn’t foresee.
In other words, adequate planning needs to account not just for the things that you will probably want in the future, but also the things you can’t possibly know you’ll want. Yes, you read that right. Your plans need to account not just for what you know, they need to account for what you can’t know.
As the time frame grows, so does the number of unknowables that could derail your plans. The hardest part of coming up with a good long-term strategy is accounting for these chaotic variables that are currently just blank spaces or ambitious guesses.
Preparing for the Unknowable
How do you account for what you can’t possibly know? It’s surprisingly simple. Your choices today should limit your ability to act in the future as little as possible. And there lies the pitfall of relying too much on vendor partnerships: it limits your ability to adopt new technologies as they come and to change direction quickly.
Moreover, talent acquisition is unlike any other area: A blip in your ability to acquire talent is a blip that affects every department. Failure to recruit top talent is an existential threat. Therefore, compromising on your ability to incorporate new technology into your talent acquisition stack is very risky.
Instead of simply looking for a vendor with many partnerships, you need to find providers with a proven track record of integrating and adapting to whatever clients have thrown their way.
Our next-generation integration module, Avature Junction, is designed to meet the needs of any client, today and in the future.
We have more than a 1,000 integrations in production—used globally by customers of all sizes and across many industries— that fully satisfy our customers’ business needs while meeting the specific requirements of the third-party vendors they choose to work with.
Notice where the emphasis is on. Third-party vendors they choose to work with. We didn’t tell our customers who to work with, or give them a limited menu they should choose from. Instead, they decided what solutions were appropriate for them and built their own ecosystem, rather than getting a prefab generic combination that was not designed to meet their unique needs.
Technology Designed to Adapt to the Unexpected
Our Custom Integrations Platform is highly flexible and supports a broad range of data formats (e.g. XML, JSON, CSV), all major data transfer protocols (e.g. SOAP, REST, FTP) and authentication protocols (e.g. OAuth, TLS, PGP). For example: if you have two vendors, one that prefers a SOAP protocol and another that prefers a REST protocol, Avature can configure each integration using their preferred protocol.
That all sounds very technical, but the key insight is that we built our platform with modularity and flexibility in mind. We designed all of our solutions to empower our clients to be agile.
We also believe in delivering flexibility without compromising in other areas. Interoperability often comes at the expense of ease of adoption and use, but again we didn’t design our integration framework around a single use case.
Often what our clients want are relatively simple integrations, so we also built endpoints so that third-party vendors can pull and put information into your Avature platform without having any knowledge of Avature. And we give our customers the tools they need to control who can see what and when.
And, of course, some just want simple integrations with popular third-party services. So we also offer an off-the-shelf catalog, that we can enable and disable at your will, featuring integrations to all major job boards, ATS, HRIS, background check and assessment vendors, among many other point-solutions, to choose from.
Sometimes you just want to turn an integration on, sometimes you just need to provide an endpoint to your third-party vendors, sometimes you need a complex custom integration built for a very specific use case. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes. Nobody knows everything that you will need, what we do know is that we’ve built a platform that is always going to be able to deliver it, whatever that ends up being.
