The Greenhouse Onboarding API lets you easily filter and pull employee information, including custom fields and documents, into the system of your choice:
- Retrieve employee data (field values including department, location, email, etc., documents, e-signature requests)
- Update employee field values
- Do basic employee filtering with most employee fields, i.e. only pull employees with a start date within the last two weeks
- Create a pending hire
- Retrieve assorted "foundational" data (Departments, Fields, etc.)
GraphQL
Greenhouse Onboarding’s API is a read/write GraphQL API. GraphQL allows us to cater to many different API clients, each of which may request different types of data stored in Greenhouse Onboarding.
For example, one API client may request certain employee fields (e.g., name, email, and home address) for employees with a start date within the next two weeks. Another API client may request e-signature documents for employees in the New York office who started three months ago. GraphQL allows us to service these requests simply and efficiently.
Recommended data flow
Since Greenhouse Onboarding is not a system of record, the main purpose for using the API is to get employee information collected in Greenhouse Onboarding into your system of record.
When a candidate is marked as hired in Greenhouse Recruiting, Greenhouse Recruiting will send Greenhouse Onboarding a pending hire. When an admin converts a pending hire to a new hire, the new hire will receive an email invitation to enter the Greenhouse Onboarding Welcome Experience, where the new hire can fill in fields and sign e-signature documents.
Your system of record will most likely require that a minimum set of information be present for an account to be created. Using the filters available in GraphQL you can control what information must be present in Greenhouse Onboarding before the initial push from Greenhouse Onboarding to the system of record.
After the initial push, the new hire and other key stakeholders should continue to fill out fields and complete any e-signature requests. You can control how often Greenhouse Onboarding should be polled for updates, and how often those updates should be sent to the system of record.
At some point after the new hire’s start date, you should stop polling Greenhouse Onboarding for updates, and the maintenance of the employee’s record should transfer completely to the system of record. We recommend that you stop polling for updates two weeks after the start date.