Career Control takes control of their marketing information

Career Control is a Dutch recruitment agency and talent matchmaker. They primarily work with Finance professionals, and try to keep an active profile of interesting candidates, to facilitate their matchmaking services. To do this, they always have various concurrent online marketing campaigns live to meet and qualify new people. The online marketing automation application they use for this is called SharpSpring.

To keep track of all companies and people they interact with, Career Control uses Bullhorn Connexys, based on Salesforce. As you may have read in several blogs, we are Salesforce fans and have many different clients who we integrate with a Salesforce product for. Bullhorn Connexys was a new string on our bow, and a very interesting one due to the opportunities and challenges associated with their API.

The challenge

SharpSpring holds extremely relevant data for Career Control. However, they want to use Connexys as their main platform. But these systems don’t talk to each other. For Career Control, this was a problem. Doing data transfers manually was costing them a lot of valuable time. It wasn't just the direct transfer of the data either - data needed to be manipulated to find its way into Connexys and provide a single overview of a customer or candidate.

For example, SharpSpring would calculate an ‘engagement score’ for any (prospective) customer or candidate, to reflect how (much) they interact with the online content and campaigns that Career Control offers. Transferring this score to Connexys was not straightforward, yet a vital piece of information that Career Control wanted their staff to see and use.

Who can help?

One would expect many possible solution providers to jump at this challenge. But unfortunately this didn't happen. When Career Control made some calls, they were told an integration between SharpSpring and Bullhorn Connexys was not possible.

Of course, Career Control did not accept this for an answer and they kept looking. Eventually they found us, and it turned out we could help them.

Why was this difficult?

Bullhorn Connexys is built on the Salesforce ecosystem. It comes as a configurable ‘box’, and most of the time an external vendor or specialist is needed to configure and manage Connexys.

Connexys is unique in several aspects, for example exporting vacancies to common job boards such as Indeed and Monsterboard, or tools like Channable, was not possible in the normal way. More commonly, the application allows scraping vacancy information and transferring it to the job boards. Connexys does not allow this either.

There are more examples like this one, where it is needed to approach certain restrictions creatively, underpinned by agnostic technology that can deal with such an approach. There are ways to achieve outcomes like this one, via the authenticated API.

(minor Nerd Alert)

Harmonizer works around this by reading the Connexys API to obtain all the published vacancies and subsequently transforms this to a XML file that is then hosted on a publicly available URL (using Azure Blob Storage). This way the valuable vacancy information is made publicly available for platforms like Channable, Indeed and Monsterboard

The particular challenge

For the integration between SharpSpring and Connexys, several complex data transformations were required. Who is a candidate? And who is a customer in SharpSpring? How is this logically placed in Connexys? How do we link SharpSpring’s email address identifier to Connexys’ unique ID method of identifying individuals and companies? You get the gist.

These are just a few examples of questions and complexities which probably lead to the initial advice from third parties that an integration was not possible. We managed to tackle these translation challenges and others within the space of two weeks. Due to the modular nature of Harmonizer, we were able to swiftly build all the required complex transformations and logic, and provide a true tailor made, yet at the same time automated solution.

Conclusion

Career Control is another example of a medium-sized entity that does a lot of heavy lifting with limited resources. This was the trigger for them to think about working smarter without spending more money or time - arguably spending less of both, with Harmonizer.

It is critical to them to be able to make SharpSpring work for them as much as possible in a fully automated fashion. Having all the information available in Bullhorn Connexys allows them to create more matches between candidates and customers in a shorter space of time. Matching converts to money, and things come full circle (and more).

This means automating these processes is a true strategic project for them. As they have told us in their testimonial:

Various of our core systems didn't talk to each other in the past, and that was a real issue for us at Career Control. We were looking for a flexible tool to fix this issue, and found a perfect match in Harmonizer! We were pleasantly surprised by how fast the integration was up and running. Having the integration in place has enabled us to uncover important actionable insights, and allows me to use our budgets much more effectively.

We would highly recommend Harmonizer to others, specifically because of its flexibility and the team's direct, proactive style of communication. The collaboration was excellent.

We are currently discussing a third integration with Career Control, and see many opportunities for further collaboration after these initial ones. In turn, Career Control sees us as the right partner to assist them on this road to strategic automation of their business.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash