ATS integrations and test workflows when the systems do not talk to each other
A new Eagle Hill Consulting survey, covered by HR Dive, shows HR professionals still juggling multiple systems and manual workarounds despite AI and automation. The article uses the findings as a starting point to walk through three levels of ATS integration for assessments in hiring and the questions worth asking before buying.
The news
HR departments have bought plenty of new technology in recent years, yet the work itself has not become easier. That is the conclusion of a survey by Eagle Hill Consulting, covered by HR Dive on 30 September 2026. The survey, conducted by Ipsos among 200 US HR professionals, describes a paradox. 86 percent say AI and automation have helped them deliver better results, and 91 percent say it has become easier to access information. At the same time, 51 percent spend at least half of their working week on repetitive administrative tasks.
The figures that matter most to anyone running tests in a hiring process are the ones about systems. 91 percent of respondents need two or more systems to complete a single HR task, and 43 percent need three or more. More than three quarters regularly enter the same data into several systems. 37 percent report recurring integration problems, and 68 percent fall back on spreadsheets, shared drives and similar workarounds. Melissa Jezior, chief executive of Eagle Hill, says in a statement that the challenge is rarely a lack of technology but the way work is designed. New tools are layered onto processes that were never built to work together.
The survey is about HR work in general and does not mention recruitment or assessments. The pattern, however, will be familiar to most people who have tried to fit a test into a hiring process.
Why the test workflow is a textbook case
An assessment in recruitment rarely lives in one system. The candidate applies in an ATS, receives an invitation from the assessment platform, completes the test in a third place, and the result has to travel back to the hiring manager, who is usually working in the ATS again. Every hop between systems is a point where data has to be copied, where a status can get lost, and where a candidate can drop out of the process without anyone noticing.
Where the integration is missing or half finished, exactly the workarounds described in the survey appear. The recruiter exports a list from the ATS, uploads it to the assessment platform, downloads a report and attaches it to the candidate record by hand. That works with ten candidates. It does not work with five hundred.
Three levels of integration
It helps to distinguish three levels. The first level is a link. The candidate receives a URL to the test, and the result comes back as a PDF by email. That is not an integration but a manual process with a nicer name.
The second level is a status-based integration. When the candidate is moved to a particular stage in the ATS, the invitation goes out automatically, and when the test is completed, the status in the ATS updates. This removes most of the duplicate work, but the result itself still lives only in the assessment platform.
The third level is a data integration, where scores, norm group and any recommendations are written back into the ATS as structured fields. This makes it possible to filter, report and document decisions in one place. It is also where the requirements around data security and deletion become most concrete, because test data now exists in two systems.
Questions worth asking before you buy
- Which ATS platforms have a ready-made integration, and what exactly does it cover? Trigger, status, result or all three?
- Who owns the integration when something breaks? The assessment vendor, the ATS vendor or the customer?
- How is deletion handled? When a candidate is deleted in the ATS, is the test data deleted too, or does that have to be done by hand?
- What happens to candidates who never complete the test? Does the recruiter get notified, or do they disappear into a queue?
- Can the integration be tried out in a test environment before it goes live?
Design before technology
The survey's central point applies to any organisation considering automating its assessment flow. Jezior notes that the organisations getting the most out of their technology investments are the ones redesigning the work itself. Translated to hiring, that means deciding first where in the process the test belongs, who should see the result, and what the result will be used for. Only then does it make sense to discuss which integration should carry it.
An integration that automates an unclear process simply delivers the lack of clarity faster.
Kilde: https://www.hrdive.com/news/technology-isnt-yet-solving-hrs-workflow-problems/831749/