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Strategic Solutions for Seamless Integration of Third-Party SaaS

kishore_avvaru

Microsoft

Jul 25, 2025

Enabling Robust, Scalable, and Future-Ready Talent Acquisition

Introduction

Modern systems must be modular and interoperable by design. Integration is no longer a feature, it’s a requirement. Developers are expected to build architectures that connect easily with third-party platforms, but too often, core systems are designed in isolation. This disconnect creates friction for downstream teams and slows delivery.

At Microsoft, SaaS platforms like SAP SuccessFactors and Eightfold support Talent Acquisition by handling functions such as requisition tracking, application workflows, and interview coordination. These tools help reduce costs and free up engineering focus for high-priority areas like Azure and AI. The real challenge is integrating them with internal systems such as Demand Planning, Offer Management, and Employee Central.

This blog post outlines a strategy centered around two foundational components: an Integration and Orchestration Layer, and a Messaging Platform. Together, these enable real-time communication, consistent data models, and scalable integration.

While Talent Acquisition is the use case here, the architectural patterns apply broadly across domains. Whether you're embedding AI pipelines, managing edge deployments, or building platform services, thoughtful integration needs to be built into the foundation, not bolted on later.

Opportunities with third-party integration

Data Format Incompatibility
Internal systems must interpret data from multiple
third-party sources, each with its own schema and terminology.

Data Validation & Duplication
Ensuring clean, non-redundant data across systems is critical for accuracy and compliance

Version Control & Auditing
Schema changes in third-party systems can disrupt downstream processes unless backward compatibility
is maintained.

Real-Time Distribution
Internal systems require timely updates from third-party platforms to maintain operational efficiency.

API Limitations & Performance Bottlenecks
Third-party APIs often have usage caps and latency issues that can affect system performance.

Security & Availability
Ensuring secure and highly available data exchange across platforms is essential for business continuity.

Strategic Solutions:

Integration Platform

This platform serves as a robust integration layer, orchestrating timely and secure updates from internal enterprise systems to a variety of external SaaS solutions, ensuring data is updated instantaneously to meet operational demands. By ensuring reliable, secure, and timely data exchange, it enables our business to operate seamlessly and adapt quickly to changes. The platform’s architecture supports efficient adaptation to system updates and provides transitions—for example, maintaining uninterrupted integration during transition to new ATS in future. This approach optimizes business processes, maximizes the utility of both in-house and third-party systems, and upholds the high standards necessary for modern enterprise operations.

Abstraction Layer
A key element of the platform is its abstraction layer, which encapsulates the technical diversity of third-party APIs by presenting a standardized interface built on a Common Data Model (CDM). Internal systems interact exclusively with this model, simplifying integration and minimizing the impact of third-party SaaS schema changes

Example: When SuccessFactors changes the schema of its offer entity, the Abstraction layer ensures that MS systems continue to communicate using the familiar CDM format, shielding them from underlying schema changes.

Orchestration Engine
The orchestration engine governs the sequence and dependency management of data exchanges, ensuring process accuracy and operational reliability.

Example: In SuccessFactors, the Offer object is composed of two standard objects and three distinct custom objects. As a result, a single call from any tenant—such as MS Recruit (MSR), the offer management system—will be orchestrated by the platform into 5 separate API calls to update all necessary components within SuccessFactors.

Cache API (Recruiting API)
By strategically utilizing Azure Cosmos for the storage of pre-fetched and high-frequency data, the architecture ensures rapid data accessibility and robust operational continuity—even in the event of disruptions to third-party services. This proactive approach safeguards mission-critical processes, enabling sustained business performance and resilience against third-party service interruptions.

Example: SuccessFactors/ICIMS will be temporarily unavailable at regular intervals due to its scheduled maintenance, internal tools like MSR Offer can still function by retrieving essential data from the cache.

Performance Optimization
To ensure optimal system performance and ensure the reliability of third-party services, the platform implements parallelism, enabling processes to run concurrently and thereby reducing execution time and increasing system efficiency.

Example: To enhance system performance and minimize latency, the platform orchestrates the 5 requisite API calls in parallel, utilizing robust asynchronous processing capabilities. This strategy not only optimizes the efficiency of sub-object updates but also sustains low response times and a seamless user experience, even amidst high-volume activity.

Security & Availability
Utilizes Azure services like Key Vault, Service Bus, and Front Door to guarantee secure, resilient, and high-availability integration.

Example: Azure Front Door provides high availability and load balancing to maintain system performance and security and Service Bus ensures reliable message delivery even during high traffic periods.

API Call Management
Tracks usage against limits (e.g., 28M calls for iCIMS which is third-party SaaS ATS provider) and optimizes call patterns to avoid overages.

Example: Leveraging Azure monitoring capabilities, the platform raises proactive alerts when API consumption approaches defined thresholds. This real-time visibility empowers teams to take timely, preventive action before limits are exceeded, safeguarding system performance and cost management. Moreover, the solution offers granular insights by identifying which specific processes are driving the highest number of API calls. This level of detail enables targeted optimization and informed decision-making, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and operational risks are minimized.

Messaging Platform

The messaging platform serves as a critical integration layer, enabling real-time, asynchronous acquisition of essential data from external sources and its reliable distribution across internal systems through multiple delivery channels such as – Azure Service Bus, Webhook, Azure Data Lake. By facilitating near real-time data transfer, the platform accelerates agile business processes and enables teams to respond efficiently to changing information. For example, Success Factors enable immediate onboarding initiation in Employee Central, streamlining business workflows. Critically, the timely availability of this data ensures that downstream systems can maintain business continuity, even in the face of upstream disruptions or outages.

Real-Time Synchronization
A core technical component of the platform is the implementation of timer-based input connectors by leveraging Azure function. These connectors are configured to poll upstream systems—such as Success Factors and Eight-Fold—at defined intervals (e.g., every minute), ensuring continuous synchronization between source and destination environments. By decoupling data ingestion from event delivery, the connectors facilitate consistent data capture, even during third-party service interruptions or scheduled maintenance windows. Real-time synchronization ensures that downstream systems are immediately updated with the latest information from Success Factors, thereby enabling rapid and responsive business operations.

Example: when recruiter marked as initiate onboarding in Success Factors, the Employee Central system receives this update in real time, triggering onboarding processes without delay. This eliminates lag in business workflows and supports agile operational decisions

Common Data Model (CDM)
All inbound and outbound data undergoes transformation into a standardized Common Data Model (CDM) format prior to distribution. This ensures data consistency, reduces schema mismatch errors, and enhances interoperability between disparate systems

Example: Employee IDs are mapped across systems—External ID in iCIMS, Personnel Number in SF—to a unified Employee ID used internally.

Robust Data Distribution
The platform employs three primary data distribution channels; each designed to maximize reliability and ensure that critical information reaches all necessary systems efficiently:

Service Bus: Acts as the backbone for automated workflow initiation across enterprise applications.
Example: When an offer update occurs in the Success Factors Recruiting Module, an event will be published to the service bus, which subsequently updates the data in Onboarding.
Webhooks: Provide instant push notifications to subscribed endpoints, enabling real-time transactional updates.
Example: Upon a candidate’s acceptance of an offer, a webhook promptly issues an automated notification to generate a CRM incident, ensuring HR services can immediately commence background verification processes.
Azure Data Lake: Archives all events for subsequent analysis, audit, and generation of actionable insights on hiring trends and operational efficiency.
Example: Every ATS event is logged to Azure Data Lake, where analytics teams can generate comprehensive reports on hiring trends and operational performance.

By integrating these distinct channels, the platform guarantees the seamless, secure, and timely flow of business-critical data throughout the organization, supporting both day-to-day operations and strategic analysis.

Data Validation & Cleansing
The platform validates incoming data, removes data duplicates, and supervises changes made by various systems to maintain integrity and support regulatory compliance

Example: If duplicate candidate profiles are detected, the system automatically cleans and reconciles the data

Version Control & Auditing
Tracks all data changes and maintains backward compatibility to prevent disruptions.

Example: If SF retires a field like “Graduation Flag,” the platform ensures downstream systems continue to function without errors.

Message Replay Capability:
Consumers can replay messages within a 21-day window, enabling recovery from missed updates or processing failures without data loss. Coupled with the caching strategy enabled by Azure Cosmos DB, this feature ensures that business-critical operations remain robust in the face of system outages or synchronization issues.

Example: This capability ensures that critical business processes remain robust, even in the event of system outages or data synchronization issues

Outcomes

By implementing these strategic platforms, Microsoft has:

Reduced integration complexity and time-to-market for third-party integrations.
Consistently validated, high-quality, and real-time data across all Talent Acquisition systems.
Enhanced system resilience, performance, and security throughout the integration architecture.
Enabled scalable and future-proof architecture for Talent Acquisition.

This solution was developed and deployed by the RPI engineering team (rpengteam@microsoft.com)

Updated Jul 23, 2025

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