A former employee you rehire should get a new employment contract on the person who is already in the HR system, with their existing personnel number and history. A good integration between ATS and HR therefore first checks whether the candidate is already known, by BSN (Dutch citizen service number) or by date of birth with name, and only creates a new person if there is no match.
The handover from ATS to HR goes well in most cases. It goes wrong with the exceptions: someone who worked here before, an internal candidate, an offer withdrawn after the candidate was already set to Hired. This article goes through those cases, so you can agree on them with HR and recruitment in advance.
What goes wrong without agreements
An ATS sees every applicant as a new candidate. It does not know that the same person was employed three years ago. If the integration passes that candidate on without a check, the HR system gets a second person with a new personnel number and no history. The history stays with the old record, separate from the new employee.
The reverse also happens. An offer is withdrawn after the candidate was set to Hired. The integration has already started the hire, and a half-created employee whom nobody expects any more remains in the HR system.
Recognising a former employee
The integration first searches the HR system by BSN, or by date of birth with name. On a match, it does not create a second person. It creates a new employment contract on the existing person, or prepares the change for HR. Per system, it works like this:
- AFAS: onboarding uses the existing employee, so history and personnel number are kept.
- Visma Raet YouForce: YouForce checks whether the candidate already has a personnel number. The hiring workflow also exists for rehires and contract changes.
- Personio: KoppelHet looks up existing employees before anything is created.
How your organisation recognises a former employee, we agree with HR in advance. Not every ATS stores a BSN, and then date of birth with name is the key.
An internal candidate
A colleague who applies for another job is already in the HR system. The integration does not create a new person for them. The internal move goes to HR as a notification, and HR adjusts the contract. That way the job change stays with HR. How a job change then carries through to accounts and access is covered under job change and transfer.
Teamtailor has a variant of its own. There, a hire belongs to an application. If someone applies for two vacancies and is hired for one, they enter the HR system once, with the data of the right vacancy.
An offer that is withdrawn
The rule is simple: the integration does not delete anything itself. What does happen depends on the HR system.
- AFAS: the employee is still in the AFAS workflow. HR rejects it.
- Dayforce and SAP SuccessFactors: an employee cannot be rolled back there. The integration notifies HR, which ends the employment or adjusts the start date.
Dayforce also offers the option of only validating a new employee first. The integration always does that validation first. If a location or job is missing, HR gets a notification and no half-created employee appears.
Other edge cases from practice
- Volunteers. Care organisations also recruit volunteers in Recruitee. The integration recognises those vacancies and does not put those hires into SDB as employees.
- Duplicate events. Deel does not link a new contract back to an application. KoppelHet keeps track itself of which contract belongs to which candidate, so a second event does not produce a second contract.
- A missing position. A hire in Workday requires a position. If the vacancy has none, the integration stops with a notification and does not fill anything in by guesswork.
How KoppelHet builds this
KoppelHet builds each integration per organisation on its own platform. We go through these cases with HR in advance: how we recognise a former employee, what happens with a withdrawn offer and how an internal move comes in. Completion stays with HR. The integration reports what it is not sure about.
Examples of combinations where this applies are Recruitee to AFAS, Recruitee to YouForce, Recruitee to Dayforce, Recruitee to SAP SuccessFactors, Recruitee to SDB and OTYS to AFAS. More about the systems themselves is under AFAS, YouForce and Teamtailor.
Read more about rehires and withdrawn offers, about the regular handover of a hired candidate, or see the whole integration from recruitment to HR.