HR Integrations: Make Your HR Tech Stack Work Seamlessly

Lattice’s 2025 State of People Strategy Report revealed that many HR teams are struggling to secure the resources they need to make a meaningful impact on employee engagement. 

Just 39% of HR teams are actually able to execute their plans for employee engagement. The majority don’t have the resources or leadership buy-in to make progress toward their goals or respond to the needs of their workforce. 

If you’re in that boat and you want to communicate more effectively with the C-suite, you need to be able to speak their language. And that means data. It’s next to impossible to make a compelling case for people initiatives without comprehensive HR data. And it’s next to impossible to access that data without an integrated HR tech stack. 

If your HR tech stack is well-integrated, you can draw clear lines between engagement and productivity, or between learning and performance. And, as a result, it becomes far easier to make your case to business leadership. 

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What are HR integrations?

HR integrations are tools that connect different HR software systems and apps. This means that all your HR platforms work together, and you can move data from one platform to another without having to copy and paste it. 

For instance, if you use integrations to connect your human resource information system (HRIS) with your payroll platform and applicant tracking system (ATS), then all three platforms will be up-to-date and consistent. If a new employee's information is in the ATS, their details can be added to the HRIS and payroll platform automatically upon hiring. This keeps you from having to manually enter the information two more times. 

It's more than just saving time on data entry. HR tech connectors unify each system into a cohesive tech stack, so you gain a complete view of each employee and the workforce as a whole.

Benefits of Integrating HR Systems and Apps

The potential upside of this integrated HR tech stack is huge. HR integration can help your team: 

Get rid of data silos. 

Without HR integrations, employee data — such as employee records, engagement scores, and payroll details — sits in separate, isolated platforms that don’t “talk” to each other. By integrating your HR tools, you’ll be able to view and analyze data from multiple sources in one place. 

Reduce tedious manual tasks. 

HR team members shouldn’t have to spend their time copying data from one platform to another. Using integrations means you can automate this process and also avoid introducing manual errors into the data. 

Align HR efforts with business goals. 

Integrating HR systems with business applications (like finance, sales, or project management tools) gives you a unified view of your workforce data, so you can provide timely insights to leadership and make better decisions about your people programs. 

For example, connecting HR and finance data can help draw a line between workforce costs and profitability, so you can align your plans for training or hiring with the organization’s financial goals.

Improve the employee experience. 

When platforms work well together, it’s easier to create a positive experience for employees. For instance, a 2023 report by O.C. Tanner found that companies where recognition is “highly integrated” were 648% more likely to report a “thriving culture.” 

An important nuance here: Integration in this case means more than simply adding recognition tools into the existing HR tech stack. Integrating recognition (or performance management or talent development) into your culture involves taking proactive steps to make recognition a meaningful part of your team members’ daily experience.

But an integrated tech stack is the foundation that makes this quality of experience possible. If, for instance, managers have to leave their usual platform to offer recognition to their direct reports, they are less likely to remember to do so. On the flip side, if you use an integrated HR solution like Lattice Praise, managers could add public recognition in Slack, via email, or through Lattice, and it would always be captured and shared. 

Challenges With HR Integrations

Integrating your HR tools isn’t always easy. According to a 2024 survey by HR.com, 35% of surveyed HR professionals said their tech stack wasn’t well-integrated. 

Below are some of the challenges we commonly see when it comes to integrating HR tools.

• Data synchronization and accuracy: Because employee data changes so often, keeping it up-to-date and consistent across multiple systems is tough. Integrated tools don’t always update data in real-time — for example, one system might update immediately while another updates hourly or daily. This delay can create temporary mismatches in employee data, given how frequently it can change.

• Security and compliance: Employee data is highly sensitive, and systems need to comply with rigorous (and constantly evolving) privacy regulations. When working to optimize integrations, you’ll need to ensure that employee data is transferred and stored securely. This includes managing secure authentication and permissions for accessing data via application programming interfaces (APIs). 

• Adjusting to evolving technology, especially AI: While our 2025 State of People Strategy Report found that just 15% of HR teams have actually started to implement AI solutions, a growing number of teams are formally considering their introduction. These tools present their own set of challenges, especially when it comes to data security.

• User adoption and training: Because many HR tools are used by the entire workforce, they come with adoption and training hurdles. Employees (and HR teams) may find new, integrated systems have a steep learning curve. Ensuring a smooth transition will require training sessions, adjusted workflows, and regular communication and support. 

HR Integrations: Common Integration Use Cases

Despite these challenges, the upsides of HR integration can be significant — both in terms of making your team more efficient and making your HR programs more effective. Here are a few use cases for HR integrations.

• Automating onboarding and offboarding: HRIS integrations or human capital management (HCM) system integrations can have a major impact on the efficiency of your HR processes. For example, by syncing employee data across HR, payroll, and benefits, you can streamline employee onboarding and offboarding. If you integrated Lattice HRIS with Workday, to take just one use case, when an employee termination was registered in Lattice, your payroll would be automatically updated in real-time to reflect the change. 

• Enabling employee self-service: If you connect a self-service employee portal with your HRIS, employees can manage their personal information, such as contact details, emergency contacts, and bank information, directly within the system. This is easier on employees and also cuts down the number of admin tasks handled by HR. 

• Linking performance and compensation: In our 2023 State of People Strategy Report, 83% of surveyed HR professionals agreed that compensation should be linked to performance, but 72% felt that their current strategies in this area needed improvement. By connecting performance management systems with payroll and compensation tools, HR integration gives you a more accurate, transparent alignment between pay and performance metrics.

Part of the disconnect may be a lack of integrations. If you integrate your HRIS with your performance management system, it’s easier to automate pay adjustments. That way, your team can align compensation with performance efficiently, avoid manual updates, and ensure that the compensation strategy supports your budget and your business goals.

How to Get Leadership Buy-In For Integration Projects

In our 2025 State of People Strategy Report, 55% of HR professionals reported that their organization recognizes the importance of employee engagement but doesn’t always provide the necessary resources to implement engagement initiatives. 

So, while we hope we’ve convinced you that HR integrations could help you build better HR programs and save a ton of time, your task now will be to convince business leadership of the same. 

Here are a few tips: 

1. Talk business, not HR.

Budgets are tight right now, and business leaders won’t be offering budget and buy-in for integration projects unless you can communicate the value in meaningful business terms. 

Commenting on our report findings, Natalie Breece, chief people and diversity officer at thredUP, said: 

“HR leaders can’t afford to operate in a silo; they need to be business experts who not only have great HR instincts, but deeply understand the organization’s industry, objectives, and operational realities. By embedding themselves in the business, understanding key drivers, metrics, and pain points, HR leaders can offer more relevant, strategic solutions that resonate with leadership.”

In other words, instead of leaping into discussions of how integrations will boost HR metrics like engagement and experience, focus on issues that directly impact business objectives, such as poor retention or productivity. Then break down how the integration will address these issues — for instance, by reducing manual work or boosting HR efficiency. 

For example, you could show leaders how long onboarding is taking under the current tech setup and provide an estimate for how long it would take with better integrations. Then explain that this would reduce time-to-productivity for new hires, as well as freeing up HR resources for more important tasks. 

As well as the short-term, tactical benefits of integration, it’s worth discussing the long-term strategic impact of a well-integrated HR tech stack. For instance, organizations with highly effective HR technology were 18 times more likely to have well-integrated HR systems than those with ineffective tech, according to the HR.com survey.

To put it another way, if leadership has invested in HR tools, then they should understand that those tools should be integrated to gain the maximum return on their investment. 

2. Look at what’s already working.

Conduct a thorough audit of your existing tech stack. Are there opportunities for low-cost or simple workarounds that would achieve the same result as an integration? 

Exploring existing options before talking to leadership shows that you’re making smart, budget-conscious recommendations, which makes your proposal more compelling. 

3. Look for the easiest possible options.

Custom integrations can be expensive — but many popular HR platforms offer prebuilt integrations to other tools, which are usually cheaper and easier to implement. 

For example, Lattice offers ready-made integrations with dozens of other HR tools and employee communication platforms, including Jira, Workday, Slack, Salesforce, Gusto, Greenhouse, and many others. These more cost-effective options may be an easier ask. 

Get powerful HR integrations with Lattice.

If you’re ready to integrate your HR tech stack more effectively, Lattice makes it easy. With the recent addition of HRIS and Payroll, Lattice has evolved into a robust HR system that consolidates much of the core technology needed in any enterprise or mid-market HR tech stack. 

Our modular design means that you can add the functionality you need — when you need it. And our extensive range of integrations makes it simple to add Lattice to your existing stack, so you can spend less time on manual data entry and more time on meaningful strategic work. 

If you’d like to see how Lattice can transform your HR operations and simplify your tech stack, we invite you to explore our HRIS demo.