Payscale is the leading provider of compensation intelligence solutions. They help companies scale their business with pay and transform their largest investment into their greatest advantage. Payscale’s data and technology support organizations through the entire compensation lifecycle, from benchmarking salaries to running merit cycles.

Payscale needed to connect to their customers’ HRIS platforms to pull in employee data—like salaries, tenure, and location—that would enable users to review their employees’ compensation and confirm it is competitive with market benchmarks. 

They initially supported secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) integrations for HRISs, but this approach came with a myriad of issues.

“SFTP connections were cumbersome to build and couldn’t support syncs at the frequency we needed,” explains Katie Harmon, the Senior Director of Channels at Payscale.

“We then built three API-based HRIS integrations in-house, but that required devoting engineering resources to launch and maintain. We needed a better solution.”

They finally decided to outsource their HRIS integrations and quickly uncovered Merge. 

According to Katie:

“Merge offered the most reliable and scalable HRIS integrations, and their support team proved to be best-in-class during our proof of concept. The choice of who to partner with was really easy.”

After integrating with Merge’s HRIS Unified API, Payscale was able to take 11 HRIS integrations live in a single month, bringing their total to 14. These included providers like BambooHR, Paycor, and UKG.

Here’s how the integrations work:

1. Once a user logs in, they’d select Data Management and then click “Create New Integration.”

From there, they should be able to see all of the HRISs they can connect to.

2. As soon as a user selects a specific HRIS, Merge Link, a UI component, pops-up. It provides all the steps the user needs to follow to authenticate successfully.

3. Assuming authentication is successful, Merge will sync employee-level data, such as salary, location, start date, and job code. These syncs also occur weekly by default, but they can be more frequent if needed.

Once all the employee data that can influence compensation is continuously resynced in Payscale, users get a consistently up-to-date view of their employees’ level of compensation relative to their market value.

This makes it easy for HR and leadership teams to make effective and timely adjustments to their team members’ comp plans—not just during annual cycles.

With Merge, Payscale was able to launch integrations exponentially faster.

“It took our team at least a month to build a single HRIS integration. With Merge, we were able to add 11 within that timeframe”, says Katie.

These integrations have also been crucial to delivering a great customer experience. 

“With Merge’s HRIS integrations, our users can easily and effectively benchmark employee compensation over time. As a result, we see a 10% higher retention rate for customers that adopt these integrations,” explains Katie.

Finally, Payscale sees Merge’s customer support as a key differentiator. 

According to Katie:

"Merge’s post-sales team is truly amazing. They’re fast, responsive, and deeply knowledgeable of HRIS integrations and our use case."

So, what’s next in Payscale’s integration journey with Merge?

“We plan to continue adding HRIS integrations through Merge to expand into new markets and deliver additional value for even more of our customers,” says Katie.

We can’t wait to elevate the leading compensation management platform even further!