● Live in production
What Merge.dev is
Merge.dev provides unified APIs across categories of business software, including ATS. One authorisation flow and one object model stand in front of many underlying vendors.
For us that means the pipeline talks about a job order, a candidate, and a submission once, and the connector layer resolves what those mean in each ATS. It also means ATS credentials live with Merge and never in our database.
What syncs, and which direction
| Object | Direction | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Read + write | Merge owns the OAuth handshake and token lifecycle with the underlying ATS. SyncTalent.ai holds a Merge account token, not your ATS credentials. |
| Job orders | Read | Normalised into the canonical requirement model before parsing and dedup. |
| Candidates and attachments | Read | Candidate records and résumé attachments feed shortlisting and semantic scoring. |
| Applications / submissions | Write | Submissions are written back through the same normalised layer. |
| Notes and activities | Write | Screening outcomes and scorecard summaries written against the candidate record. |
Setup
1. Link your ATS
An admin completes the Merge Link flow for your ATS. This happens once, in a hosted flow, and produces an account token scoped to your tenant.
2. Confirm the object mapping
Merge normalises the common fields. The staffing-specific ones — work authorization, tax term, layer count, end client — usually live in custom fields and are mapped explicitly.
3. Set the sync scope and cadence
Choose which job-order statuses and candidate segments sync, and how often. A tighter scope makes the first week easier to read.
4. Enable write-back deliberately
Write-back is a separate switch from read access, and it stays off until you have compared agent output against your own desk.
Things worth knowing
Why a connector layer instead of direct integrations
Because a bespoke integration per ATS is a maintenance liability that grows linearly with customers and breaks silently when a vendor changes an endpoint. One normalised surface means adding an ATS is a configuration change rather than a release.
The trade-off is field coverage
A unified model exposes what is common across vendors well and what is idiosyncratic less well. The staffing-specific fields we depend on are frequently custom fields, which is why mapping is an explicit onboarding step rather than something we claim works out of the box.
Credentials never land here
SyncTalent.ai stores a Merge account token per tenant. Your ATS username, password, and OAuth refresh tokens stay with Merge, which narrows what a compromise of our systems could reach.
Frequently asked
Do we need our own Merge.dev account?
No. The Merge relationship is ours. You complete a hosted Merge Link flow to authorise your ATS, and that is the extent of the setup on your side.
Which ATS products does this reach today?
Bullhorn is the supported path today and the one we run in production. Merge covers a broader catalogue, but we only claim what we have actually run end to end for a customer.
Where are our ATS credentials stored?
With Merge, not with us. SyncTalent.ai holds a per-tenant Merge account token and never sees your ATS username, password, or refresh token.
What happens if the connector goes down?
Agents are idempotent and safe to retry, so a sync failure delays work rather than corrupting it. Nothing is written twice, and the pipeline resumes from where it stopped once the connector recovers.
Next steps
Schedule a demo and we will connect a sandbox instance and run your own open requirements through the pipeline. Read how the six agents work first if you want the shape of it before the call.