We are excited to announce the implementation of webhooks, the latest addition to our API feature suite. Webhooks allow users to register subscriptions for Employee API standard endpoints, which, once active, will automatically notify the user about changes, additions, or deletions of records (profiles) matching their specified criteria or a list of IDs.
The feature is available to clients who are purchasing plans starting from $1500/month.
Webhook subscriptions are especially beneficial for the following use cases:
- Discover new records based on your criteria
- Receive alerts for changes in selected records
- Keep your lists up to date by removing records that no longer match your criteria
How does it work?
API clients can now create a subscription by querying new subscription endpoints and using any of the three input options to narrow down the relevant records:
- Search filter parameters
- Elasticsearch DSL query
- List of profile IDs
Once set, the subscription will start sending event-based change notifications (HTTP POST requests) to a specified callback URL on a regular basis. The triggering events are changed, added, or removed records.
A webhook notification contains the following information:
- Profile ID
- Change type
The overall flow is as follows:
- Choose the profiles you want to track
- Provide a callback URL to receive notifications
- Receive notifications to a specified URL
- Collect data records with the latest data
By default, the subscription will be valid for 90 days and accepts up to 1 million data records tracked with one subscription.
Why use webhook subscriptions?
Simple in principle, webhooks solve some common pain points that companies experience when using APIs to collect data, mainly:
1. Webhook subscriptions remove the need to maintain scheduled, suboptimal queries to check for updates.
2. Collecting redundant data. Previously, clients could only rely on last_updated timestamps, which do not necessarily indicate actual changes in the data. This can result in the collection of identical records. With the introduction of webhooks, we ensure that notifications are sent only about changed profiles.
Other benefits include improved data freshness, improved and easier API integration for new clients, and reduced workflow redundancies for existing clients.
Get started with webhooks
Webhook subscriptions are a great tool to ensure data freshness for the records you care about in a cost-effective way. They reduce operational burden and unlock highly effective and streamlined use cases, essentially allowing you to generate signals about relevant employee profiles.
To learn more about using webhook subscriptions in your organization, contact sales for a free consultation.
