Over the past few years, most HR teams have gone digital in a big way. Candidates apply through recruiting platforms, employee data lives in a modern HRIS, and documents are stored in digital personnel files. But there’s often a gap between these systems. Add a new hire to the HRIS, and they won’t necessarily show up in their personnel file. The integration that’s supposed to connect the two? It’s been requested from IT, and the ticket has been sitting open for weeks.
So HR improvises. Names, start dates, and contract details get copied over by hand, then double-checked later. It’s tedious and error-prone, but it gets the job done, more or less. At many companies, this workaround quietly became business as usual a long time ago.
The reasons aren’t hard to see. Integration requests from HR are competing with security patches, cloud migrations, and infrastructure projects, and those almost always win the priority battle. Then there’s the bigger, structural issue: there simply aren’t enough people. A recent study by Bitkom, Germany’s digital industry association, found roughly 79,000 unfilled IT jobs in Germany alone, with 97 percent of companies reporting that open IT roles are hard to fill.¹ The most in-demand profiles? Systems administrators and operations specialists, the exact people who build integrations and keep them running.
A few minutes of typing here and there may not seem like much, but it adds up fast. Every manual handoff is a chance for something to go wrong: two digits swapped in an employee ID, an address updated in one system but not the other, a contract drafted from outdated records. And these mistakes usually stay hidden until they cause real problems.
Bad data comes at a price. Gartner estimates that poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million a year.² With employee data, the stakes are even higher: under Article 5 of the GDPR, personal data has to be accurate and up to date, and employers need to be able to prove it.³
That’s why more and more HR software vendors are taking a different approach. Instead of building a custom integration for every customer, they offer prebuilt connectors to the most widely used HR systems and take care of maintenance and updates themselves. What used to be a months-long IT project can now often be done with a single click in the settings.
IT doesn’t get cut out of the picture, though. They define the guardrails up front: what data can flow and who gets access. Within those boundaries, HR is free to turn on the connections it needs. And because everything runs inside existing security policies, there’s no shadow IT.
aconso takes exactly this approach with its Plug & Play integrations. The idea is simple: rather than coding an integration from scratch, you just switch on a connection that’s already built. For leading HR platforms like Workday and SAP SuccessFactors, these integrations can be activated right in the aconso Admin Center, no IT project required.
The approach is system-agnostic, so it isn’t tied to any one HR platform. aconso handles operations, maintenance, and updates, while your company’s security policies and access controls stay fully in place. The result: new hires land in their digital personnel file on time, with no retyping and no open tickets.
Want to learn more? Check out the overview of aconso’s Plug & Play integrations.
In the end, integrations that drag on for weeks are less a technical problem than an organizational one. The question isn’t whether your HR systems can talk to each other anymore. It’s how fast you can make it happen.
Sources:
¹ Bitkom "Der Arbeitsmarkt für IT-Fachkräfte" – Study 2026
² Gartner: "12 Actions to Improve Data Quality" (via Verato)
³ Art. 5 GDPR – Principles relating to processing of personal data