Human resources is a focused but fast-moving vertical in the catalog — 118 providers — and it’s a clean illustration of how a back-office function got unbundled into a stack of specialist APIs. Hire, onboard, pay, manage, and offboard each have their own vendors now, and the catalog lays the pieces out in order.
The bands
| Band | What it does | Providers on apis.io |
|---|---|---|
| HRIS & core | System of record for people | Workday (54 APIs), Rippling (21), Factorial (22) |
| Recruiting & ATS | Source, track, hire | Lever (23), Ashby (21), Workable (17) |
| Sourcing & marketplaces | Find candidates | Indeed (14) |
| Performance & engagement | Manage and develop | 15Five |
What’s shifted recently
- The HRIS stopped being the only system. Workday — 54 APIs — is still the heavyweight system of record, but recruiting (Lever, Ashby), payroll, and engagement now run as independent platforms with their own surfaces. The monolithic HR suite gave way to a composed stack.
- Recruiting went API-first. The ATS band (Lever, Ashby, Workable) ships genuinely modern surfaces — webhooks, clean object models — because recruiting tools have to integrate with sourcing, assessment, and scheduling tools to be useful at all.
- Identity overlaps with HR. Onboarding and offboarding are increasingly where HRIS and identity providers meet — provisioning and deprovisioning an employee is both an HR event and a security event. The catalog shows these surfaces converging.
Where to start
- The Human Resources industry page ranks all 118 providers.
- For the system-of-record pattern, Workday (54 APIs) is the anchor.
- For the modern ATS shape, compare Lever and Ashby side by side.
The takeaway
HR tech is a tidy case study in unbundling: one suite became a stack, and integration is the whole game. The catalog’s value here is seeing the employee lifecycle as a sequence of API surfaces — and spotting where the HRIS, the ATS, and the identity provider have to hand off cleanly to each other.