Industry-leading recruiting software expands its offering with Symmetry’s payroll tax forms.

The nearly 700 clients of this hiring software company include some of the most recognized enterprise businesses in the world, including marquee brands in healthcare, food processing, manufacturing, and finance and banking. Its fully featured applicant tracking system (ATS) is routinely rated among the best in the recruiting technology industry.

With 600 employees globally, its use of conversational AI and other features help everyone involved in recruiting and hiring navigate each step faster, more easily, and with greater confidence — from managers posting a new job requisition to new hires completing and processing their onboarding documents.

The Challenge

Within a few years of launching as a fully featured ATS, the company set its sights on two key strategies to drive greater customer satisfaction and continued market expansion:

• Ensure its features and processes were mobile-first and easy for the world’s frontline, non-desk workforce to access and use.
• Extend its functionality to include a fully compliant withholding tax form solution for every state in the U.S.

The company’s developers could handle a lot of the first strategy — ensure the platform as it currently existed was mobile-first. The second strategy posed a far different challenge, as the company learned.

One option for providing a tax-form feature involved pulling PDFs from each state’s taxing authority website and uploading them to its system. Job candidates using the platform had to find the correct forms, open them on their desktop computer or mobile device, and manually complete them, data field by data field. This was, to be blunt, “a very bad experience for candidates,” a senior product manager says.

Another option the company tried was using a version of an online tax preparation software. But, the navigation of that system was overly complex and not well-guided or intuitive. This result would be another poor user experience.

These efforts led the company to the familiar question eventually faced by most tech companies seeking to embed payroll and tax processing into their systems: Build or buy?

After the attempts it had already made, the company realized it would be impractical to build. They learned that building a fully compliant, completely online, and mobile-first solution for federal, state, and local tax withholding forms, at the least, was a very specialized type of work. On top of that, they understood that getting it right — for every customer and every new hire to be satisfied every time — would require direct conversations and relationships with all of the various taxing agencies, at least at the state level.

The Search

The key criteria, the senior product manager said, was to find a partner that had a “very similar ideology to us.” Of course, they wanted a partner who could build and deploy the necessary API and software tools for online payroll withholding forms. That was a given. But they also wanted a partner in the whole process; they didn’t want simply one more vendor selling them a piece of software.

They wanted a technology partner who:

• Was willing to do the work together to ensure the tax withholding forms software integrated with the larger recruiting and hiring platform
• Understood and accepted that the end-user experience, whether for new hires or their potential employers and managers, had to be frictionless, easy, accurate, and compliant

In short, this company wanted a partner to help them create great experiences for their clients and the people who apply for jobs and become new hires of those clients.

The search was brief because the market provided very few choices for compliant tax withholding forms software designed to build out existing technology and help onboard employees. It became apparent during what the senior product manager called a “very straightforward conversation with Symmetry” that only Symmetry had the technology (specifically the available API) the company needed.

The API was mission-critical because it would empower integration into the recruiting and hiring platform’s user interface and avoid redirecting users out of the platform.

Another deciding factor was the depth, expertise, and availability of Symmetry’s tax researchers, boosting the company’s faith in the final product’s accuracy and support. Also, Symmetry at the time was just completing the development of the API version of Symmetry Payroll Forms® (SPF), and the ATS developers felt the Symmetry team was comfortable taking feedback to enhance the product and ensure it integrated smoothly with their platform.

The Solution

Unlike needing to post PDFs for new hires to open and manually complete one data field at a time, Symmetry Payroll Forms dynamically pulls in a user’s correct tax withholding forms based on information they’ve already provided in their new-hire documentation: legal residence, work location (or locations), federal tax exemptions, and any follow-up questions that tax withholding forms applicable to that user require. Forms submitted through SPF are 100% electronic as well as regulatory compliant and auditable for all tax jurisdictions.

Integration into the ATS platform went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped for a complex project and followed a standard development process: build, test, identify bugs, fix those bugs, and move forward. Teams at Symmetry and the recruiting and hiring platform worked together, with communication and fixes flowing back and forth — a “very positive and straightforward” partnership, the senior product manager said.

Perhaps best of all, the ATS platform was able to launch its new offering on time — before the start of a new year and a new tax season in the U.S.

The Outcome

Choosing to embed Symmetry Payroll Forms® freed up developers and other teams at the ATS company to focus on other aspects of their business, not on building their own withholding forms engine.

Equally important, the company was able to immediately embed Symmetry into its existing user interface, completely behind the curtain, and making everything as frictionless and seamless as possible. Users have what the company calls “one core experience.” They enjoy one login, easy mobile or desktop access to the necessary payroll withholding forms and efficient e-signature processing.

Since the program was launched at the start of 2021, there’s been no downtime, and Symmetry has handled any maintenance, which has been minimal, “very elegantly,” the senior product manager said.

Looking forward, the company hopes it can expand the feature to its clients in Canada; Symmetry recently added a Canadian version of Symmetry Payroll Forms to its product suite, handling federal, provincial, and territorial TD1 forms, and Quebec-specific withholding forms.