Invite Job Seekers with the Huntr API and Zapier

There are a few ways to get your job seekers on Huntr. We've written about sending Invitations through your advisor portal, which is the most popular way to get your job seekers onboarded.

We understand that your organization might already have certain workflows in place and manually sending Huntr invitations to your job seekers might not fit into those workflows. This is why you can also use the Huntr API to programatically send invitations to your job seekers. More specifically, you will use the POST /organization-invitations endpoint to send an invite to your job seekers.

With home built systems

This endpoint may be used in many different contexts, perhaps you have a dev team working on an internal home-built LMS or CRM system and you want to have an invitation sent to job seekers when something happens within that system (job seeker is created or perhaps their status is changed to "Started Job Search"). For custom built systems like these it is best to direct your dev team to the Huntr documentation for the POST /organization-invitations endpoint, that should provide all the information they need to send invitations in homegrown systems.

With Zapier

If you don't have a home grown solution and the application that you want to trigger the Huntr invitations is compatible with Zapier (Salesforce, Typeform, Google Forms, Trello, Airtable, Bullhorn, etc), then you can follow along this guide to learn how to use zapier to send a Huntr invitation to your job seekers when an event is triggered on one of your Zapier compatible systems.

Sending a Huntr invite when a Typeform record is submitted

I'm using Typeform for this tutorial. Typeform is an application that lets you build custom forms which can then be shared with anyone. For this tutorial, I will set up a Zapier zap that will send a Huntr invitations whenever a new Typeform response is received.

Even if you are not using Typeform, it should be fairly easy to use the steps from this tutorial with your own application. If that is the case then the steps in phase 1 will be slightly different depending on your application, but most of the steps in phase 2 will be the same.

Let's get started!

Phase 1: Setup your trigger

• Login to Zapier
• Click on the 'Create Zap' or 'Make a zap button'
• Search your application from the search box where is says 'Choose App & Event'. For me this is 'Typeform', for you it should be the name of the application that you want to trigger the Huntr invitation.
  
• Select the application event that will trigger the invitation to Huntr. For me, that is the 'New Entry' Typeform trigger. Select the proper trigger depending on your use case and click 'Continue'.
• Login into the application (Typeform in my case) by following the prompts on the screen, the steps to login are very straighforward; Zapier has made this a very simple process.
• Once you have logged into your application you will see a 'Choose Account' section in Zapier, select the account you just logged into and click 'Continue'.
  

The next few steps will be different depending on the application that you are working with. We are basically setting up the specifics of when we want the Huntr invitation to be triggered, I will demonstrate what this looks like for Typeform but if you are using a different application you will have to use common sense and select the options that make sense for the specific workflow you want to setup.

• Select the Typeform form that you want to trigger the Huntr invite and then click 'Continue'.
  
• Click on the 'Test Trigger' button. This will retrieve a few entries from Typeform that will be used to build the request to Huntr. Make sure that you have test (or real) data in your application before testing the trigger. For me, that means sending a couple of 'Test' form submissions in Typeform.
• If Zapier found data, you will see a screen similar to the one below. Make sure that all the data you need for the Huntr invite is included and click 'Continue'. The one piece of information that is required is the job seeker's email, so make sure that the email is included in some section of the data coming from your application. Though optional, if you want to set job seeker's Custom Fields, then the values for those fields should also be included in the test date entry.
  

Phase 2: Send POST request to Huntr

This section should be very similar regardless of the application that you are using. Here we use Zapier's Webhook App to prepare and send a POST request to Huntr's 'Create Invitation' API endpoint.

• Search and select the 'Webhooks by Zapier' app and select the 'Custom Request' event. Then click 'Continue'.
  
• In the 'Customize Request' section, enter the data exactly as shown in the image below. For the 'method' field, choose 'POST', for the 'URL' field enter https://api.huntr.co/org/organization-invitations, and for 'Data Pass-Through' select False.
  
• For the 'Data' text field, copy the code block below and paste it into the field. This is a placeholder shell of the formatted data that needs to be sent to Huntr to send an invitation, in the next few steps we will fill this shell with all the appropriate information that we will source from our setup in Phase 1.

{
    "email": "",
    "boardName": "Job Search 2020",
    "memberFieldValues": []
}

• Optional. If you want your job seeker's boards to be named something different, then replace the "Job Search 2020" text for your preferred name.

• Within the 'Data' text field, put your cursor in the empty email value (see the image below). An 'Insert Data' dropdown will show up; from the dropdown, select the field that contains your job seeker's email, you might have to click on the 'Show all options' button at the bottom of the dropdown to see the field.
  

• Once you've selected the field from the dropdown, you will see something like this:
  

• Optional. If you don't want to provide Custom Fields for your job seeker's through the invitation, then you can skip the following sub-steps.

  • To provide custom field values in your invitations, you have to provide an entry of the format {"fieldId": "5cab66e23780f8000f52cbd0", "value": ""} inside of the memberFieldValues list. Here is an example of what the Data field would look like when 3 custom field values are provided:
    
  • First you need to retrieve the fieldId for any custom field value that you want to add. You can find this under the 'Settings' page in your Advisor Portal, under the 'Field Id' column in the 'Custom Job Seeker Fields' table.
    
  • Each field that you add in the Zapier 'Data' text field needs a value. You can hardcode the value for the field by entering the text manually like {"fieldId": "5cab66e23780f8000f52cbd0", "value": "002"}, this means that ALL invitations to all job seekers will have the same value you entered, this is usually NOT what you want to do. In most cases you will want to source the field value from the data coming from your trigger app (Typeform in our case). To do this, you will click into the empty text section after the 'value' key and select the data coming from Typeform from the 'Insert Data' dropdown. Take a good look at the image below to get an idea of what the final 'Data' field must look like:
    

• Once you've filled out the Data field, there is only three fields left. Select 'Yes' for the 'Unflatten' field, and leave the 'Basic Auth' field blank.
  

• The final field is 'Headers'. For this field we need to add 2 headers. Each header has a key (box on the left) and a value (box on the right):

  • For the first header the key is Authorization, and the value is Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN> where <ACCESS_TOKEN> should be replaced by a token you have to create and copy from the 'Developers' section in your Advisor Portal (Go to the 'Developers' section, click 'Add Token' and copy the token from the page, make sure you copy the token exactly as it is displayed, even one extra space or missed character will result in errors).
  • For the second header the key is Content-Type and the value is application/json.
  • The final Headers field should look something like this (except your access token should be different):
    

• Click 'Continue'

• If everything worked, you should see a success screen like the one below. Also, you should receive a Huntr invite in the email that was used throughout the test, the one we sourced from the test Typeform form submission.
  

• Finally, click 'Turn on zap' to activate your Zapier Workflow. After this zap is on, any job seekers that submit your Typeform form will receive an invitation to join your organization in Huntr.