Migrate from HR Director to Zoho Recruit

HR Director Employee records map to Zoho Recruit Candidates. The HR Director forename and surname map to Zoho Recruit First Name and Last Name respectively; Last Name is mandatory in Zoho Recruit and any Employee record without a surname value is transformed to Last Name = 'Not Provided' before import, following Zoho Recruit's own import documentation. The HR Director Employee ID is preserved as a custom Candidate field ex_employee_id__c for audit traceability. Current employment status maps to a Candidate Custom field rather than a native status field.

HR Director employment history records (previous employer, job title, start/end dates) map to custom Candidate fields or a custom Work Experience sub-section in Zoho Recruit. Because Zoho Recruit is an ATS and not an HRMS, previous employment details are captured as text fields on the Candidate record rather than as a related object with independent lifecycle tracking. We transform date ranges to Zoho Recruit's expected date format (YYYY-MM-DD) and concatenate multiple employment periods into a structured custom field set.

HR Director emergency contact records (name, relationship, phone number) have no native equivalent in Zoho Recruit Candidate. We create three custom text fields on the Candidate module: ec_name__c, ec_relationship__c, and ec_phone__c. The customer's admin configures field visibility and access in Zoho Recruit's field-level security settings. This is a known ATS limitation; full emergency contact management requires a dedicated HRMS like Zoho People.

HR Director job roles (job titles, departments, employment type) map to Zoho Recruit Job Opening records. The HR Director job title becomes the Job Opening Title, department maps to the Zoho Recruit Department field, and employment type (full-time, part-time, contract) maps to the Job Type picklist. Active vs archived roles in HR Director map to the Job Opening status (Open, Closed, On Hold).

HR Director department records map to Zoho Recruit Department. We extract the full organisational hierarchy and create Department records in Zoho Recruit maintaining parent-child relationships. Department heads are linked via the Zoho Recruit hiring manager field on Job Openings. The recommended import order (Users first, then Departments) is enforced per Zoho Recruit's own migration documentation.

HR Director user accounts map to Zoho Recruit Users. We resolve users by email match. A key Zoho Recruit migration constraint: any user who already has a separate Zoho Recruit account cannot be imported into the destination company's Recruit account until that separate account is closed. We flag users with existing Zoho Recruit accounts during scoping and coordinate account closure with the customer's IT admin before migration begins. Additionally, at least two Users must exist in Zoho Recruit before bulk import; we ensure this is satisfied before launching the migration.

HR Director absence records (leave type, start date, end date, status) have no native Zoho Recruit equivalent. We evaluate two paths based on the customer's requirement: create a custom Absence sub-module in Zoho Recruit with a lookup to Candidate, or attach absence history as a structured CSV document linked to the Candidate record. For most ATS migrations, absence data is excluded from the candidate record and managed in a separate HRMS (Zoho People recommended for customers staying in the Zoho ecosystem). The customer chooses the approach during scoping.

HR Director compensation records (salary, effective date, pay frequency) are HRMS-specific data with no Zoho Recruit Candidate equivalent. Salary expectations from HR Director can be captured in a custom Candidate field candidate_salary_expectation__c if relevant to recruitment. Full compensation history is exported as a PDF document and attached to the Employee-turned-Candidate record, with the expectation that full payroll continuity is managed in a dedicated payroll platform (Zoho People or a UK payroll provider) post-migration. We flag this boundary explicitly.

HR Director employee documents (CVs, qualifications, contracts, right-to-work checks) map to Zoho Recruit Candidate Attachments and the Document Library. We extract document type from HR Director's file naming convention or metadata and create the corresponding Zoho Recruit attachment, categorised by type (Resume, Qualification, Contract, Right-to-Work). Large document sets require chunked import; we validate file size limits per Zoho Recruit's attachment constraints during scoping.

HR Director qualification records map to Zoho Recruit Candidate skills and custom qualification fields. We extract qualification type, issuer, and expiry date into custom Candidate fields qual_type__c, qual_issuer__c, and qual_expiry__c. Certifications with expiry dates that are approaching are flagged in a pre-migration report for the customer's admin to review. Skills from HR Director are mapped to Zoho Recruit's Skills picklist, which is used for Boolean candidate search on the Professional and Enterprise plans.

If HR Director contains candidate application history (i.e., the customer is migrating an existing ATS dataset alongside HR records), applications map to Zoho Recruit associations between Candidate and Job Opening records. The application date, stage, and outcome map to Zoho Recruit's Activity sub-panel on the Job Opening. Historical application stages are recreated as Activity records with the original timestamps preserved.

HR Director interview and assessment records map to Zoho Recruit Interview and Assessment modules. Interview date, interviewer, score, and feedback map to the corresponding Zoho Recruit Interview fields. We use Zoho Recruit's Interview Feedback Form feature (available on Standard and above) to structure historical feedback, with free-text fields used where structured feedback forms do not map from HR Director's format.