Hey folks, hoping to get some collective wisdom here. We've been relying on BambooHR's webhooks to automate our new hire onboarding flows for about a year now, and they've been mostly solid. But this week, we had a major—and silent—failure that caused three new hire records to completely fall through the cracks. No welcome emails, no system access provisioning, nothing. We only caught it because a manager wondered why their new team member hadn't gotten any login info.
Has anyone else experienced similar silent drops recently? Our setup hasn't changed, and we're not seeing any failed attempts in our middleware logs, which is the most concerning part. It's as if the webhooks simply never fired.
Here's our basic integration recipe:
- **Trigger:** BambooHR Webhook (`employee.created`)
- **Middleware:** Make.com scenario (also tested with Zapier historically)
- **Actions:** Post to internal API to create user in AD, send welcome email via SendGrid, create a ticket in Jira for IT setup.
We have the standard retry logic and error handling built into the scenario. The webhook configuration in BambooHR looks like this (sensitive details redacted):
```json
{
"name": "New Hire Automation",
"monitorFields": ["hireDate", "department", "workEmail"],
"url": "https://hook.make.com/our-unique-endpoint",
"format": "json"
}
```
The gotcha we *thought* we had covered: ensuring the webhook was set to monitor the specific fields that, when populated, signify a "complete" new hire record. But now I'm wondering if there's a timing issue or a payload change on BambooHR's end.
**What we've checked so far:**
* BambooHR's "Webhooks" admin page shows the webhook is still "Active" with a recent successful test.
* No 4xx/5xx errors in our middleware's operation history for the timeframes in question.
* The employee records in BambooHR look correct, with all monitored fields populated.
* We've verified our endpoint URL is still reachable and hasn't changed.
The silence from the logs is what's so puzzling. It points to either:
1. BambooHR's webhook service not triggering at all for these specific records.
2. A payload structure change that our middleware accepts but then silently discards because it can't find the expected data path.
I'm leaning towards setting up a secondary, redundant check now—maybe a scheduled automation that polls for new hires every few hours as a backup. But that feels like a band-aid.
Would love to hear if others have hit this, and if you've found a root cause or a reliable workaround. Specifically:
* Are you using the `employee.created` event or `employee.changed`?
* Have you added additional logging or validation at the very first step of your workflow?
* Has BambooHR support been helpful in diagnosing webhook issues for you?
Thanks in advance. Losing new hires in the onboarding black hole is a nightmare for IT and HR.
-- Ian
Integration Ian
We haven't seen silent failures with that specific trigger, but we have encountered similar issues with other BambooHR webhooks, particularly around field updates. Our monitoring revealed the payload sometimes arrives with a different structure than the documented schema, which causes our middleware to accept it as a valid 200 response but fail to parse it correctly for the next step. It's a form of silent failure on our end, initiated by their side.
Given your setup, I'd suggest two immediate checks beyond the webhook logs. First, review the exact timestamp of the `employee.created` event in BambooHR against your new hire's actual start date. We've seen instances where a draft or future-dated record triggers the event, but a subsequent administrative edit or approval changes a field and the webhook for that *update* fails silently instead. Second, confirm with your middleware provider that there haven't been any recent, silent API changes on their side regarding how they acknowledge and process incoming webhooks; sometimes a "successful" receipt doesn't equate to the scenario actually initiating.
Could you verify if these three new hires had any commonalities, like being imported via a CSV, having a particular job template, or sharing a department with unique custom fields? That pattern might isolate the variable.
Check the SLA.
Silent failures are the worst kind. You said you're not seeing failed attempts in your middleware logs, but have you verified the webhooks are even leaving the station? BambooHR's dashboard for webhook delivery is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
Check the actual outgoing HTTP request logs on BambooHR's side for those three hires, if you can. I've seen them "fire" with a 200 from their system, but the payload was an empty object or malformed JSON. Your middleware might be logging a successful receipt but choking silently on the next step. Time to add some defensive payload validation before your first business logic step.
Deploy with love
Oh, the "screen door on a submarine" analogy got a good chuckle out of me. Spot on. I've found their delivery logs are great for confirming a webhook was *sent*, but they tell you nothing about what was actually in the envelope.
Your point about a 200 with an empty payload is critical. I got bitten by that once where our listener logged "webhook received" but the subsequent parsing step just... didn't. No error, because the JSON lib handled an empty object fine, but the logic expecting an `employee.id` just quietly stopped.
We ended up adding a validation shim right at the entry point that does a brutal schema check and logs the entire raw payload to a separate audit stream. If the required fields aren't there, it throws a 422 back at BambooHR so at least *their* logs show a failure. It's a bit noisy, but it turns these silent ghosts into loud, annoying alarms we can actually chase.
it worked on my machine
Yeah, that `employee.created` trigger can be sneaky. Had a similar silent drop last quarter that turned out to be a race condition. The webhook fired *before* all the mandatory fields in BambooHR were populated, so our logic to create the AD account failed on a null department field. It logged a 200, but the process just halted.
Check if your Make scenario is validating the payload for every single field you need downstream, not just that it got *a* payload. Their API can sometimes send the event before the record is fully "baked".
Still looking for the perfect one