Anyone else's BambooHR webhooks failing silently? Lost 3 new hires this week.

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.

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.

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.

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".

We had this exact failure mode last year. Your middleware logs a successful receipt because it's returning a 200 to the webhook call, but the failure happens later in the pipeline, after that initial acknowledgement.

The issue is likely a hidden dependency on a field value that isn't guaranteed at the moment the `employee.created` event fires. For example, your AD provisioning step might require `workEmail`, but BambooHR often sends the webhook before that field is populated. The scenario step fails or silently skips, but the webhook itself was technically "successful."

You need to audit your Make scenario's execution logs for those three hires, not just your webhook listener logs. Look for scenario runs that completed but have zero successful operations after the initial trigger. Then implement a secondary validation step within the scenario that checks for the presence of all required data points before proceeding to any actions. If they're missing, pause the scenario and retry after a delay, or log a specific error to a dedicated failure channel.

Ugh, silent drops are a nightmare for onboarding. The community's already hit on the likely culprit with payload validation and race conditions.

One extra angle: check if those three hires came from a specific office location or had a unique job template applied. We once traced a silent failure batch to a new office code that wasn't yet mapped in our middleware, so the scenario took the webhook but had no logic path for that branch. Everything just stopped without an error.

Their delivery status page might say "sent," but as others said, the payload could be hollow. I'd add a dead-simple logging step as the very first module in your Make scenario, before any logic, that just dumps the entire raw webhook data to a separate log service. That's how we finally caught ours.

That's a really good point about the middleware provider's silent API changes. I'm using Make for this scenario, and I know they do roll out updates that can affect webhook handling. How do you usually monitor for that kind of change? I'm just checking their changelog manually, which is probably not fast enough.

The timestamp check against the start date is interesting too. It makes me think my trigger might be firing for a "draft" state. If the webhook for the *actual* update fails later, we'd never know.

Absolutely. The validation shim and throwing a deliberate 422 is a smart operational move. It forces an error into their delivery log, turning a silent problem into a visible, trackable incident.

A caveat to that approach, though, is that some webhook systems will interpret a 4xx or 5xx response as a failure and attempt a retry. If the payload is fundamentally malformed or empty, you risk a loop of retries that never succeed, potentially flooding your logs. You need to ensure your validation logic is idempotent and that you're prepared to handle, or ignore, those subsequent automatic retries of the same bad payload.

We implemented something similar but with a 200 response and an immediate side-channel alert to a dedicated PagerDuty endpoint. That way we stop the retry loop but still get the loud alarm you mentioned.

Screen door on a submarine 😂 That's too accurate.

And yes, that 200 with empty/malformed JSON is exactly what we found too. Our endpoint would log "success" but then the workflow just... stopped. No error, nothing.

We ended up adding a dead-simple validation step as the absolute first module in our Pipedream workflow. It logs the raw body and checks for the existence of `employee.id`. If it's missing, we throw a 422 immediately. That finally got the failures to show up in their logs.

A solid recipe, but the devil is in the delivery. Everyone's correctly flagged payload validation, but you mentioned using Make. Their router can occasionally get updates that change how the initial webhook data is structured or passed between modules, without it being a clear breaking change in their changelog.

Check your scenario's execution history for those three hires. Look for a run that shows "Finished" but the operations count is suspiciously low, like it only processed the webhook module itself. That's a classic sign the payload made it to Make but their internal routing to your first real module failed silently.