12 Underrated Features of Make.com and Zapier That Will Revolutionize Your HR & Recruiting Productivity

In the rapidly evolving landscape of human resources and recruiting, the adage “time is money” has never been more pertinent. HR professionals and talent acquisition specialists are constantly balancing strategic initiatives with a myriad of repetitive, administrative tasks. From scheduling interviews and sending follow-up emails to managing candidate data and onboarding new hires, the sheer volume of operational duties can stifle innovation and prevent a focus on truly impactful work. Enter automation platforms like Make.com (formerly Integromat) and Zapier. While many are familiar with these tools for basic integrations, a wealth of their most powerful, yet often overlooked, features remain untapped. These aren’t just about connecting two apps; they’re about building sophisticated, resilient, and intelligent workflows that can fundamentally transform how HR and recruiting teams operate. By delving into these deeper functionalities, you can move beyond simple triggers and actions to construct robust systems that save countless hours, reduce errors, and enhance the candidate and employee experience, ultimately allowing your team to reclaim valuable time for strategic, human-centric efforts.

This article will explore twelve such underrated features across both platforms, demonstrating how each can be leveraged to create efficiencies and drive profound changes in your daily HR and recruiting operations. Prepare to unlock a new level of productivity and redefine what’s possible with automation.

1. Advanced Error Handling & Fallback Routes (Make.com & Zapier)

While basic automation flows are designed to run smoothly, the real world is messy. External API issues, invalid data, or unexpected network glitches can cause automations to fail, leading to dropped candidates, missed communications, or inaccurate data. Both Make.com and Zapier offer sophisticated error handling mechanisms that are far more robust than simply getting a notification. In Make.com, this comes in the form of dedicated error routes that you can define, allowing you to catch specific errors (e.g., “invalid email format”) and redirect the flow to a recovery path. This could involve logging the error to a spreadsheet, sending a notification to an administrator, or even retrying the operation after a delay. For instance, if an attempt to update a candidate’s status in your ATS fails due to a temporary API timeout, instead of the entire scenario stopping, Make.com can be configured to retry the update several times before flagging it, or to send a detailed report of the failure to your IT team. This proactive approach ensures data integrity and prevents interruptions in critical HR workflows, such as a candidate moving through your pipeline without their status being correctly updated. Zapier, through its Paths and filters, allows for similar conditional logic based on success or failure, enabling you to build branches that manage different outcomes.

The underrated aspect here is not just knowing that errors can be handled, but actively designing workflows with potential failures in mind. This means building in notification systems for key stakeholders, creating retry mechanisms for transient issues, and establishing clear fallback actions for irrecoverable errors. For an HR team, this might mean automatically creating a manual task in a project management tool if an automated onboarding email fails to send, ensuring no new hire is left without critical information. This level of foresight transforms fragile automations into resilient systems, crucial for maintaining consistency and reliability in high-stakes HR processes.

2. Iterators and Array Aggregators (Make.com) / Looping (Zapier’s Looping by Zapier)

Often, data comes in lists or arrays – think of a form submission with multiple skills, a candidate’s work history, or a list of new hires from an HRIS export. A common misconception is that automation platforms can only process one item at a time. Make.com’s Iterators and Array Aggregators, and Zapier’s “Looping by Zapier” (a premium feature), dispel this myth, offering powerful ways to process multiple items sequentially or consolidate them. An Iterator in Make.com takes an array of items (e.g., a list of addresses for new employee background checks) and processes each item individually through subsequent modules in the scenario. This means you can loop through a list of interviewees from a scheduling tool and send each one a personalized pre-interview survey link, rather than sending a generic one to all or manually sending each. Similarly, Zapier’s Looping action can iterate over line items or a list, performing a set of actions for each item.

The true power of this feature for HR and recruiting lies in its ability to handle batch operations efficiently. Imagine you receive a spreadsheet of 50 new hires. Instead of manually creating an HRIS profile, an email account, and onboarding tasks for each, an automation can iterate through the list, performing all necessary actions for every individual. Conversely, Array Aggregators in Make.com allow you to collect multiple items that have been processed individually (e.g., feedback from multiple interviewers) and combine them into a single structured output, such as a summary document for the hiring manager. This feature is particularly underrated because it allows for complex, multi-faceted operations on large datasets, significantly reducing manual effort in bulk processing tasks like quarterly review assignments, benefits enrollment reminders, or candidate outreach campaigns tailored to specific skill sets found in a database.

3. Webhooks for Event-Driven Workflows (Make.com & Zapier)

While polling (checking for new data at regular intervals) is common, webhooks offer a far more efficient and instantaneous way to trigger automations. Instead of the automation platform constantly asking “Is there new data?”, webhooks enable the source application to push data to your automation the moment an event occurs. This means immediate action. For HR, this could revolutionize responsiveness. Imagine a candidate completing an assessment; a webhook from the assessment platform could instantly trigger an automation to update their status in the ATS, notify the recruiter, and even schedule the next interview step. This real-time capability drastically reduces latency, improves the candidate experience, and ensures that recruiters are always working with the most up-to-date information.

The underrated aspect is the understanding that almost any modern SaaS application can generate a webhook, even if it’s not listed as a direct integration. Many platforms allow you to configure custom webhooks within their settings, sending data to a unique URL provided by Make.com or Zapier. This opens up a world of possibilities for integrating niche HR tools, custom-built applications, or even internal systems that might otherwise be isolated. For example, if your internal project management tool has a webhook feature, you could trigger an onboarding task list creation the moment a new employee record is marked “active” in your HRIS, leading to zero lag time between hire and onboarding initiation. Leveraging webhooks transforms reactive processes into proactive, event-driven workflows, ensuring that critical HR actions happen precisely when they need to, without delay or manual intervention.

4. Data Structures and JSON/XML Parsing (Make.com) / Formatter (Zapier)

Automation relies on understanding data. However, data often arrives in complex formats like JSON or XML, especially when interacting with APIs or advanced webhooks. Simply mapping fields isn’t enough; you often need to parse, transform, and restructure this data to make it usable in subsequent steps. Make.com excels here with its built-in JSON and XML parsing modules, allowing users to define data structures, extract specific values from nested arrays, and even create new JSON/XML payloads. Similarly, Zapier’s Formatter step (with its various capabilities like Text, Numbers, Dates, Utilities, and Webhooks by Zapier for parsing) provides powerful ways to manipulate data, albeit often requiring multiple steps for complex transformations.

The underrated power lies in mastering these transformations. For HR, this could mean:
* **Parsing detailed candidate profiles:** Extracting specific skills, experiences, or project details from a resume parser’s JSON output to enrich candidate records in your ATS.
* **Integrating with custom dashboards:** Taking complex data from an HRIS and restructuring it into a format required by a BI tool or a custom internal dashboard for real-time analytics on headcount, turnover, or recruiting funnel metrics.
* **Automating compliance reporting:** Extracting specific data points from various systems, combining them, and formatting them into a specific XML or JSON structure required by regulatory bodies or internal audit systems.
Without these capabilities, such integrations would either be impossible without custom code or incredibly manual and error-prone. Understanding how to sculpt data to fit your needs is a cornerstone of truly powerful automation, turning raw, unwieldy information into actionable intelligence for HR decision-makers.

5. Custom Code (Python/Node.js in Make.com, Code by Zapier)

While Make.com and Zapier offer thousands of pre-built integrations and modules, there will always be edge cases or highly specific requirements that aren’t met by off-the-shelf solutions. This is where the ability to run custom code steps becomes invaluable. Make.com supports Python and Node.js code modules, allowing users to write scripts for highly specific data manipulations, complex calculations, or interacting with APIs that require unique authentication or request structures. Zapier offers a “Code by Zapier” action for Python or JavaScript for similar purposes. This feature is a bridge between no-code automation and full-stack development.

Its underrated nature stems from the perception that it requires deep programming knowledge, making it seem inaccessible to HR professionals. However, even basic scripting knowledge or the ability to adapt existing code snippets can unlock tremendous power. For HR, this might mean:
* **Implementing custom scoring algorithms:** Automatically calculating a composite candidate score based on assessment results, resume keywords, and recruiter feedback using a custom algorithm.
* **Generating unique IDs or secure tokens:** Creating specific identifiers for employees or candidates that adhere to internal naming conventions or security protocols.
* **Interacting with very specific legacy systems:** Building a custom API call to push or pull data from an older HR system that lacks modern integrations.
* **Advanced data cleaning:** Performing highly specific data cleansing operations (e.g., standardizing addresses, parsing unstructured text fields for specific keywords) that go beyond standard formatter functions.
By embracing custom code, HR teams can overcome limitations, extend the functionality of their existing tools, and build truly bespoke automation solutions tailored precisely to their unique operational needs, transforming seemingly impossible tasks into automated realities.

6. Conditional Logic with Filters & Routers (Make.com) / Paths (Zapier)

The ability to create conditional workflows is fundamental to sophisticated automation, yet its full potential is often underutilized. It’s not just about “if this, then that,” but building complex decision trees. Make.com’s filters allow you to define precise conditions for data to pass through a specific path, while Routers enable you to split a single workflow into multiple distinct paths based on different criteria. Zapier’s Paths (a premium feature) offer similar branching logic, allowing you to define different actions based on different outcomes or data points.

The underrated aspect here is designing workflows that mimic complex human decision-making. For HR, this can revolutionize a multitude of processes:
* **Dynamic Onboarding:** If a new hire is in Department A, send them the Department A welcome packet and trigger IT provisioning for their specific software. If they’re in Department B, send different materials and trigger different provisioning. This eliminates manual categorization and ensures personalized experiences at scale.
* **Intelligent Candidate Routing:** If a candidate’s application for Job X indicates skills for Job Y, automatically forward their application to the hiring manager for Job Y while notifying them of the suggestion. If their background is less suitable, send a polite rejection.
* **Targeted Communications:** Based on an employee’s role, tenure, or location, send different HR policy updates or benefits reminders. For instance, only employees in California receive updates on specific state-mandated leave policies.
Mastering conditional logic moves automation beyond linear tasks to intelligent, adaptive processes that can handle the nuances and variations inherent in HR operations, ensuring accuracy and personalized engagement.

7. Scheduling and Time-Based Triggers with Advanced Options (Make.com & Zapier)

While everyone knows you can schedule automations to run at a certain time, the true power lies in the advanced scheduling options. Make.com allows for highly granular scheduling – down to specific minutes on specific days, with options for daily, weekly, monthly, or even custom intervals. It also allows for ‘run once’ triggers and ‘data store’ based scheduling. Zapier’s Schedule by Zapier also offers daily, weekly, and monthly options, with specific time-of-day control. The underrated aspect is leveraging these granular controls for strategic, time-sensitive HR tasks that often fall through the cracks.

Consider the following HR applications:
* **Automated Compliance Checks:** Schedule a scenario to run every Friday at 3 PM to check all employee records for expiring certifications or licenses and flag those nearing expiry, sending reminders to employees and managers.
* **Proactive Employee Engagement Surveys:** Schedule mini-pulse surveys to go out to a rotating subset of employees every other Tuesday at 10 AM, ensuring continuous feedback collection without overwhelming individuals or teams.
* **Regular Data Synchronization:** Instead of manual exports and imports, schedule a daily or nightly sync of candidate data between your ATS and a recruitment marketing platform, ensuring consistent data across systems for retargeting campaigns.
* **Automated Payroll Reminders:** Send out automated reminders to managers to approve timesheets every other Thursday at noon, ensuring payroll deadlines are consistently met.
* **Onboarding Nudge Campaigns:** For new hires, schedule automated emails or messages to check in at 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month intervals, providing relevant resources or surveys at each milestone.
These time-based automations, when precisely orchestrated, transform reactive HR tasks into proactive, reliable processes, significantly reducing the administrative burden and ensuring critical actions are never missed simply due to forgetfulness or time constraints.

8. Routers & Data Stores for State Management (Make.com) / Storage by Zapier & Webhooks (Zapier)

Most automations are stateless, meaning they process data as it comes in and don’t remember past events or decisions. However, some HR workflows require “memory” – knowing if a candidate has already been contacted, if an employee has completed a specific training, or if a certain quota has been met. Make.com’s Routers combined with its Data Store modules (or even Google Sheets/Airtable as a pseudo-database) allow you to create scenarios that remember and act upon past information. For Zapier, you can achieve similar results using “Storage by Zapier” or by leveraging external databases like Google Sheets, coupled with webhooks and advanced lookup steps.

The underrated power here is enabling multi-stage or long-running processes that require context. For instance:
* **Avoiding Duplicate Candidate Outreach:** Before sending a new outreach email, query a data store to see if this candidate has been contacted recently for a similar role. If yes, skip the email or send a different message.
* **Tracking Onboarding Progress:** As new hires complete different onboarding tasks (e.g., signed offer letter, background check complete, IT setup done), update their status in a data store. This allows a central automation to trigger the next step only when all prerequisites are met.
* **Managing Limited Resources/Seats:** If you have a limited number of spots for a training program, an automation can check the data store for available spots before registering an employee.
* **”Drip” Campaigns for Internal Communications:** Send a sequence of internal communications over time, ensuring employees receive the next piece of information only after a certain period or after interacting with the previous one.
By building “memory” into your automations, you create intelligent, adaptive workflows that prevent redundant actions, ensure compliance with multi-step processes, and provide a more personalized and streamlined experience for candidates and employees over extended periods.

9. Text Parsers & Regex (Make.com) / Formatter Text Functions (Zapier)

Much of HR data is unstructured or semi-structured text: email bodies, resume descriptions, survey responses, or notes in your HRIS. Extracting specific pieces of information from this text is a common challenge. Make.com offers powerful Text Parser modules, including the ability to use Regular Expressions (Regex) – a highly flexible way to define patterns for finding and extracting text. Zapier’s Formatter step has robust text functions like “Extract Email Address,” “Extract Phone Number,” “Split Text,” and “Find,” which can achieve similar outcomes without Regex for common patterns.

The underrated aspect is realizing how much valuable data is hidden within free-form text and how easily it can be liberated. For HR, this opens up possibilities such as:
* **Automated Resume Parsing (basic):** Extracting key information like years of experience, specific certifications mentioned, or preferred pronouns from resume text or cover letters that don’t conform to strict ATS fields.
* **Categorizing Inbound Emails:** Automatically categorizing incoming emails (e.g., “candidate inquiry,” “HR policy question,” “payroll issue”) based on keywords in the subject or body, then routing them to the correct team or person.
* **Survey Response Analysis:** Extracting sentiment indicators or recurring themes from open-ended survey responses to quickly gauge employee satisfaction or identify areas for improvement.
* **Standardizing Data from Various Sources:** If different systems provide “job title” in slightly different formats (e.g., “Software Dev,” “Software Developer,” “SW Engineer”), use text parsing to standardize them before storing in your master HRIS.
Mastering text manipulation allows HR teams to automate the extraction of insights from unstructured data, reducing manual data entry, improving data quality, and enabling more intelligent routing and analysis of crucial textual information.

10. AI Modules & OpenAI Integration (Make.com & Zapier)

The integration of Artificial Intelligence, particularly large language models like OpenAI’s GPT, into automation workflows is transformative yet still largely underrated for its practical applications in HR. Both Make.com and Zapier offer direct integrations with OpenAI and other AI services, allowing you to embed AI capabilities directly into your automations without needing to write complex code or build custom models. This moves beyond simple data movement to intelligent data processing and content generation.

The underrated power here is realizing that AI isn’t just for fancy chatbots; it can be integrated into everyday HR operations to perform sophisticated tasks at scale:
* **Automated Job Description Enhancement:** Feed an initial draft of a job description into an AI module to automatically enrich it with relevant keywords, improve clarity, or ensure inclusive language.
* **Personalized Candidate Feedback:** Generate initial drafts of personalized feedback emails for candidates (both successful and unsuccessful) based on their application details and interview notes. These drafts can then be reviewed and refined by a recruiter.
* **Summarizing Long Documents:** Automatically summarize lengthy resumes, cover letters, or employee feedback documents to provide quick overviews for busy hiring managers or HR business partners.
* **Answering FAQs for Candidates/Employees:** Use AI to generate answers to common questions posed via email or an internal chat tool, directing users to relevant internal resources or providing direct answers, reducing the burden on HR support staff.
* **Content Generation for Internal Comms:** Draft initial versions of internal announcements, training materials, or onboarding content.
By leveraging these AI modules, HR teams can augment their capabilities, automate cognitive tasks that previously required human intervention, and scale personalized interactions, freeing up time for high-touch, strategic human engagement.

11. Web Scraper/HTML Parser (Make.com) / Webhooks (Zapier with external tools)

Sometimes, the data you need for HR processes isn’t available through a direct API or a CSV export; it lives on a website. While less common than direct integrations, the ability to scrape data from web pages can be a game-changer for certain niche HR and recruiting needs. Make.com offers a dedicated “HTML Scraper” module that can parse web pages, extract specific elements (like text from a table, or links), and then use that data in your automation. For Zapier, this typically requires using a “Webhook” action to connect to an external web scraping service (like ParseHub or Apify) that then feeds the scraped data back to Zapier.

This capability is often underrated due to perceived complexity or ethical concerns, but when used responsibly and legally (adhering to terms of service and robots.txt), it can be incredibly powerful. HR applications might include:
* **Monitoring Industry Trends:** Regularly scrape job boards or industry news sites for trending skills, job titles, or salary benchmarks relevant to your recruitment strategy.
* **Competitor Analysis (public data):** Gather publicly available information on competitor job postings, career pages, or employee review sites to inform your talent acquisition strategy.
* **Automating Public Resource Data Collection:** If your team relies on public government resources for compliance updates or labor market statistics, you can set up a scraper to automatically pull relevant data changes.
* **Vendor Due Diligence:** Extracting information from public vendor sites for security and compliance checks.
While web scraping should be approached with caution and adherence to legal guidelines, it unlocks a unique pathway for gathering external data that can provide valuable insights and efficiencies for strategic HR and recruiting operations that are not typically covered by standard integrations.

12. Tools for Debugging and Monitoring (Make.com & Zapier)

The ability to build complex automations is one thing; the ability to maintain and troubleshoot them effectively is another. Both Make.com and Zapier offer robust, yet often underrated, tools for debugging and monitoring your workflows. Make.com provides detailed “Run History” with visual step-by-step execution, showing exactly what data passed through each module, including inputs, outputs, and any errors. It also has an “Inspector” tool for deeper dives. Zapier has a comprehensive “Task History” that details each step of a Zap’s execution, including the data in and out of each action, and clear error messages.

The underrated aspect is not just their existence, but actively using them for proactive maintenance and rapid issue resolution. Many users only check these tools when something breaks. However, regularly reviewing run histories and task logs can help identify subtle data inconsistencies, unexpected external API behaviors, or workflow bottlenecks before they become major problems. For an HR team, this means:
* **Ensuring Data Integrity:** Periodically reviewing a workflow that syncs candidate data to ensure all fields are mapping correctly and no data is being truncated or corrupted.
* **Proactive Error Resolution:** Spotting patterns in minor errors (e.g., a specific integration occasionally failing) and addressing them before they impact critical processes like offer letter generation or payroll processing.
* **Optimizing Performance:** Identifying steps in a long workflow that are causing delays or consuming excessive operations, then optimizing them for efficiency.
* **Auditing Compliance:** Using the detailed logs to demonstrate that specific HR processes (e.g., data anonymization, record retention triggers) are executing as per compliance requirements.
Mastering these debugging and monitoring tools transforms reactive firefighting into proactive maintenance, ensuring your HR automation infrastructure remains robust, reliable, and continuously optimized, allowing your team to trust their automated processes fully.

The true power of platforms like Make.com and Zapier extends far beyond their most commonly used features. By delving into these twelve underrated functionalities, HR and recruiting professionals can move from basic task automation to building sophisticated, intelligent, and resilient workflows that address complex operational challenges. From real-time data synchronization and dynamic onboarding processes to AI-powered content generation and proactive compliance checks, these advanced capabilities enable teams to reclaim invaluable time, reduce manual errors, and elevate the overall candidate and employee experience. Embracing these powerful tools allows HR to transition from a purely administrative function to a strategic powerhouse, driving efficiency, improving data quality, and focusing on the human elements that truly matter. Invest the time to explore these deeper functionalities, and you’ll find that the revolution in your productivity has only just begun.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Make vs. Zapier: Powering HR & Recruiting Automation with AI-Driven Strategy