We’re experiencing sync failures when pushing new hire records from ADP Workforce Now (adp-2022.2) to our third-party HRIS system during onboarding. The integration worked fine for the first batch, but now approximately 30% of employee records fail with vague error messages.
Our middleware logs show the API call completes successfully on ADP’s side, but the receiving system rejects the payload. We suspect missing mandatory fields or schema validation issues, but the error responses don’t specify which fields are problematic.
Current error from receiving system:
HTTP 400: Invalid employee payload
Details: Required field validation failed
Timestamp: 2025-03-14T08:15:33Z
We’ve checked our field mapping configuration and everything appears correct. The pre-send payload validation in our middleware passes, yet the sync still fails. Has anyone dealt with similar field mapping issues or know how to identify which specific fields are causing the validation failures?
Check your position and job code mappings too. ADP uses positionID as a reference to a separate position object, but many HRIS systems expect the actual job title and department as direct string fields. If your mapping assumes these will be populated directly in the employee object, they won’t be there. You need to make additional API calls to resolve position references into actual values before sending to your target system.
We had the exact same problem last quarter. The root cause was that ADP returns empty strings for some fields while our target system expected either a valid value or complete omission of the field from the JSON. Fields like middleName, suffix, and alternateEmail were coming through as empty strings (“”) instead of null or being excluded. Our solution was to add a payload cleaner that removes any fields with empty string values before sending to the target system. Took us three days to figure out because the error messages were so generic.
Good point about null values. Also verify your API schema version alignment. ADP updated their employee object schema in adp-2022.2 and some optional fields became conditionally required based on employee type. For example, if employmentType=‘contractor’, certain fields like benefitsEligible must be explicitly set to false rather than omitted. I’d recommend logging the full JSON payload right before transmission to compare successful versus failed records. Look for patterns in what’s missing or different between them.
Another thing to check is date format consistency. ADP can return dates in ISO 8601 format but some fields might come through in different formats depending on how they were entered. We found that hireDate was ISO formatted but customDate fields were coming through as MM/DD/YYYY strings. If your receiving system has strict date validation, this could cause silent failures. Also, phone numbers and addresses have nested object structures that might not match your target schema exactly. You might need transformation logic beyond simple field mapping.