Why we believe in open HR ecosystems

An HR ecosystem is the network of integrations, tools and workflows that surround a core HR platform: how payroll, scheduling, learning and other systems connect and exchange data in everyday work.

I've worked closely with integrations for several years, often bridging internal teams and external partners. Seeing how integration work comes together and what it takes for it to actually hold up over time has shaped how I think about openness.

One thing that's stuck with me is how often openness gets treated as a risk. Access gets limited, test environments stay closed. I understand the instinct: security matters, and those decisions are rarely just technical. But you can usually tell the difference between a system that's been designed to be open and one that's been designed to stay closed. The best integrations I've worked on started with a sandbox and someone who actually wanted to make it work. That's the balance we try to get right at Hailey.

Most of the time, the data already exists somewhere. The problem is getting it to move. It's rarely the API itself, it's whether someone on the outside can understand what's possible and what isn't.

The Hailey MCP Server is part of that thinking. We built it because we want Hailey to be genuinely useful in whatever stack is being built around it.

/Linnéa Kaplan, Ecosystem developer at Hailey HR