A webhook is an automatic message one system sends to another the instant something happens. When an event occurs, the sending system posts a small package of data to a web address the receiving system supplied in advance, so the second system learns about the change immediately instead of asking repeatedly.
Polling means the receiving system asks on a schedule: every few minutes it calls the other system and enquires whether anything changed. A webhook reverses that direction. Nothing is asked, because the sending system announces the change as it happens by posting to a URL the receiver gave it earlier. The practical differences are timing and waste. Polling introduces a delay equal to the interval, and almost every check returns nothing, which burns request limits on both sides. Webhooks arrive within seconds and only when there is something to say. The trade-off is reliability, since a webhook firing while the receiver is offline can be lost unless the sender retries, whereas a poller simply catches up on its next run. Careful integrations use both, with webhooks for speed and a periodic reconciliation sweep to catch anything missed.
Anything marking a change of state in the hiring process. New application received is the most common, because it lets a downstream tool react the moment somebody applies. Candidate stage changed drives notifications, assessment orders and scheduling. Interview scheduled or canceled keeps a calendar or a video tool in step. Offer extended, accepted or declined is the event that usually triggers work outside recruiting, such as creating a record for onboarding. Requisition opened, approved or closed feeds finance and workforce planning. The package that arrives is normally compact: an event name, a timestamp, identifiers, and enough detail for the receiver to fetch the full record if it needs more. That last point surprises people. A webhook usually tells you what happened rather than shipping an entire candidate profile, so the receiving system still calls back for the details.
Well-behaved senders retry, usually several times with a widening gap between attempts, then stop after a set number of failures. That behavior creates the two situations every implementation has to handle. The first is a message that never lands, because the receiver was unavailable for longer than the retry window, which is why a scheduled reconciliation job earns its keep even when webhooks work. The second is the same message arriving twice, since a retry can fire after the original was in fact processed. The remedy is idempotency: the receiver records the event identifier and ignores anything already handled, so a repeat delivery changes nothing. Ask for a delivery log as well. Without visibility into which events were sent and what response came back, a silently failing webhook looks exactly like a system where nothing is happening.
Someone technical on the receiving side, usually a developer, an implementation consultant, or the vendor whose tool is consuming the events. The recruiting team's job is to specify which events matter and what should happen when they arrive, which is a business decision rather than a technical one. What gets exchanged is short: the destination URL, the list of events to subscribe to, and a shared secret so the receiver can verify a message genuinely came from the sender rather than from someone who guessed the address. Expect a test event, a staging environment if one exists, and a conversation about failure handling. If nobody can own the receiving end, a native connector shipped with your [hiring software](/hiring-software) is the better route, and that wider buying question belongs to the ATS integration decision rather than to this mechanic. Webhooks are simply the plumbing beneath most cross-system [recruitment automation](/recruitment-automation).
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