From Chaos to Clarity: How We Made Workday Data 70% Faster to Retrieve — Without Breaking Its APIs

#api #software #workday #webdev

When “simple data retrieval” isn’t so simple…

Integrating with Workday often sounds straightforward — until you try to fetch complete employee data.
Information is scattered across multiple endpoints — worker, payroll, jobs, benefits, and assessments.
Bringing it all together means chaining API calls, merging results, and hoping nothing breaks mid-process.

It’s slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale.

The Challenge

Companies leveraging Workday APIs for HR and compliance data often struggle to get real-time, consolidated employee data.

Workday’s REST APIs aren’t built for one-shot aggregation; each dataset (payroll, jobs, worker, benefits) lives in its own endpoint. That means:

Multiple API calls to retrieve one complete record
Rate limits that slow down large data pulls
Chain-call failures that break entire pipelines
Irregular data structures that make normalization painful

Our Solution: Workday WQL + REST API Integration

We turned to Workday Query Language (WQL) - a powerful but underused tool.

By designing custom WQL queries and executing them through REST APIs, we built a solution that retrieves complete, structured employee data in a single call — faster, cleaner, and far more stable.

Here’s how we solved it 👇

Challenges and our Solutions:

Multiple endpoints & manual merging- Used WQL queries to fetch consolidated results in one go
Rate limits from high-volume calls- Reduced API hits by merging datasets into a single REST execution
Chain-call failures- Removed dependencies with independent, self-contained queries
Irregular employee records- Built a data consolidation model for consistent, analytics-ready outputs
Security & compliance- Implemented OAuth 2.0 and role-based access
Performance bottlenecks- Optimized queries with joins, expand rules, and pagination

🚀 The Result

✅ ~70% faster data retrieval

✅ Significantly fewer API calls

✅ Stable, secure, and analytics-ready HR data pipelines

Simplifying Complex Integrations — One Platform at a Time

At Genesis Technologies, we’ve built and optimized 100+ integrations across HR, CRM, IAM, and collaboration ecosystems.

Whether it’s Workday, Greenhouse, HubSpot, Okta, or Slack, our team ensures your APIs work seamlessly together — secure, scalable, and ready for the enterprise.

Need integrations that just work?
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