Use this simple guide to customize your applicants with our custom fields that are specific to your business or industry. You can create and update custom field schemas for applicant records on your site with our API.

Prerequisites

To create and update custom field schemas, you'll need to meet the following prerequisites:

ATS Anywhere account
API Access enabled with a valid API key

Step 1: Understanding where these custom fields will be located

Applicant custom fields can be located in either one of two places, depending on how they are configured. If they are available in view and edit contexts, they will appear in the main Applicant viewer feature, directly below all primary fields.

If they are set up to be visible during the mark_as_hired context, then they will only be visible when you mark an applicant as hired. This is particularly useful for fields that are only relevant to hired applicants, such as pay rate or position.

Step 2: Validate that you can access the correct fields in the API

Make sure that you can query the API to retrieve all of your existing custom fields correctly. This can be done with the steps below,

Use the GET method with the request URL: https://api.applicant-tracking.com/api/v1/applications/custom_fields_schema
Under Headers area put in the following column values:
Key: Content-type
Value: application/json
Ensure that your request is using Basic Authentication, using the API key/secret that can be found in the Account Details page.

Output

Here’s how it will look in Postman.

Step 3: Add/Modify The Custom Fields

Use the PUT method with the request URL: https://api.applicant-tracking.com/api/v1/applications/custom_fields_schema
Under Headers area put in the following column values:
Key: Content-type
Value: application/json
Ensure that your request is using Basic Authentication, using the API key/secret that can be found in the Account Details page.
Send over the raw request body shown in either the Postman example below, or in the cURL example below.

Option 1: Modify Fields with Postman

Option 2: Modify Fields with cURL

You can modify your custom fields schema using cURL as well, as shown in this example.

curl -u YOUR_KEY https://YOURCOMPANY.applicant-tracking.com/api/v1/applications/custom_fields_schema -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
	"update_existing_data": true,
	"custom_fields_schema": [
		{
			"field_name": "custom_field_1",
			"field_type": "string",
      "display_name": "My Custom Field 1",
      "default_value": "This is your default value in a text field",
      "required": true,
      "whitelist_values": [],
      "blacklist_values": [],
      "ui_priority": 1,
      "ui_readonly": true,
      "ui_input_type": "text_field",
      "ui_hints": [],
      "ui_render_targets": ["view", "edit"],
      "group": null,
      "subgroup": null,
      "group_priority": null
    },
		{
    	"field_name": "custom_field_2",
      "field_type": "string",
      "display_name": "My Custom Field 2",
      "default_value": "This is your default value in a text area",
      "required": true,
      "whitelist_values": [],
      "blacklist_values": [],
      "ui_priority": 2,
      "ui_readonly": false,
      "ui_input_type": "text_area",
      "ui_hints": [],
      "ui_render_targets": ["view", "edit"]
    },
    {
			"field_name": "custom_field_3",
			"field_type": "string",
      "display_name": "My Custom Field 3",
      "default_value": "This is your default value",
      "required": true,
      "whitelist_values": [
      	"Option 1",
        "Option 2"
      ],
      "blacklist_values": [],
      "ui_priority": 3,
      "ui_readonly": false,
      "ui_input_type": "select",
      "ui_hints": [
      	"Option 1",
        "Option 2"
      ]
	  }
  ]
}

Output

You will likely have more creative field names than our example below, as well as more than one option in a select list, but this just shows what is possible from the the custom field endpoint.

Step 4 (Optional): Confirm New Custom Fields via the API

Once you've added these fields, you can retrieve them via the API using the same request that was used in Step 2 to query the existing custom field records.