Seeking Advice on Consolidating Candidate and Customer Data Across Platforms

[MMorganti]

Hello dear HubSpot Community,

We are an incubator for pharma that acts by projects that constantly needs new candidates and project proposals.

Currently, we are managing three distinct target groups:

1. Target Group n.1 (Candidates): We use an in-house platform for recruitment, which currently holds over 14,000 candidate records. These candidates sign up and provide consent to receive communication from us. Since our platform doesn’t have an integrated email system, we export this data and upload it to Mailchimp for email communications.

2. Target Group n.2 (Other Email Lists): In addition to the candidates, we have multiple smaller lists (ranging from 20 to 500 people) in Mailchimp for other purposes, such as project updates and various communications.

3. Target Group n.3 (Customers): We implemented HubSpot to manage customer relationships and have about 1,500 customer records in the system.

Challenges:

• We need a way to efficiently manage these separate lists and ensure smooth communication with each target group.

• While the in-house platform for candidates (Target Group n.1) cannot be modified, I would like to find ways to track additional information about candidates and improve our communication with them.

• We also want to consolidate the data from Mailchimp and HubSpot for better segmentation and personalization.

• Eventually, we aim to build a unified platform that combines the candidate data from the in-house system, customer records from HubSpot, and information from external platforms like LinkedIn.

Questions:

1. Integration and Data Sync: What’s the best way to integrate our in-house platform for candidates with HubSpot? Are there any tools or workflows that would allow us to pull in candidate data automatically and track additional information?

2. Segmentation & Communication: How can we best segment our candidates (Target Group n.1) within HubSpot, especially since we’re currently using Mailchimp for email distribution? Is there a way to streamline this process to reduce manual work and improve communication targeting?

3. Data Enrichment: Are there any tools or strategies you would recommend for enriching candidate profiles with additional information, particularly from external sources like LinkedIn?

4. Long-Term Solution: As we scale, how can we ensure our data and systems remain efficient and flexible? Should we consider migrating all lists (including Mailchimp) into HubSpot, or is there a better way to manage this without losing data integrity?

I appreciate any advice or best practices you can share to help us improve our processes and make our system more efficient.

I am open to possible collaboration to help us setting-up this process. Thank you in advance for your help!

[DanSchwarz · Accepted solution]

Hi MMorganti,

I'm a recent Hubspot user, set it up for my company a few months ago. I don't have solutions to most of what you're asking about, but one part caught my eye.

You say you have group n.2, a set of smaller list of emails for Mailchimp, and you said you want to "consolidate the data from Mailchimp and HubSpot". I have the same problem.

We have a tool called everyrow.io/merge to do joins and dedupes across different lists of contacts, where the names and emails don't always match. I wrote it up here: https://futuresearch.ai/merge-hubspot-contacts. We export our data to CSV / Sheets, do the merge & dedupe, and then upload the clean data to Hubspot.

This helped us because we had different sourcing systems but we didn't want to send people multiple emails, and with lists of about ~1k it was too much to do by hand, especially as we generate new contacts in the different systems frequently, which it sounds like you might do as well.

I hope this helps with that part.

-Dan

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community @MMorganti! The nice thing about HubSpot is that it's a platform, which means integrations abound. However, as a longtime user myself, I've found that the more you can house in HubSpot, the better. So I'm curious about the separation of prospects in Mailchimp and customers in HubSpot? Is there a reason all of your contacts, regardless of where they are in their journey, can't live in HubSpot? 

In the meantime, if the answer is no they simply can't, then here are a few thoughts for your questions. If your goal is to use HubSpot for segmentation and contact intelligence, while continuing to send via Mailchimp, here's what I might try. 

You can use the official HubSpot–Mailchimp integration / data sync to keep lists aligned. Data Hub Data Sync (Mailchimp connector) can handle 2‑way contact data sync, mapped properties, and list membership. You'd want to define one or two “primary segments” in HubSpot (“All active candidates”, “Candidates for Oncology projects”) that sync to specific Mailchimp audiences or groups.
​

In HubSpot, build segments using lists and custom object associations:

• Active candidates by specialty, experience, or project: list of contacts where the associated Candidate object has properties such as therapy area = X, status = Active, etc.
• Behavior‑based segments: candidates who opened at least 3 emails in 90 days, clicked project updates, visited certain pages (if you can put the tracking code on your candidate‑facing pages or emails).

​Then push those HubSpot segments into Mailchimp and let Mailchimp handle template and delivery, while HubSpot holds the intelligence and relationship history.

Now, for the data enrichment question. Your candidates are knowledge workers; enrichment gives you better targeting and matching for projects.

First, you can use HubSpot’s built‑in enrichment. They've been rolling out free enrichment capabilities (company revenue, industry, job title, etc.) that can auto‑fill missing data for contacts and companies. Configure Enrichment Settings to enrich new candidates on creation or when certain workflows trigger.
​

Alternatively, third‑party enrichment for LinkedIn and firmographics like ZoomInfo can pull in social profiles, job titles, company details, etc., and keep them updated when people change roles. Clay and similar tools can also ingest LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches and push enriched leads into HubSpot (often via iPaaS or native connectors).
​

Since this isn't something I've done a ton, I looked up best practices on how to structure enrichment. Here's what I found from HubSpot and LinkedIn resources. 

• Store LinkedIn and other social URLs as properties on the Contact and optionally on the Candidate object (e.g., “Primary LinkedIn profile”).
• Enrichment workflow pattern in HubSpot:
  • Trigger on: new Candidate object created OR Contact added with candidate flag = true.
  • Step 1: call enrichment tool (via integration) to get social, firmographic, and seniority data.
  • Step 2: map only “approved” fields into HubSpot to avoid overwriting curated internal notes.

​This should support better matching (like by therapeutic area, publication history, seniority, region) without touching the in‑house platform.

I hope that helps inspire some thoughts around what you're trying to accomplish. Again, I would work toward migrating into HubSpot if possible for more accurate reporting. 

[MMorganti]

Hi Dan, thanks for your extensive answer.
The answer is simple. Mailchimp costs a 10th of HubSpot and if I only send them mails there is no need to move them all to hubspot. Sorry! 

Another story if there were more functions - then it would make sense.
I don't have good experiences with the enrichment functionalities from HubSpot. They are expensive and not accurate. But I also didn't use them a lot.

[chighsmith]

Thank you @MMorganti for sharing your feedback! 

Your experience is really important to us, and we want to ensure you get the right value for what you, and all of our customers, need. We have submitted your feedback to our team!

Cassie, Community Manager

[BérangèreL]

Thanks so much @danmoyle for these incredible insights!!! 🧡

[danmoyle]

@BérangèreL always happy to help!

[DanSchwarz · Accepted solution]

Hi MMorganti,

I'm a recent Hubspot user, set it up for my company a few months ago. I don't have solutions to most of what you're asking about, but one part caught my eye.

You say you have group n.2, a set of smaller list of emails for Mailchimp, and you said you want to "consolidate the data from Mailchimp and HubSpot". I have the same problem.

We have a tool called everyrow.io/merge to do joins and dedupes across different lists of contacts, where the names and emails don't always match. I wrote it up here: https://futuresearch.ai/merge-hubspot-contacts. We export our data to CSV / Sheets, do the merge & dedupe, and then upload the clean data to Hubspot.

This helped us because we had different sourcing systems but we didn't want to send people multiple emails, and with lists of about ~1k it was too much to do by hand, especially as we generate new contacts in the different systems frequently, which it sounds like you might do as well.

I hope this helps with that part.

-Dan

[BérangèreL]

Hi @MMorganti  and thank you so much for sharing the details of your process and your goals with the HubSpot Community!

This is exactly the type of collaborative question that makes our community thrive, thank you!

I'd love to put you in touch with our Top Experts: Hi @danmoyle, @HubDoPete and @TomM2 do you have any insights to share with @MMorganti, please?

Thanks so much in advance for your valuable suggestions and I wish you all a fantastic day!
Bérangère