The Business Problem

In many organizations, offer letters must present a full salary breakdown — Cost to Company (CTC), Basic salary, HRA, and Special Allowance — each derived from the gross CTC using pre-defined calculation logic. SmartRecruiter, as a standard product, does not natively support this on-the-fly salary computation. Recruiting stakeholders are left to manually populate individual salary components, which introduces risk of error and inconsistency.

The requirement is straightforward: when a recruiter enters the CTC for a candidate, the system should automatically calculate the salary components and pre-populate the offer fields — without any manual intervention and without a custom build inside SmartRecruiter.

Solution Overview

The solution leverages the Webhook capability native to SmartRecruiter and the orchestration power of SAP Integration Suite. The approach is event-driven: when a recruiter updates the CTC field (or moves a candidate to the next stage), a webhook fires and triggers an integration flow in CPI that performs the salary calculation and upserts the results back to SmartRecruiter via REST APIs.

Webhook Setup

Two webhook events are subscribed to in SmartRecruiter to cover both update scenarios:

• application.fields.updated — fires when a field value on an application is changed
• application.status.updated — fires when the candidate is moved to a new stage

Either event reliably signals that the CTC may have been updated and that the calculation should run. The webhook payload carries the candidate ID and job requisition ID, which are used as keys in subsequent API call

Step 1 — Configuration in SmartRecruiter

Custom Application Fields

CTC –

HRA –

Similarly define other pay components required for calculations –

CTC as application field.

Rest of pay components as offer fields.

For ex – Four custom fields are configured in SmartRecruiter to hold the salary components:

• CTC — Gross Cost to Company (input field; marked as mandatory for the recruiter to populate)
• HRA — House Rent Allowance (output; auto-populated via CPI)
• Basic — Basic Salary (output; auto-populated via CPI)
• Special Allowance — (output; auto-populated via CPI)

Since CTC is the trigger field, it is set as mandatory. The recruiting stakeholder is instructed to update CTC either at the application stage or when moving the candidate to the offer stage.

Recruiting stakeholder fills the value of CTC field –

Step 2 — Retrieving the CTC Value from SmartRecruiter

How Fields Are Stored in SmartRecruiter

In SmartRecruiter, custom fields are represented as candidate properties — effectively key-value pairs attached to the candidate entity. Each field has a unique Property ID (UUID) that is referenced in API calls.

Retrieving Candidate Properties

To retrieve all property values for a candidate, including the CTC field, the following GET request is used:

How to retrieve the CTC value – 

Step 3 — Salary Calculation in SAP Integration Suite (CPI)

Once the webhook fires and the CPI iFlow is triggered, the integration flow performs the following sequence:

• Extracts the candidate ID and job requisition ID from the webhook payload
• Calls the SmartRecruiter properties API to fetch the current CTC value for the candidate
• Applies the pre-configured salary calculation logic within the Groovy script or message mapping step in CPI
• Derives HRA, Basic, and Special Allowance values from the CTC
• Prepares the upsert payload with the computed values

Integration Note

The calculation logic (e.g., percentage splits for HRA, Basic, Special Allowance) is externalized in CPI and can be adjusted without touching SmartRecruiter configuration. This keeps the business rules in a governed, version-controlled integration layer.

Step 4 — Upserting Calculated Values Back to SmartRecruiter

With the calculated salary components ready, CPI writes the values back to the SmartRecruiter candidate record using a PUT/PATCH call scoped to both the candidate and the specific job requisition:

The payload specifies each Property ID and its newly calculated value. All three output fields — HRA, Basic, and Special Allowance — are upserted in a single call.

Step 5 — Verifying the Results

After the upsert, a GET call to the candidate properties endpoint confirms that the calculated values are now stored correctly:

Step 6 — Creating the Offer in SmartRecruiter

Once the candidate properties are populated, the recruiter proceeds to create the formal offer letter inside SmartRecruiter. Because the salary components have already been written to the candidate record, the offer template picks them up automatically — the recruiter sees pre-populated values for all compensation fields, including Special Allowance, without any manual calculation.

Handling Renegotiation Scenarios

Real-world recruiting frequently involves renegotiation. If a candidate requests a revised offer, the flow handles this gracefully:

• The candidate is moved back to the Offered stage (this can be done programmatically via the SmartRecruiter API)
• The recruiting stakeholder updates the CTC value
• The stage change or field update automatically fires the webhook again
• CPI recalculates all salary components and upserts the new values to SmartRecruiter
• A new offer is created with the revised compensation breakdown