What the HiBob connection does
Connecting HiBob to ReFresh keeps your workforce data in one place without re-keying it. Once connected, ReFresh can bring in:
People: your employees and their details (see the full list below).
Org structure: your HiBob departments and sites, mapped into ReFresh groups, with each person placed in the right team.
Two principles apply to everything the connection does:
Sync is one-way (HiBob to ReFresh). ReFresh reads from HiBob and never writes back to it. HiBob stays your source of truth.
Sync is preview-first. Every sync shows you exactly what will be added, updated, or removed, and nothing is applied until you review and confirm it.
What gets imported
People
Name, work email, and profile photo
Job title and department
Manager and reporting line (your org chart)
Employment status (active, on leave, contractor, intern, and so on)
Hire date, office location, and working hours
Privacy by default: ReFresh stores only First Name, Last Name, Email, and Job Title unless an employee explicitly consents to share more. See Setting up and managing HRIS sync.
Org structure
From HiBob | Becomes in ReFresh |
Departments | Department groups (hierarchy preserved) |
Sites | Location groups |
Department and site combinations | Teams |
Before you start
You are an Admin in ReFresh.
You are an Admin in HiBob, able to install a marketplace app (or authorise it on your organisation's behalf).
The connection requests permission to read employee data and your company lists (departments and sites).
Connecting HiBob
There are two ways to connect, depending on where you start. Both end in the same place: a connected HiBob integration in ReFresh.
Option A: Connect from ReFresh (recommended)
In ReFresh, open the Integrations page.
Find the HiBob card and select Connect.
You are taken to HiBob to authorise the connection. Sign in to HiBob if prompted.
Review the permissions, choose which employees ReFresh may access (the employee audience), and approve.
HiBob returns you to ReFresh and the HiBob integration now shows as Connected.
Option B: Install from the HiBob Marketplace
You can also start in HiBob.
Sign in to ReFresh first: Before you install from the HiBob Marketplace, make sure you are already signed in to ReFresh in the same browser. The install finishes by linking the connection to your ReFresh organisation, so it needs your active session.
In the HiBob Marketplace, find the ReFresh app and select Install.
Consent to the permissions and choose the employee audience.
You are sent to ReFresh, where the connection completes automatically and is linked to your organisation.
Choose what syncs
In the sync workspace, HiBob can act as two kinds of source, and you turn on each one:
User source: brings in your people.
Group source: brings in your departments and sites as groups.
Enable both to import your workforce and your org structure. Set HiBob's priority to the highest so its employment data is treated as authoritative when more than one source is connected.
Run your first sync
Do these in order: your group structure should exist before people are placed into it.
1. Import your org structure (Group Sync)
Open the sync workspace and go to the Groups tab.
Enable HiBob as a group source if prompted.
Select Preview. ReFresh reads your HiBob departments and sites and shows the group tree it will build.
Review the proposed groups. ReFresh flags where an incoming HiBob group matches an existing ReFresh group (a merge) rather than creating a duplicate, and it works out each person's group membership from their HiBob department and site.
Select Apply.
2. Import your people (User Sync)
Go to the Users tab.
Enable HiBob as a user source, and set its priority to the highest.
Select Preview. ReFresh fetches all the employees in your chosen audience and shows who will be added, updated, or removed, along with the details it will bring in for each person.
Review and select Apply.
Once applied, synced people flow through the rest of ReFresh: they appear in your employee list and groups, on the org chart, and as available recipients for surveys.
3. Check the org chart
Open the Org Chart tab and confirm reporting lines resolved correctly. ReFresh links each person to their manager by email.
Keeping data in sync
Your workforce changes, and ReFresh picks those changes up the next time a sync runs.
When you make changes in HiBob, such as:
adding a new employee, editing an employee's details, or changing their location,
terminating an employee,
creating a new site, renaming a site, or archiving a site
the next Preview shows exactly those changes as add, update, or remove entries. Review and Apply, and a following preview comes back clean with nothing left to apply.
To reduce manual runs, per connection you can enable:
Auto-sync: ReFresh refreshes from HiBob on a schedule instead of you previewing and applying each time.
Auto-deactivate: an employee removed or terminated in HiBob is deactivated in ReFresh automatically.
Which fields HiBob controls
By default HiBob manages first name, last name, job title, and department. These appear locked on employee records, marked Managed by HiBob, so a sync is not overwritten by a manual edit. You can change which fields HiBob manages per employee.
What the HiBob connection does not do
No writeback. Changes you make in ReFresh are never pushed back to HiBob; the sync is one-way.
No real-time updates (yet). ReFresh updates when a sync runs, manually or on your auto-sync schedule, rather than the instant a change is made in HiBob. Live, event-driven sync (webhooks) is a planned improvement.
Disconnecting or uninstalling
Disconnecting starts in HiBob. The app must be uninstalled from the HiBob Marketplace first, and ReFresh then stops reading your data once you confirm it. ReFresh cannot remove the app from HiBob for you, so it can't be uninstalled from the ReFresh side alone.
In the HiBob Marketplace, open the ReFresh app and uninstall it.
In ReFresh, open the Integrations page and select Disconnect on the HiBob card.
In the Uninstall from HiBob dialog, tick I have uninstalled the app in HiBob, then select Remove from ReFresh.
Once confirmed, the connection ends and ReFresh stops reading from HiBob. Already-synced people and groups remain in ReFresh; they simply stop updating. To reconnect later, run through the connect flow again.
Changing permissions: HiBob does not allow editing an installed app's permissions in place. To change what ReFresh can access, uninstall the app in HiBob and reinstall it; reinstalling updates the existing connection rather than creating a duplicate.
Troubleshooting
Some employees did not import
Check the employee audience you selected during install; ReFresh can only see the employees you granted access to. Also confirm those people are active in HiBob. Terminated employees are normally excluded.
My departments or sites did not come through as groups
Make sure HiBob is enabled as a group source and that you ran the Groups sync before the Users sync. Re-run the Group Sync preview.
Reporting lines are missing
ReFresh links managers by email. If a manager's email in HiBob does not match their imported ReFresh record, the reporting line will not resolve. Confirm manager emails are populated in HiBob.
The connection says it expired or stopped syncing
HiBob access tokens are short-lived and ReFresh refreshes them automatically. If sync is still failing, reconnect the app: uninstall it in the HiBob Marketplace, confirm the removal in ReFresh, then run through the connect flow again.
For general sync problems, see Troubleshooting HRIS sync.