Underneath
“Integrated” is a claim. “Required” is a constraint.
Any two products can be made to exchange records. The question is what happens on the day somebody imports a spreadsheet, or a nightly job fails quietly, or two people are merged — because that is when a convention stops being true and nobody is told.
Enforced
The link is not optional, and it was made compulsory carefully.
A candidate, a contact and an employee each must point at a person. The database refuses a record that does not — and that requirement was switched on only after verifying there were no gaps, in a way that would have failed loudly rather than quietly if there had been.
Sixteen different parts of the product resolve through the same path. Which is what makes this a property of the system rather than a habit of whoever wrote the last feature.
- Matching understands how email actually works —
Dots are not significant at some providers and are at others; a plus-alias is the same person at some and not others. Each is a rule, because the alternative is a duplicate nobody can explain.
- Profile links are canonicalised —
Locale prefixes and tracking parameters stripped, so the same person saved from two countries is one person.
- Nothing merges on its own —
An exact match on an address, a number or a profile resolves immediately. Anything less confident is queued for a person — stated as a rule in the code, not left as a preference.
- The same pair cannot queue twice —
However the two records happen to be ordered when they are compared.
- A failed check never blocks a save —
The record is created and the failure logged. Nobody is stopped from entering a customer because a background check had a bad moment.
Merging
Field by field, with an exact undo for thirty days.
Choose the survivor per field across seventeen of them. The merge records exactly which links and which history entries it moved, which is what makes the undo an undo rather than an approximation.
Past thirty days it refuses by name rather than offering a button that quietly does nothing.
- An erasure request reaches every role —
Because the subject is the human, not whichever record you happened to open. And somebody under legal hold is skipped, deliberately.
- Who you already know at a company falls out of it —
Because the relationship was recorded somewhere else in the business.
›Does linking the records share their permissions?
No. The person record links the roles; what anybody can see is still decided per record by the ordinary visibility rules.
›Is the timeline unified across every module?
Not yet — today it reflects the commercial side, and the recruiting and HR projections are written but not switched on. The record spans all three; the timeline over it does not yet. Worth knowing precisely, because it is the thing most likely to be assumed.
›Does merging two contacts merge the people behind them?
No, and the difference matters. Those are two different merges. Do the person merge when it is genuinely the same human.
›Who can see the unified view?
It is an administrative surface by default rather than something every rep holds. Grant it deliberately.