The Context

Workwise.io is a job platform from Germany that connects job seekers with employers. The company streamlines the hiring process for both candidates and companies, fostering frictionless recruitment in the European job market.

For a recruitment company like Workwise, where part of the main value-proposition is adding structure to chaos, a great customer experience is core to their business model and a priority for the product team to constantly improve the way they work with their partners.

In Workwise’s case, a great experience also means integrating directly with their customers’ Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) to enable a streamlined exchange of job descriptions, applications created, and candidate milestones in the hiring process.

The Challenge

An inefficient customer experience that relied on manual work on both sides.

A big chunk of Workwise’s customer base was already using an ATS (albeit a different one for most) and so integrating directly with those ATSs became a priority for the team to streamline the hiring experience as much as possible.

To build each of these integrations themselves, however, turns out to be a laborious and inefficient endeavor, as it takes hundreds of engineering hours from building the product to building the infrastructure on which the product can run.

Before using Kombo, Workwise built a few integrations in-house, but quickly realized the effort of:

• waiting months to get a sandbox access
• taking weeks worth of time from their engineering team
• being on-guard for sudden changes in requirements, systems breaking — all in all maintenance

was not justified, as integrations were not their core functionality. The topic, therefore, always ended up deprioritized due to lack of capacity, although it was a pressing issue in everyone’s mind.

We had a chat with Alessa Fleischer, Project Manager at Workwise, who walked us through their challenges of building integrations in-house.

The customer experience (for customers whose ATS we did not support) before using Kombo involved constantly sending lists with applicants’ names, having someone double-check it, leading to a lot of extra time for us and our customers, because we could not keep up with integrating with all the tools ourselves.
— Alessa Fleischer, Product Manager

The Decision

Adding 22+ ATS integrations out of the box with Kombo.

We looked at our backlog of 30+ requested ATS integrations coming from our sales team and decided it was not worth it for us to build and maintain all the integrations internally, as it took far too much engineering capacity. Continuing with the status quo was no longer an option, as it was hurting our customer user experience and growth potential and we wanted to give our customers a scalable solution.
— Alessa Fleischer, Product Manager

The alternative to building in-house?

Outsourcing integrations to an external unified API, and focusing on their core product.

We had multiple conversations with Kombo’s leadership team and were convinced by the sheer passion and expertise they have built in the talent acquisition space. Not only did they understand our problem in detail, but we were able to share industry-wide expertise on how the recruiting market is developing.
— Alessa Fleischer, Product Manager

The Outcome

A superior customer and candidate experience.

With newly-added integrations in their toolkit, Workwise improved their processes on two fronts:

• For their customers – hundreds of hours saved, a seamless experience, and the peace of mind that Workwise can now connect new systems upon request with Kombo
  From sending candidate lists back and forth to a smooth journey that does not rely on any manual input but offers a quick solution to create candidates, receive applications, and get back to them, all while maintaining highest data privacy requirements.

• For the candidates – a shorter time-to-hire
  Each job board or recruiting company is competing for relevant candidates, so ensuring a short journey from “Application” to “Response” is crucial. Before using Kombo’s unified API, it took up to several days to transfer candidate data from Workwise’s system to their customers’ so the candidate can get a response. Now, that feedback loop can be instant as the data is transferred seamlessly from one system to the other.

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As of their experience working with Kombo?

We chose Kombo because they are experts in ATS integrations, and we stayed because it was not only leadership that lives and breathes ATS integrations. Their entire support and customer success team has proven to be knowledgeable, quick to answer our questions and solve issues, and reliable from implementation to the day-to-day.
— Alessa Fleischer, Product Manager

We are inspired by working with Workwise and witnessing the immense improvements in customer experience they enabled since the beginning of our partnership.

They are also just getting started, with a roadmap full of exploring all that Kombo can do to further enhance the benefits of out-of-the-box integrations.

That includes syncing data in their platform as a source of truth, automatically importing job descriptions from the ATS, and receiving hiring signals back.

If you’re interested in leveraging similar use cases for your company as well, we’d love to get in touch and explore how Kombo can support with your integration journey too.

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