Welcome to another first edition of “startup spotlight”, a content series that gives you the inside scoop on how startups build, market, sell, and support their customer-facing integrations. 

Today we’re highlighting Assemble, a compensation management platform that allows HR teams to manage employees’ compensation cycles, recruitment, and more.

You can read on to hear directly from Ethan Welty, a Product Growth, Marketing, and Strategy Senior Associate at Assemble. He’ll share why they needed integrations for their product, how they’ve gone about building them, how they market and price them, and more! 

1. Why does Assemble need integrations?

HRIS and ATS integrations are foundational to our platform—especially the former.

Integrating with clients’ HRIS systems allows our platform to gather all the employee data our clients need (full names, job titles, salaries, equity packages, etc.) to make informed and timely compensation decisions. More specifically, our clients can compare the compensation data that’s synced over with the benchmarks they’ve assigned to a given role, enabling them to decide who needs a raise and by how much.

All the while, integrating with ATS solutions allows our clients’ recruiters to automatically pull data from their ATS for a given candidate and use that data to populate the candidate’s offer letter.

2. Can you walk me through Assemble’s journey in building integrations?

We decided early on that we needed to outsource our customer-facing integrations.

There are simply too many HRIS and ATS integrations we need to build and as a startup, we simply can't afford to have our engineers implement and maintain them; our engineers needed to be fully immersed in building out and improving our core product features and capabilities.

We began evaluating embedded iPaaS and unified API solutions and decided that Merge—through its broad set of HRIS and ATS integrations and intuitive tooling to manage them—was the best solution for our product.

3. How does Assemble market its integrations?

We host all of our integrations on a single landing page and make the page highly accessible through our “Platform” tab on our homepage. 

We’ve also made it easy for our prospects and clients to find the specific integrations they're interested in on the page itself. Visitors can find a search bar at the top along with filters for specific software categories. 

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4. How does Assemble sell its integrations?

Our sales reps ask prospects about the HRIS and ATS solutions they use during demo calls. And since Merge allows us to integrate with nearly every HRIS and ATS solution, our sales reps can tell prospects that we integrate with their systems. 

Allowing our sales reps to say “yes, we integrate with your HRIS and ATS solutions,” lets us move deals across the finish line faster and more often.

We’ve also decided to bake integrations into our pricing. Our thought process here is that since these integrations are so critical to our clients adopting Assemble and enjoying their experience on the platform, they’ll be more likely to renew if they use them. These additional renewals will surpass the costs of providing integrations, especially as our client base scales.

5. How does Assemble support its integrations?

I’m fully responsible for auditing our integrations’ health and resolving issues whenever they arise. 

This involves logging into my Merge Dashboard every day and reviewing how our 30+ integrations across our client base are performing. 

I’m able to pinpoint and diagnose most issues quickly as well as share Merge's suggested remediations. And for more complex issues, I can lean on Merge’s customer success team for timely guidance and support. 

‍Learn more about how Assemble uses Merge to build flexible HRIS and ATS integrations at scale by reading their case study.