Fetcher, a sourcing automation platform that helps talent acquisition leaders make the candidate outreach process more efficient, needed to build integrations with applicant tracking systems (ATS) that their customers used to store candidate information.

The team began by building a few popular integrations in-house to meet two primary use cases: candidate deduping, or preventing Fetcher from sending duplicate profiles that already existed in customer systems, and enabling Fetcher to push qualified candidates into their clients' ATS solutions.

Their first integrations “were typically dependent on the customers we were working with and how quickly we could get an integration set up,” says Taylor Bold, Product Manager at Fetcher. But building in-house was difficult due to partnerships and needing significant engineering resources to build and maintain APIs. After four to five integrations including Greenhouse and Lever, and pressure from sales, the Fetcher team decided that they needed to find an alternative path or risk not being able to retain customers and grow the company.

“Over time, we had the question of spinning up an entire team to build integrations, or finding a partner who could help us scale fast.” That’s when the team landed on Merge.

The Fetcher team looked at a number of other unified API providers but landed on Merge because of the breadth and depth of integration with applicant tracking systems. “There was also no way we’d be able to offer 25 integrations with the number of engineers that we had,” says Bold. “We knew there were other integration providers out there, but between the number of integrations available with applicant tracking systems specifically, the ease of use of the Merge platform, and the ease of integration – it made sense to us.”

With Merge, the team was able to return focus to building the core Fetcher product, and continue providing value to customers by making sourcing as automated as possible. Within weeks, Fetcher was able to offer ATS integrations including Ashby, Workable, Breezy, and Recruiterflow. The team also took advantage of the Merge Dashboard, Integrations Management features, and Merge docs to monitor performance and manage their integrations.

“The Merge Dashboard is really easy to use. We use the dashboard for troubleshooting, to make sure that data is being synced properly, and that we’re getting good API responses from Fetcher to Merge, and Merge to our customer applicant tracking systems. It’s been really helpful for our support and engineering teams.”

By using Merge, Fetcher has been able to provide an improved customer experience, and scale fast despite broad economic headwinds.

“Merge has definitely allowed us to scale our integrations faster with integration partners, specifically in closing new business with customers who need specific integrations, and being able to retain customers with integrations.” says Bold.

Approximately 30 percent of Fetcher customers who use an ATS use Merge today. Merge also supports Fetcher in competitive differentiation. According to Bold, “Integrations are a competitive necessity. If you’re not able to integrate experiences together, it’s really difficult to gain traction with customers who may already have an existing ecosystem of products they work with.”

A huge part of the Fetcher experience with Merge has been having “an awesome, responsive support team and amazing documentation.” Both teams stay close on what integrations Fetcher’s customers are prioritizing. “Working together, we’ve been able to identify key points of integrations that help us gain new business or retain new business.”