Windmill is an AI-powered performance management platform that automates performance reviews and other common feedback workflows by using real-time insights from work tools like Slack, Linear, and Hubspot.

To power every feedback workflow, from pulse surveys to 1:1s to semi-annual performance reviews, Windmill relies on employee data from customers’ HRIS applications.

"We need org charts from customers’ HRISs to power nearly every part of our product. For example, if a manager asks our AI agent, ‘Windy,’ to send their team a pulse survey, Windy would need to know who reports to that manager,” explains Max Shaw, a co-founder of Windmill.

But building integrations with customers’ HRISs and syncing hierarchical data, along with other types of employee data, like full names, job titles, and departments, proved difficult.

According to Max:

“Many HRISs have API documentation that’s decades old and no longer useful. Some HRIS providers even require us to enter into a partnershipship before building to their API, which could take months. Couple this with the fact that our customer base uses dozens of HRISs, and it was clear we needed to outsource our HRIS integrations.” 

Once Max and his team decided to outsource their HRIS integrations, they evaluated Merge against another unified API player, StackOne.

"Merge offers several security features that enable us to provide more secure integrations than what’s possible with StackOne. For example, Merge offers fine-grained controls on the objects and fields that can be synced with our platform. Since HRISs often deal with PII, this is table stakes for us.”

Max explains further: 

“Merge’s level of support is miles ahead of what StackOne offers. Everyone we’ve interacted with at Merge is not only extremely knowledgeable of integrations and our use case but also act with urgency every time we reach out.”

After integrating with Merge’s HRIS Unified API in roughly a week, Windmill was able to offer integrations with over 50 HRIS providers, including Paylocity, Gusto, BambooHR, and ADP. 

Here's how Windmill’s Merge-powered HRIS integrations work:

1. A logged in user would navigate to “Integrations” and select “Org Chart” in the dropdown to see all of the HRISs they can integrate with.

2. Once the user selects an HRIS they’d like to connect to, Merge Link, a UI component, appears. It provides all of the steps the user would need to follow to authenticate the connection.

3. Once the integration is set up successfully, Windmill syncs a wide range of data on an hourly basis. This includes employees’ full names, job titles, departments (or groups), and managers.

Here are just a few ways that this integrated employee data supports Windmill’s AI agent, Windy, and the platform as a whole.

• Continuous feedback: Windy can use the HRIS data to ask employees for feedback intelligently. For example, Windy can determine when an employee is working with a colleague from another team and ask the employee how the collaboration is going

• Pulse surveys: Windy can help people managers gather feedback on team offsites by polling their direct reports for ideas in an app like Slack. And Windy can use the integrated hierarchical data to determine who, exactly, should be polled for a given people manager

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• Team reviews: When people managers want to see what their team is working on, the integrated HRIS data ensures that all of their direct reports are included in a single view and their personal and professional information is up to date

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Windmill estimates that building the first HRIS integration would have been the most time consuming (as it’d also require them to build the data model between their platform and customers’ HRISs). But each subsequent integration would still take at least two weeks.

Max adds more context on how Merge has helped accelerate Windmill’s time to market:

“It would have taken our team 6 months to build the same number of HRIS integrations that we added with Merge in just a week. This means we’ve been able to launch integrations 24x faster with Merge.”

In addition, Max and his team have been able to form partnerships with enterprise HRISs significantly faster with Merge, which have not only let them integrate with these HRISs but also engage in impactful co-marketing activities with them.  

Max offers up just one of several examples: “Our Gusto partnership was approved in just a few weeks with the help of Merge. If we tried to navigate this process ourselves, it would have taken us months, if not years.”

The ability to sync a wide range of HRIS data frequently and without issues has also been pivotal for their AI agent.

“Like any AI agent, ours requires as much relevant, up-to-date data as possible. Merge’s HRIS integrations meet these requirements to a tee, which allows our agent, Windy, to consistently make accurate and impactful decisions on behalf of people managers.”

Last but not least, Merge made it easy for Windmill’s sellers to close more deals. 

“Thanks to Merge, We can say ‘yes’ to every HRIS integration request during sales conversations. That alone increased our close rate by 30%”, says Brian Distelburger, Windmill’s other co-founder.

Looking ahead, Windmill is exploring Merge’s other integration categories.

“We’re currently evaluating Merge’s ATS integrations with the idea that candidate data could give people managers and our AI agent helpful context as they onboard and work with new hires.”

We look forward to elevating the cutting-edge performance management platform even further in the years ahead.