What does it take for a 50-person Series A startup to land a roster of Fortune 500 clients? One engineer, one universal calendar API, and a healthy dose of hustle is a good place to start.
An all-in-one hiring system, applicant tracking, and recruiting platform helps companies around the world hire hourly workers at scale using self-service interview booking, automation, machine learning, and customizable workflows. In just a few years, they’ve grown to power hiring solutions for industry leaders in grocery and e-commerce.
Using Nylas, this fast-growing recruiting platform revamped its scheduling features, going from proof of concept to production in a matter of weeks.
Building a contextual scheduling feature
No interview exists in a vacuum. When candidates book interviews, they’re choosing a block of time surrounded by other work meetings or personal plans. The company wanted its scheduling system to work in harmony with its users’ whole schedule.
The company set out to build a scheduling feature that operated as a single source of truth, showing users interviews in the context of their personal and work calendars.
It took the company one internal hackathon, one engineer, and the Nylas Calendar API to build the scheduling feature they had in mind, uniting users’ calendars regardless of their calendar platform.
Moving from idea to production in no time
“Making fast changes and being able to iterate quickly is core to our business,” says a product manager at the company. “Nylas is the fastest way to get interoperability with all of the different calendar providers. We went from idea to execution in a couple days.”
The prototype the company built at their internal hackathon accomplished exactly what they hoped it would, instantly syncing users’ external calendars with in-app calendar events using a React frontend and Ruby on Rails backend.
The recruiting platform’s Nylas integration changes the way users interact with their service for the better. Now, users don’t have to bounce from one calendar to the other, double checking if they’re double booked. The ATS delivers context directly to their calendar.
Speed to market delivered with one API
The recruiting platform’s scheduling has to work because they’re on a fast-paced work schedule of their own. The difference between being competitive and beating the competition is measured in sprints and development cycles. The company wants to make the most out of each moment.
Nylas brought together a disparate network of calendar platforms, making all of them easily programmable using one API. Instead of spending valuable time building scheduling integrations for each provider, the recruiting platform built one integration for all platforms.
“Using individual APIs would have taken three times longer,” says the product manager, adding that alternative API providers wouldn’t have supported smaller calendar platforms that our customers rely on. With Nylas, the company can ship fast without compromising the breadth of calendar coverage.
“We could iterate on our internal view of the calendar without worrying how it integrates with outside providers. We know very little about how Outlook 365 works, but our customers are using that calendar system and it’s integrated to our product via Nylas. This allows us to offload that knowledge to Nylas and not have to worry about how Microsoft’s product works, or any of the other myriad of calendar providers.”
After bringing their Nylas integration into its users’ hands, the company logged fewer feature requests simply because they built the feature users had requested. The amount of time users spend using the company’s scheduling solution has also dropped. It now takes users less time to view, modify and manage appointments because their service is more streamlined.
Success at scale with Nylas
The recruiting platform is taking the time they saved with Nylas and putting it to work. The team is focused on aggressive international expansion, as well as leveraging AI to build smart scheduling that recommends appointment times or automatically rejects appointments that conflict with either user’s schedule.
On the Nylas platform, the company knows they can expand with confidence and continue to serve everyone from early stage startups to SMBs to the enterprise.
“Scheduling will be a core part of our product no matter what company is using us, Nylas just makes that scheduling a little bit easier.”
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