EmployUS referral system employs Flatfile for imports

The challenge

EmployUS is a venture-backed startup that manages an automated candidate referral system for businesses. They improve both the quality and quantity of incoming applicants and hires for their customers. Prospective customers, often large enterprises, had the data needed to power EmployUs’s referral service, but that data was locked away in legacy systems. That often meant halting product development efforts and building one-off integrations for each new prospect.

Matt Cotter, CTO and Co-founder of EmployUS: “We found that every time we said the word “integration”, eight to twelve other people had to join the conversation that wouldn’t otherwise have to be a part of the buying decision.“

Every customer requesting a new integration with a different applicant tracking system (ATS) meant more updates to EmployUs’ codebase, more review cycles, and less time building a better referral system. It wasn’t sustainable. Having identified this, EmployUS decided to explore how they could move away from bespoke integrations with ATS and towards a more efficient, repeatable solution.

Matt: “My first instinct is to always build it. But my cofounder found Flatfile and asked me to test it out. I got it set up in 30 minutes and told him ‘yeah, we’re using this."

Matt is no stranger to building integrations, having previously toiled on a custom data importer for a similar business. That project involved building a CSV importer that attempted to resolve a myriad of encoding issues. The ultimate solution put the burden of work on the end-user, with dozens of FAQ documents outlining how to import their particular document into the application.

Matt: “I’ve built a data importer before. After weeks of development time we still ran into bugs, and our users had to slog through a massive FAQ. It was a full-time job for a full team! Compare that to Flatfile, which took us less than a day to implement. And it’s powerful! Our users love it.”

After configuring and testing a proof-of-concept implementation, Matt integrated Flatfile into EmployUs’ product on a Friday afternoon. By Monday, they had deployed it to all their customers. With Flatfile integrated into their client-facing solution, the team found it so easy to use that they also added the importer to their own admin portal.

Matt: “Behind the scenes, we have to migrate data from legacy customers to a new customer in a new system. Flatfile takes in a bunch of random fields, converts it to JSON, and I can pipe it through our normal functions.”

And how is it working out for EmployUs’ clients?

Matt: “Now we have no barrier for them to get started: they can always create a CSV document they want, import the users, import their jobs, update them. It’s easy.”

Internally, the EmployUs no longer needs to toil over complex app integrations, and can now focus even more on their customers.

Matt: “We’ve replaced most of our integrations with CSV importing now. We give the entire functionality of an integration to the customer without having to address every minute edge case.”

Success stories like EmployUS's are the reason we built Flatfile.io. Saving our customers time and effort from building custom solutions is nice, but creating a great experience for a process that used to be frustrating is what keeps us going. The Flatfile team is ambitious in our pursuit of delightful data imports, and we look forward to working with EmployUS and all of our customers to solve any problem related to getting data into web-based software applications.

About EmployUS

To learn more about EmployUS’s high-quality candidate referral system for agencies and corporations, visit www.employus.com.

About Flatfile

Flatfile's mission is to remove barriers between humans and data. With AI-assisted data onboarding, they eliminate repetitive work and make B2B data transactions fast, intuitive, and error-free. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned, enabling customers and teams to spend more time using their data instead of fixing it. Flatfile has transformed over 300 million rows of data for companies like ClickUp, Blackbaud, Benevity, and Toast. To learn more about Flatfile’s data onboarding platform email hello@flatfile.io or get started for free at flatfile.com.