Kombo sells its products to software companies in the HR sector. These companies are, for example, job boards (like Indeed and Stepstone), employee benefits companies like FREE NOW Business or EGYM Wellpass, and many more. They all have in common that they handle HR data in some way.
These customers have software products that heavily rely on interacting with their customers' HR data. We call the customers of our customers end-customers. The end customers are also businesses that, for example, want to offer EGYM Wellpass as a benefit to their employees.
We enable these companies to integrate with their customers’ HR systems as efficiently as possible.
The market of HR Systems (Human Resources Systems) and ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) is very fragmented and location-specific. In Germany, different tools are used than in France or the UK. Even in Germany, there are hundreds of HR systems.
When our customers want to read and write data with these systems of their customers, they will come across many challenges. In the first place, they will have to build integrations to all of them, which consumes a lot of engineering capacity, but they also have to explain to their customers how they can set up these integrations. Also, integrations often require partnerships with the providers (the HR systems) to get a Sandbox and even be able to develop the integration.
Because all HR systems solve the same problem in the end (managing employees in HR Systems or managing the hiring process in ATS), they usually support the same data models and can be abstracted in a similar way.
Kombo provides a unified API that allows our customers to integrate with all the HR and ATS at once. Our customers just integrate us once and can talk to all systems in the same way without having to worry about the specifics and edge cases. In addition, we provide technical support and guides to set up integrations.
Because we support a range of use cases and customer segments with different needs for HR integrations, this example hopefully makes it easier to understand.
Example: FREE NOW Business
Their offering: Employees of their customers get a budget every month to spend on mobility as a benefit.
Their use case for integrations: They need to know who the employees of their customers are. Also, they want to make sure that newly hired people get onboarded and terminated employees can’t use the benefits anymore.
Example of HR system of their customer: Personio helps companies manage their employees. Personal information, team structures, and contract information is stored there.
Overview of this relationship
FREE NOW has more than one customer and has to build a lot of integrations without Kombo.