How Assemble is changing compensation management with Merge

Merge is a leading provider of HRIS, Payroll, and Accounting integrations for B2B companies. In this article, we outline how Assemble uses Merge’s HRIS, ATS and Accounting APIs to expedite product development and sales by offering 40+ integrations.

I remember thinking “wow” when I received my offer from Expanse.

A PDF accompanying the offer letter perfectly explained the company, my equity, and what that equity could look like over time. The packet’s clarity far outshone offer letters from other start-ups — I was onboard right away.

Once I joined, I found that Expanse was very operationally advanced compared to most companies at its stage. The team was extremely proactive about headcount planning, and had recently done a compensation revamp.

During my first week at Expanse, Enrique explained how this quest to revamp Expanse’s compensation plans revealed the widespread pain-point of compensation planning in all companies. It turns out that the candidate and employee experience was very much dependent on effective communication about compensation.

A few years later, Lisa and Enrique started Assemble to solve that problem. They built a product that would thoughtfully provide fair and equitable compensation management. Lisa and Enrique were both hiring managers previously, and strongly believed that compensation is a shared responsibility across an entire organization; because of this, sophisticated integrations with HRIS, ATS and Accounting platforms were required to systematically engage all departments.

Enrique Esclusa, Co-Founder at Assemble:
A key aspect of our value proposition is helping our customers assemble data from various systems to help them make better compensation decisions. Merge allows us to integrate with dozens of HRIS and ATS providers, cutting down our development time and substantially expanding our market opportunity. With Merge, we can now deliver more value to more customers, more quickly.

As compensation experts, Lisa and Enrique also knew assigning expensive engineers to build integrations would be an expensive and challenging endeavor that they actively sought to resolve. Lisa especially understood the need to outsource integrations from her previous experience of building products. The Assemble team looked to Merge, calculating that Merge’s Unified API would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, allow them to develop their platform more rapidly, open up their TAM to add additional customers via integrations, and expand their engineering capacity.

Lisa Wallace, Co-Founder at Assemble:
While integrations are an important part of our strategy, the HRIS, ATS and Accounting space are incredibly fragmented. Investing in integrations without Merge, i.e. by piecemeal, would have been too incremental for our small team. Merge allows us to be ambitious with our integration strategy — without needing to staff full-time integrations specialists to our engineering team.

Assemble uses Merge in a few ways:

• To keep employee data in sync, and pull data for historical employee compensation
• To see what candidates are in pipeline, and what the conversion rate is for various offers
• Soon — to sync with different accounting providers in order to make forecasting easier for companies with respect to headcount planning

Assemble knew that enterprise customers on their platform required high-quality integrations. After looking at other API providers out there, they selected the product that would be able to provide the best experience both for their customers and their engineers.

Merge has always had a developer-first approach, and with SDKs in 40+ languages, it was easy for Assemble to get started quickly. With Merge’s webhooks, they immediately get notified (with normalized data) as new employees are hired, or candidates get to the offer stage. With our smart issues detection, logging, and API testers, Assemble’s developers manage their integrations end-to-end fully in Merge instead of disjointed experiences in Sentry, DataDog, Postman, and more.

Ease of use for their customers and their own developers were the principles that the Assemble team prioritized, and we’re thrilled Merge was the obvious choice.

Assemble has a stunning product, and it’s amazing to see the team onboarding huge customers onto their service every day. We’re honored and excited to be working with their team, and helping their mission of making compensation fair, equitable, and explainable.