How to save 12 weeks of software engineering work by using n8n automations
Ruan Pethiyagoda is the CSO of Kunai, a product development and consulting agency from the Bay Area that works with Fortune 500 companies as well as fast-growing startups.
Kunai specializes in building digital products as well as sourcing software engineers so the company’s backbone is reliant on fast, precise and efficient hiring since their clients heavily rely on top-level software talent.
In their own words:
Kunai strives to create work environments that enable our people to do the best work of their lives.
Migration and onboarding done automatically
Kunai needed to build two custom workflows that facilitate speedy data exchange between popular ATS (applicant tracking software) apps used by their teams & clients.
- The team decided that they wanted to migrate all of their applications & recruitment data from JazzHR into Lever.
- Additionally, one of Kunai’s clients wanted to quickly onboard new engineers provided by Kunai, but wanted to keep using Greenhouse as their go-to ATS.
Why wait 12 weeks to migrate platforms?
When considering the move from JazzHR to Lever, the Kunai team thought of doing the integration on their own without any 3rd party tool. However, early estimates showed that it could take up to 12 weeks of engineering work in order to complete the migration. It’s safe to say that, the teams didn't feel like this would be the most viable option.
If you're not using such a workflow automation tool, you're losing time and money building and maintaining all those integrations. It doesn't pay off.
Ruan did consider using Zapier, but needed a bit more autonomy when it came to structuring data flows between apps. After a bit of research on popular Zapier alternatives he stumbled upon n8n, which immediately appeased him thanks to its customization capabilities.
From 12 weeks to 2 days
n8n allowed Ruan and his team to set up a migration workflow in less than 2 days of work. After that, all of the applicant and hiring data was seamlessly integrated from JazzHR to Lever.
Then, in order to address their client’s needs, an additional workflow was built to send new hire data to the client’s app - Greenhouse. The client team had also initially thought of handling the migration on their own and added it for their February roadmap, but it only took one afternoon to set up a workflow in n8n that does all the heavy lifting.
Saving 300 hours of software development
Both of the migrations were so seamless that Kunai team members thought that it was some software engineering mastery.
My colleagues were impressed with my alleged coding skills since they didn’t notice that it was a custom build automation using an external tool such as n8n.
In the end, n8n helped Kunai save over 300 hours of software development work thanks to the migration workflows that were built. Given that Kunai is solely focused on building great engineering teams to address their clients’ needs, avoiding a long and resource-heavy custom migration was a tremendous success.
In short, this is what Kunai managed to achieve thanks to n8n and it’s low-code automations:
- Ensured that Kunai can go about their busines without any delays.
- Saved time and engineering resources on a rather challenging migration project.
- Lowered costs thanks to only 2 days of engineering work (compared to 12 weeks if it weren’t for n8n)
- Impressed highly experienced engineers. Some of them were stunned to learn that there is a tool that allows so much flexibility when it comes to building custom low-code workflows.
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