Challenge
Luka Pilic, Marketplace Tech Lead at The Stepstone Group, and his team identified a challenge with ongoing business inventory, which was creating additional work for his team and slowing the time-to-market for new job adverts. Adverts from different employers are supplied in a variety of formats, and the data needs to be sanitized and standardized before it can be integrated to Stepstone’s platform. However, there was no straightforward way to integrate data from these various sources into the Stepstone ecosystem. Instead, Luka’s team would kick off a data integration sprint with engineering, which would take around two weeks to complete.
Solution
After experimenting with other workflow automation platforms, Stepstone moved to n8n. The Marketplace Tech team tested a couple of n8n-driven workflows locally on their laptop, and quickly switched to a development server environment, setting up two AWS instances leveraging a PostgreSQL database which have now been running for more than 18 months. The team enhances their workflows with AI to parse data sources that update adverts with any missing information, which saves considerable time and effort.
“You get instant access to the development environment out of the box with n8n. For our workflows, we have one instance that has access to the development environment, and one instance that has access to both development and production environments, so we can experiment, test, and prove that workflows work before switching to the production endpoint. It’s just so easy.” Luka said.
“Everything is so logical with n8n. If you have basic knowledge about how your workflows run, you are able to achieve a lot in a short time. You also save money by freeing up your engineering team to focus on more complex work, because they don’t need to handle these basic connections for you, like connecting internal services to external services and APIs.”
Example workflow
Working with a Berlin-based SaaS recruitment organization, Stepstone is able to quickly integrate an entire inventory into its platform with n8n. The data is sent from the recruitment organization to Stepstone, where it is processed and transformed into Stepstone’s specific requirements through an n8n workflow. It took just two hours to build and test the workflow, which has run daily for more than a year, significantly reducing time investment for the engineering team and allowing the team to quickly promote high-profile jobs to a global audience.
Impact
n8n has been widely adopted across the Stepstone Marketplace team, which now runs more than 200 mission-critical workflows, connected to 50 internal data sources, helping job seekers to find the best jobs and companies to recruit top talent.
Using n8n, it takes the team just two hours to prototype a new workflow and integrate the necessary data into Stepstone’s platform, including testing API connections and data transformation, adding up to 200 sprints or over 400 weeks of time investment saved, all without having to build custom workflows in Java/Springboot.
“Using n8n, we can speed up the integration of data sources 25X. In fact, n8n is one of the best tools for prototyping. It takes me a maximum of two hours to connect up various APIs and transform the data that we require. You cannot do this in code this quickly,” Luka said.
”This is another example of how we can boost the efficiency of our processes with Automation and AI – to offer an even better product for our users and customers.”
Next steps
With n8n proven within the Marketplace Tech team, the tool is fast gaining traction among other business units. And with more than 200 workflows running on n8n, the team is planning to migrate to a more powerful and stable PostgreSQL database, to better manage data-heavy workloads.
“For me, n8n is a Swiss Army knife in my daily work,” Luka said.
