deskbird offers a workplace management solution that helps European organizations manage desk bookings, meeting rooms, workplace engagement, and more for hybrid teams.

As the team at deskbird looked to expand their presence across Europe, they knew they needed to add dozens of HRIS integrations to accommodate all the HRIS solutions their prospects use. 

These integrations were critical to automatically provisioning users to their product, helping managers enforce team-specific hybrid work policies, and enabling leadership to analyze office usage.

Building and maintaining these integrations in-house, however, wasn’t an option.

“We couldn’t afford to build an entire team of engineers dedicated to building and maintaining HRIS integrations. At the same time, these integrations were table stakes for working with most SMB and mid-market European companies, so we knew we had to look at 3rd-party options,” explains Akshay Palivela, Senior Product Manager at deskbird.

After evaluating Merge and Kombo, Akshay, Katja Hähnlein, and other members of the product team quickly decided that Merge was the better option.

“Merge integrates with more HRIS solutions that are popular in Europe than Kombo. Merge also offers more responsive and strategic support. They were clearly a better fit for us.”

deskbird built to Merge’s HRIS Unified API in roughly a week and was then able to take a wide range of HRIS integrations live that are popular in Europe, from Personio to Factorial to LuccaHR.

Here’s a closer look at how their HRIS integrations work:

1. Once a customer is logged into deskbird, they would visit their integrations page, select the relevant HRIS provider, and then click on the action that’d initiate the sync with this provider.

2. This triggers Merge Link—a UI component that allows customers to authenticate their integrations—to appear.

The customer can follow the authentication steps outlined in Merge Link and can customize the fields they want to access and sync via Merge’s Scopes feature. This provides the extra layer of security that deskbird’s customers want.

3. Once the customer completes the authentication process, employee data from their HRIS is added to deskbird. This can include employees’ first and last names, job titles, departments, addresses, time off, remote days, and more. 

The employee data is also re-synced every 24 hours, allowing deskbird’s users to access the latest data.

This continually synced data powers several use cases:

• deskbird’s users can easily determine when colleagues are coming into the office

• Managers and leaders can set up hybrid work policies for their teams, apply them across team members automatically, and ensure they’re being effectively implemented

• Leaders can analyze office usage across offices, departments, among a range of other variables

Investing in Merge has been a “no brainer” for Akshay and his team.

According to Akshay, “The process of building each HRIS integration in-house would require multiple engineers along with a product manager like myself. And it would take us multiple weeks to complete.”

Katja explains further: “Given all the HRIS integrations we’ve been able to add through Merge and all of the ongoing integration maintenance work that Merge performs on behalf of our engineers, we save thousands of engineering hours every year with Merge.”

The deskbird team also appreciates Merge’s commitment to security.

Ilija Bozic, another Senior Product Manager at deskbird, offers additional context:

“Given that we primarily serve European companies, data security and data minimization are incredibly important to us. Since Merge complies with regional data security and privacy regulations like GDPR and offers features that let our customers pick and choose the data they want to sync (via Scopes), we’ve been able to provide HRIS integrations that exceed our customers’ security requirements.”

So, what’s next in deskbird’s integration journey with Merge?

Ilija explains that “we’re looking to expand our presence in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), so we plan on adding more HRIS integrations that are popular across these countries. Since Merge can add each HRIS integration we need in roughly a week, we have full confidence that they’ll help us add these integrations quickly.”

We look forward to helping deskbird expand across Europe and beyond.