Founded in 2017, Grayscale is an employee engagement platform designed to accelerate frontline employee recruiting, onboarding, and retention in industries with high-volume hiring such as retail, manufacturing, and distribution. Recruiting teams use Grayscale to interact with talent through SMS, which helps applicants feel engaged in a timely, tailored recruiting experience, and is often a more effective communication channel than email as candidates may not be sitting in front of a desk. Candidates use Grayscale to apply to jobs, schedule interviews, communicate during the interview process, and get notified of their first day on the job.

As a recruiting engagement product, it was critical for Grayscale to integrate with ATS’s (Applicant Tracking Systems). Hubert Liu, Co-Founder and CTO, notes that "integrations are core to our business. ATS’s are the primary source of truth for recruiting teams and they are also key for compliance." At first, Grayscale built native integrations to Greenhouse and Lever to support their initial customers.

Over time, Grayscale wanted to expand to support larger employers that frequently use other ATS’s. These larger companies also tend to manage hiring across many locations and millions of candidates. Building integrations to these ATS’s was going to be more challenging, remembers Hubert. "Workday's ecosystem is fairly closed. SAP is complex and Grayscale didn't have a partnership at the time." The company considered working with a consultant to build out integrations with individual customers or building more native integrations, but then found Merge.

Working with Merge enabled Grayscale to access a set of new enterprise ATS integrations that helped unlock the enterprise market. In addition, by using Merge's Unified ATS API, Grayscale was able to get to market faster than building out integrations natively. Grayscale syncs candidate and job data from ATS’s via Merge, including names, phone numbers, roles, and job stages. This data powers the text messaging, automation, and communication history that makes Grayscale so transformative to recruiting teams.

Grayscale became a Merge customer in 2021. The development team was able to immediately use Merge to sync data and begin supporting new customers within weeks. Today, Grayscale supports integrations with 7 popular ATS’s and serves a broad range of enterprise customers.

Today nearly every one of Grayscale's customers use ATS integrations, many of which are based on integrations with Merge. These customers have been impressed with the ease of use and quality of the integrations. Hubert describes how "enterprise customers expect a long implementation time. Yet the reality is that we have Workday customers that are set up within 24-48 hours. The onboarding flow that Merge provides makes this possible."

Merge has also made it easy for Grayscale to keep their customers' integrations healthy over time. For enterprise ATS integrations "there is rarely an issue that needs to be solved, usually just permissions changes and maintenance windows," says Hubert. "Merge's support is great and the support bot is very helpful. We've leveraged a lot of expertise from the Merge team about specific ATS integrations."

With ATS integrations so critical to Grayscale's business, it's no surprise that support for enterprise ATS’s have opened up a new enterprise market that is propelling the company's growth.