JOIN: Making hiring delightful for small and medium enterprises
About JOIN
Founded in Switzerland, recruitment software firm JOIN provides the only freemium tool on the market that combines talent acquisition with an applicant tracking system, helping SMEs to hire smarter, faster, and more cost-efficiently.
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JOIN democratizes talent acquisition for small and medium enterprises with a simple, accessible web solution built with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Streamlines the hiring process for SMEs with a solution that integrates with the world's most popular job sites
- Keeps costs to a minimum while scaling to accommodate more than 35,000 SME clients
- Focuses more resources on core business challenges thanks to simplified infrastructure management
Company showcases more than 100,000 active job ads
Some businesses begin with a question. For Tim Ruffner, that question was: "Why is it so hard for small businesses to hire people?" The answer to that question led to the founding of JOIN Solutions AG.
According to the World Bank, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment. In Europe, those figures are even higher, with 23 million SMEs accounting for more than 99% of businesses and employing three-quarters of all staff.
Finding the right people for the right role is vital for any organization's success, but SMEs don't have the money or the personnel to dedicate huge resources to this task. Larger enterprises can create whole departments or hire in recruitment specialists to find diamonds in the rough, while smaller business managers often have to do what they can on top of their existing responsibilities.
JOIN seeks to change that with an easy to use web app that allows businesses to register in seconds and post job adverts in minutes. "We started with the goal of democratizing talent acquisition," says Ruffner, who founded JOIN in 2018 and oversees the company as CEO. "Our mission is to make hiring delightful, not just for hiring managers, but also for applicants. We want to improve every aspect of the hiring process for SMEs."
Since its launch, JOIN has spread from its native Switzerland to Germany and Austria, becoming one of Europe's fastest-growing HR tech companies, thanks to its "freemium" business model, which allows companies to post a limited number of simultaneous job posts at no cost. To build its solution so quickly and adapt it for rapid growth, JOIN turned to Google Cloud.
"Stability and scalability are very important to us, because we want to deliver the best possible service to our clients," says Ruffner. "At the same time, with a freemium product, our margins are tight, so we wanted to minimize costs. Google Cloud gave us the right combination of performance and low overheads."
"Stability and scalability are very important to us because we want to deliver the best possible service to our clients. At the same time, with a freemium product, our margins are tight, so we wanted to minimize costs. Google Cloud gave us the right combination of performance and low overheads."
—Tim Ruffner, CEO, JOINMaking freemium work at scale
In its quest to make hiring as streamlined and transparent as any other business process, JOIN has had to deal with some complex problems, such as keeping track of customers' ongoing job adverts, connecting them with applicants, and syncing with hundreds of job sites. "We want to make things as simple as possible for the end user," explains Kerim Indecayi, VP of Platform Engineering at JOIN. "In order to provide that simplicity, we have to hide the complexity, which means making some really interesting decisions beneath the surface."
As well as a simplified hiring experience, Ruffner and his colleagues also wanted JOIN to be as widely available as possible. That meant making a freemium product where any user can join and within a couple of minutes, post up to three simultaneous job posts on more than 10 online job boards at no cost. Users can pay for extras like posting on more than 100 specialist job boards, greater social media integration, and additional support.
This combination of all-in-one simplicity and the need for widespread availability posed a challenge to the company's technology team. JOIN itself is an SME, with a little over 100 employees and limited resources. It needed a powerful, cloud-based infrastructure that could scale across multiple regions, but also keep overheads and maintenance as low as possible. The company chose to build its platform with Google Cloud.
"For us, Google Cloud won out over the other options because of its simplicity and the streamlined developer experience," says Indecayi. "In the same way that we're trying to make hiring processes as easy as possible for our clients, Google Cloud does the same for us with infrastructure. It's a sweet spot of powerful features and managed services."
Solving for talent acquisition
JOIN's infrastructure is based around the open-source container technology of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). When a request, such as a job advert, is made via the web app, JOIN uses the messaging service Pub/Sub to deliver that request to the infrastructure's backend services, which are orchestrated with GKE. "Google Kubernetes Engine is really the heart of the platform," says Indecayi. "It makes running a highly scalable, distributed infrastructure seem simple."
"Google Kubernetes Engine is really the heart of the platform. It makes running a highly scalable, distributed infrastructure seem simple."
—Kerim Indecayi, VP of Platform Engineering, JOINA key task for JOIN's stack is to ingest, process and analyze data from several different sources and for this, it relies on BigQuery as a data warehouse solution. From here, the company's data scientists can run analyses and create reports using Looker or Looker Studio for business intelligence insight.
Meanwhile, developers use Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring to make sure they are delivering the best possible service to customers. "If anything goes wrong with the system or any of our products, we have to be on top of that very quickly. Google Cloud makes that very easy for us with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. They're very important products for us," says Indecayi.
In keeping with the need for a unified technology platform and minimal complexity, JOIN has adopted Google Workspace as its main productivity suite, ensuring that even during pandemic shutdowns, employees can work and collaborate wherever they are. "We're so much more efficient as a company with Google Workspace," says Ruffner. "Google Calendar has been a particular highlight, especially the ease with which we can sync with each other."
JOIN has also been working closely with Google Cloud partner DoiT, primarily to streamline and consolidate its billing, and also to provide knowledge and insight into the latest offerings from Google Cloud. "DoiT has been a great help since we started working with them," says Ruffner. "They not only helped give us more transparency into our costs and how to keep them as low as possible, they also had more strategic advice for some of the newer products from Google Cloud."
Managed services for greater strategic focus
Since building its platform with Google Cloud, JOIN has gone from strength to strength. A hiring manager can register in less than 20 seconds, upload a job advert and, in under 2 minutes, that advert will have a dedicated landing page and is posted on the world's biggest job boards. That saves hours of administration and monitoring time, allowing businesses to focus on their core needs without sacrificing candidate quality.
Today, JOIN hosts more than 100,000 active job ads at any one time and has signed up more than 60,000 businesses and more than 100,000 recruiters. That amounts to around 6,000,000 requests every day. Join is also hugely popular with job seekers who post around 15,000 applications every day, knowing that they will quickly come to the attention of the right employer for them.
"We've been able to build a hiring solution that's brilliantly basic for small businesses and job seekers," says Ruffner. "In principle what we have done sounds very simple, but to do it at scale was quite a complex challenge. I don't think we would have been able to do using the resources we had without Google Cloud."
By deploying GKE strategically, JOIN has been able to scale its infrastructure with demand while keeping costs to a minimum. "Our solution is for everybody but as a small company, cost efficiency is really important to us," says Ruffner. "Working with DoiT and Google Cloud means that we've been able to build our infrastructure in such a way that rapid growth doesn't hurt us."
With its managed services and streamlined user experience, Google Cloud has helped JOIN be more strategic with its manpower as well as its costs. "We only need a single DevOps engineer to oversee the infrastructure, and that means we can afford dedicated teams focused on growth, or business intelligence, or new products and features," says Indecayi. "We wouldn't be able to do that if Google Cloud wasn't so easy to manage."
"We only need a single DevOps engineer to oversee the infrastructure, and that means we can afford dedicated teams focused on growth, or business intelligence, or new products and features. We wouldn't be able to do that if Google Cloud wasn't so easy to manage."
—Kerim Indecayi, VP of Platform Engineering, JOINTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About JOIN
Founded in Switzerland, recruitment software firm JOIN provides the only freemium tool on the market that combines talent acquisition with an applicant tracking system, helping SMEs to hire smarter, faster, and more cost-efficiently.
About DoiT
DoiT International finds saving potential and optimization in every cloud or technology stack, helping businesses build and run powerful cloud solutions at scale.