Powered by Membrane: how Hireology unified integration logic to scale to every HR system

Goals:

• Scale integration development to support middle-market expansion without adding engineering headcount
• Reduce 12+ week integration build cycles that were blocking customer deals
• Build once and support dozens of integrations across different systems.

Highlights:

• Reduced integration development time from 12 weeks to as little as 6 hours
• Built a multi-app Membrane package that works across any system with zero frontend or backend changes
• Enabled upmarket expansion by delivering enterprise-grade integrations at startup speed.

Company Overview

Founded: 2010
Industry: HR, hiring & people platforms
HQ: Chicago, USA
Website: hireology.com

Hireology powers hiring for decentralized industries like healthcare, hospitality, and retail automotive – where every location runs on a different mix of HR and payroll systems. For Hireology’s customers, seamless integrations aren’t a convenience – they’re essential to delivering a complete hiring and onboarding experience.

By connecting candidate and employee data across systems like BambooHR, ADP, and UKG, Hireology enables organizations to move from “hire” to “onboard” without friction. As the company moved upmarket, integrations evolved from a product feature into a core business strategy – critical to differentiating their platform, winning mid-market customers, and proving measurable ROI.

The challenge: Scaling with embedded iPaaS and unified APIs

As Hireology targeted larger, more sophisticated customers, their integration approach hit a wall. The problem wasn’t just speed – it was that their entire model couldn’t scale.

The cost of building one at a time:

• 12+ weeks minimum to build each integration, even with complete API documentation
• No reusability: Every new system meant starting from scratch
• Maintenance burden: Existing integrations were broken, buggy, and difficult to maintain
• Resource bottleneck: A small team couldn’t keep pace with customer demand
• Deal blockers: Missing integrations meant lost revenue opportunities

Hireology needed integrations for dozens of HR systems – not just the major platforms, but the long tail of vertical-specific and regional systems their customers actually used. Building these one-by-one would require years and massive engineering investment.

We were burning time and resources instead of building our core product. Every integration was custom work. There was no framework, no reusability, no path to scale.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

Hireology required a solution that would enable them to build once and support multiple integrations. They evaluated embedded iPaaS platforms like Workato and Azure Logic Apps, and unified API providers like Merge, but found they lacked the required customization capabilities and developer controls:

Embedded iPaaS limitations:

• Marketed as “no-code” but required modified Ruby for anything complex
• Built for citizen developers, not engineering teams
• No proper Git-based version control
• Most critically: Still required rebuilding integration logic per system – the workflow builder abstraction didn’t eliminate the one-to-one problem

Unified API limitations:

• Pre-built connectors didn’t cover the HR systems Hireology’s customers actually used
• Rigid schemas constrained customization
• New integrations meant waiting on vendor roadmap prioritization
• Most critically: Abstract data models worked for simple use cases but broke down when customers needed custom fields, specific workflows, or deep functionality

Why Membrane: One codebase for hundreds of integrations

Membrane offered something the other platforms couldn’t: the ability to write integration logic once and generate implementations across any system. With Membrane’s Universal Flows, Hireology would be able to unify logic without losing depth of customization. Critically, each new integration would make the system more valuable, not more complex.

For Scott, Membrane “checked all the boxes”:

• Git-based version control: Full integration with existing development workflows, enabling proper code review and deployment processes
• Developer-friendly architecture: APIs and tooling designed for engineers rather than citizen developers, with comprehensive documentation and debugging capabilities
• Custom connector capabilities: Ability to build and maintain proprietary connectors for unique authentication patterns and data flows
• Predictable pricing model: Capped costs that wouldn’t scale exponentially with usage, enabling budget forecasting
• Self-hosting option: Deployment flexibility to meet enterprise security requirements and data residency needs, with no vendor lock-in
• AI-first systems: Dynamic adaptation to customer-specific variations, reducing manual overhead and making it easier to iterate.

I wasn’t seeing AI capabilities in other products. We liked Membrane’s vision for self-integrating software and their system for building integrations with AI. That’s going to be critical for the future.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

Implementation journey

Hireology’s journey began with BambooHR and UKG as proof-of-concept integrations. These were chosen to validate the approach across different HR system architectures and customer segments.

The use case was straightforward but business-critical: when a candidate is hired in Hireology’s applicant tracking system, that employee’s data needed to sync seamlessly to the customer’s HR system of record – including all relevant fields, custom attributes, and supporting documents. This would eliminate manual data entry and ensure consistency across systems.

Universal authentication

Before Membrane, each HR system required its own authentication logic: custom OAuth flows, token storage, system-specific quirks – multiplied across every integration.

With Membrane, Hireology built a single authentication framework:

• One user interface for connecting any HR system
• Membrane-managed OAuth flows that handle each platform’s requirements
• Automatic token management and refresh
• Support for third-party authentication patterns

The result: Customers connect their HR systems with one click, regardless of which platform they use. No system-specific UI. No custom backend logic.

Universal flows

This is where Membrane’s architecture delivers its most significant advantage. Hireology built their employee sync logic once using Membrane’s Universal Flows – then deployed it across every HR platform without modification.

Their sync workflow:

1. Candidate hired in Hireology triggers sync
2. System dynamically retrieves the target HR platform’s field schema
3. User reviews and confirms field mappings
4. Data syncs to the HR system, including documents and custom fields

Whether syncing to BambooHR, UKG, ADP, or any other platform, the process remains identical. Membrane handles the translation between Hireology’s data model and each system’s unique API requirements.

The workflow is exactly the same. It’s just different fields. Now we can start enabling connectors and allow users to select Connect and sync to any system.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

This approach meant:

• No frontend changes required for new integrations
• No backend modifications needed
• Just configure the connector in Membrane and deploy

We keep coming back to this concept. Build UI and backend once without touching it again. It’s like a genie in the bottle.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

The result: Non-linear scale and rapid integration development

With Membrane, Hireology didn’t just build integrations faster – they built an integration architecture that gets more efficient with scale.

The first integration required defining authentication patterns, data models, field mapping UI, sync workflows. The second integration validated the logic worked across different systems. Every integration after that is a matter of configuration, not construction.

We were thinking it would take a week per integration afterwards. My team pinged me: ‘We got this done in six hours.’ This is awesome.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

By solving the integration challenge at the architecture level, instead of the implementation level, Hireology has unlocked non-linear scale:

• Up to 150x faster integration development: 12 weeks → 6 hours to add each new connector
• A multi-app membrane package that supports multiple systems with zero additional changes
• Foundation to scale from to hundreds of integrations without adding engineering headcount.

The integration capability has also directly enabled Hireology’s move into the middle market, where robust integrations are table stakes. They can now confidently pursue larger customers knowing they can support whichever systems those customers already use.

The partnership with Membrane helped Hireology scale with confidence:

We felt like we had great people to work with. It was clear there was going to be a partnership with us both trying to win together instead of ‘yeah, go sign up for this thing and send us the check when you’re done using it.’ That made all the difference for us.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology

What’s next: AI for integrations that build, test and maintain themselves

Membrane is already transforming Hireology’s integration capability. But they’re excited about what comes next: the Membrane Agent Beta, which promises to accelerate their integration development even further.

Membrane Agent enables teams to describe integrations in natural language. The AI then automatically configures APIs, mappings, schemas, and edge-case handling – generating integration packages ready for deployment.

This means going from requirement to production-ready integration in minutes instead of hours, with AI handling the complexity while engineers maintain full control and customization.

As Hireology continues expanding their integration ecosystem to support hundreds of HR and payroll systems, Membrane’s AI capabilities position them to deliver on their vision: seamless connectivity to any system their customers need – at unprecedented speed.

The Membrane platform is super powerful, super fast, and elegant in architecture and design. You’re helping us accelerate faster than we would find from any other integration platform.

— Scott Gainous, VP Engineering at Hireology