How Classet built their real-time phone screening with Kombo

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50
ATS available immediately
15-19 months
of development time saved
3+ million
candidates processed daily
Chicago, USA
Classet is an AI-powered hiring platform that helps high-volume teams move faster and hire smarter. Employers use Classet’s voice and messaging assistant, Joy, to automate early-stage candidate engagement: answering questions, running phone interviews, and summarizing insights for hiring managers.
Previous Solution
Building in-house
Company Size
10+ FTEs
Integrations Used
+ many more
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The Challenge

Classet is an AI-powered screening platform that enables employers to instantly engage candidates through text messaging and automated voice interviews.

Founded by Gino Rooney and his team, the company addresses a critical challenge in high-volume recruitment: how to screen candidates immediately after they apply while the window of engagement is still open.

For Classet's AI screening platform to work effectively, real-time ATS integration was critical for two reasons.

First, Classet needed to pull candidate data immediately as applications came in to trigger their automated screening workflows. Any delay in this process meant candidates would become stale and unresponsive.

In high-volume recruiting, candidate engagement and speed is everything. If you wait 24 hours to reach out after a candidate applies, engagement rates drop by 50%.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

Second, the platform had to push comprehensive screening results back into clients' ATS systems, including interview recordings, qualification scores, and recommended next steps.

This data needed to appear in recruiters' existing workflows to maintain adoption and provide immediate value.

When we set out to build Classet, we knew the importance of not having recruiters manage two products. It was very important to build a deeply integrated product.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

Why building in-house wasn’t feasible

The team first considered building integrations themselves using Nango for authentication, but this approach would have required significant engineering resources to build and maintain.

With four to five weeks of development per integration, building coverage for the 50 ATS their target market demanded would have required their three engineers to work exclusively on this for 15 to 19 months.

Add on top the waiting times for establishing partnership agreements with all ATS, and Classet would have set back their go-to-market by 18 to 25 months - time they simply couldn’t afford as a fast growing start-up.

This set them out to find a partner with deep ATS integration expertise, who could provide ongoing support as they scaled.

The Solution

Classet chose Kombo for their specialization in ATS integrations and hands-on support model. Kombo's focus on recruitment technology meant they understood AI screening workflows and could provide dedicated support channels and technical guidance throughout implementation. This helped them achieve:

Deep ATS coverage with unified data models

Kombo provided access to 50 ATS through a single API, eliminating the need for Classet to build custom connections for each client.

This coverage included both popular systems like Greenhouse and Lever, as well as enterprise platforms like Workday and SAP SuccessFactors that would have been very difficult to integrate independently.

Dealing with all different ATS, we recognized that they’re not built the same. Having a partner along to help us when we bump into issues was an important consideration.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

Real-time screening through hybrid architecture

Kombo's hybrid architecture enabled Classet to receive candidate updates in near real-time. It combines native ATS webhooks where supported (for systems like Greenhouse and Workable) with high-frequency delta syncs for ATS that don't offer webhooks, including enterprise systems like Workday.

Where other providers relied on full data syncs that could take hours, this approach delivered both real-time updates and reliable performance across all ATS systems, without requiring Classet to manage rate limits and different webhook implementations for each integration.

When dealing with large volumes of applications, having many different webhooks firing introduces a lot of load to the system. Delta syncs are a good medium for processing applicants near-real time without having to listen to a bunch of different webhooks.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

Bidirectional data flow for complete workflows

Kombo’s deep ATS integrations enabled Classet to not only pull candidate data, but also push screening results back into ATS systems.

This included interview recordings, candidate summaries, and structured assessments highlighting key requirements and cultural fit. It also allowed Classet to programmatically move candidates between stages based on screening outcomes.

This bidirectional capability meant recruiters could access complete AI screening insights without leaving their familiar ATS interface, improving adoption and making the screening data immediately actionable.

The Outcome

Kombo's unified API infrastructure enabled Classet to focus on their core AI screening product while avoiding the engineering costs and delays that building integrations would have caused.

Eliminated months of custom integration development

By partnering with Kombo, Classet eliminated the need to build integrations for the 50 systems offered. Beyond initial development, maintaining 50 integrations would have required dedicated engineering resources for API changes, authentication updates, and customer issues.

This saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while enabling Classet to launch with comprehensive ATS coverage from day one. This meant Classet could pursue any prospect regardless of their ATS, eliminating integration capabilities as a sales constraint and accelerating their go-to-market strategy.

Kombo also provided sandbox environments for risk-free testing and a dedicated implementation guide specifically for AI screening workflows, which accelerated Classet's time to market.

Kombo’s unified API model has allowed us to templatize the way we build. It definitely made our code cleaner and allows us to launch new ATS in a modular way.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

AI screening capabilities enabled by ATS data

With access to comprehensive ATS data, Classet was able to build AI screening workflows that work within existing recruitment processes. They identify which candidates are in designated screening stages and automatically initiates contact.

Kombo now processes more than 3 million candidates for Classet every day, enabling this massive scale of automated screening operations.

After screening, Classet sends results back to the ATS - including interview recordings, summary notes, and candidate assessments - and automatically moves candidates to appropriate next stages based on screening outcomes.

This ensures recruiters can review everything in one place while maintaining their existing workflow. It also enables Classet's customers to engage quality candidates within minutes, reaching them before competitors in the fast-moving hourly job market.

Classet's workflow configuration interface showing how the platform automatically syncs candidate progression with ATS systems

Scalable growth without integration bottlenecks

Kombo's broad ATS support eliminated integration capabilities as a constraint on Classet's sales process. The team could now approach prospects regardless of which ATS they used, significantly expanding their addressable market.

Kombo’s support was also valuable for unblocking sales. For instance, when Classet was onboarding a customer on Workable and encountered an issue during the initial sync, Kombo’s support was able to resolve a blocker within less than an hour.

Overall, the time needed for onboarding customers has been reduced from 2-3 weeks to 3-4 days.

Kombo gives us a level of comfort in planning and communicating with our customers. Regardless which ATS they use, we can directly assess how long it will take and which features we can support.
– Gino Rooney, CEO and Co-Founder

How Classet uses Kombo:

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