The Challenge

Ribbon’s AI-native platform conducts screening interviews for enterprises, helping employers quickly identify top talent while ensuring a candidate-first experience.

Founded by CEO Arsham Ghahramani and his co-founder Dave Vu, the company addresses a critical challenge in high-volume recruitment sectors like retail and manufacturing: how to screen thousands of candidates efficiently while maintaining quality and candidate experience.

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For Ribbon's AI screening platform to work effectively, ATS integration was critical. The platform needed to pull candidate data from clients' ATS systems to customize interview questions and evaluation criteria for each role.

Even more critically, Ribbon had to push rich AI interview analysis and results back into these systems to maintain recruiters' existing workflows.

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Why Merge fell short of expectations

Ribbon initially chose Merge as their integration partner as they promised a comprehensive ATS coverage. However, as the team began implementing their AI screening use case, significant gaps emerged that threatened their product roadmap.

Merge just couldn't do what we wanted to do. They say “we support all these ATS” and then you actually look at what they support on each one and it's very feature incomplete.
– Arsham Ghahramani, CEO & Co-Founder

The deeper Ribbon dove into building with Merge, the clearer it became that there were substantial coverage gaps for critical ATS systems.

For instance, moving existing candidates across stages was only supported for Greenhouse and BambooHR. For other systems like Workday and UKG Pro, Merge allows you to post new candidates to stages but will not let you move existing ones between stages.

This use case is critical for AI screening, as you want to automatically advance or reject candidates based on your results.

The team found themselves building custom logic and handling numerous edge cases that Merge's unified API couldn't address.

We had to scale back our plans for integrations and we even went as far as only implementing an integration with Ashby via Merge. Ashby already had a pretty good public API, so it didn't make much sense.
– Arsham Ghahramani, CEO & Co-Founder

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The Solution

Kombo's focused approach to ATS integrations provided Ribbon with exactly what they needed: deep coverage across the ATS landscape with a single, reliable API that could handle their specific AI screening data requirements.

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Deep ATS coverage that supports complex workflows

Where Merge promised broad coverage but delivered incomplete functionality, Kombo provided access to over 46 ATS integrations with the depth needed for AI screening workflows.

This includes reading candidate applications and job requirements to customize interviews, and writing back comprehensive AI analysis (recordings, scores, skills assessments) while updating application stages based on screening outcomes.

Kombo's webhook support enables Ribbon to automatically pull candidates upon application and begin AI screening without delay. This real-time capability is essential in high-volume sectors, where top candidates are often hired within 24-48 hours.

To maintain this speed, Kombo 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.

Additionally, Kombo provided sandbox access and clear documentation that articulated exactly what was possible and which limitations existed for each integration. This transparency allowed Ribbon's team to make informed decisions upfront rather than discovering gaps mid-development.

Kombo has the most complete ATS API in the market with the most responsive team out of everyone we spoke with.
– Arsham Ghahramani, CEO & Co-Founder

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Pushing AI interview results back to ATS systems

Kombo's deep ATS integrations enable Ribbon to push complete AI interview analysis back into clients' systems. Rather than sending raw transcripts that can overwhelm recruiters, Ribbon sends processed insights that provide immediate value.

We send a lot - a link to the recording, a summary, scores, tools and skills, any logistical concerns that we extracted. The most important thing is a link to the candidate page on Ribbon.
– Arsham Ghahramani, CEO & Co-Founder

The data flows directly into existing ATS workflows as structured notes, ensuring recruiters can access detailed AI insights without leaving their familiar interface.

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Responsive technical support

Kombo provided fast responses through dedicated Slack channels, allowing Ribbon's team to get answers quickly when building their AI screening integrations.

Beyond just fast responses, Kombo's team offered in-depth expertise on individual ATS systems and potential edge cases that could arise during implementation.

For instance, when Ribbon onboarded a customer using an integration they hadn't used before, they discovered that not all relevant jobs were pulled. Kombo's engineering team quickly diagnosed the issue to be an integration-specific edge case and resolved it within 70 minutes.

This direct engineering support allowed Ribbon to continue the onboarding without disrupting the planned timeline.

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The Outcome

Kombo's unified API enabled Ribbon to focus on their core product while avoiding the engineering costs and delays that building integrations in-house would have caused.

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Saved months of engineering time and resources

By replacing Merge with Kombo, Ribbon eliminated the need to build custom integrations for the 46 ATS systems offered.

Building all these integrations, including complex enterprise systems like Workday, SAP, and Oracle, would have required their four-person engineering team to work exclusively on this for 12-18 months.

This saved an estimated $600k to $900k in salaries while eliminating ongoing maintenance of API changes and authentication updates across ATS systems.

Instead, Ribbon's team could access these systems immediately and focus on building features that differentiate their AI platform - like their upcoming AI messaging agent that handles communication for recruiters.

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AI screening capabilities enabled by ATS data

With access to comprehensive ATS data through Kombo, Ribbon pulls candidate profiles, job requirements, and application details to contextualize AI interviews.

This creates seamless integration where webhook triggers automatically start interviews while recruiters receive processed insights - including recordings, scores, and skills assessments - directly in their ATS interface.

The result eliminates traditional phone screen bottlenecks, reducing time-to-interview from 48 hours to under 5 minutes and achieving 15% higher retention according to Ribbon’s findings.

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Expanded target market and new deals won

With Kombo's broad ATS support, Ribbon can now approach prospects regardless of which ATS they use. This eliminated integration capabilities as a bottleneck in their sales process and significantly expanded their addressable market.

Most importantly, the comprehensive ATS coverage enables Ribbon to pursue enterprise accounts that use complex systems like Workday, SAP, and Oracle - integrations that competitors in the AI screening space typically can't offer.

For instance, when LAZ Parking was migrating to Fountain ATS, Ribbon won them as a new customer because the Fountain integration was already available through Kombo.

Without this coverage, Ribbon would have either lost the opportunity or faced months of custom development work.

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Quick implementation and time-to-first-customer

Ribbon went from starting their implementation to connecting their first customer in just three weeks.

Using the sandbox access provided by Kombo to Ashby and Recruitee allowed Ribbon to test their AI screening workflow completely before going live, catching any issues during development rather than in production.

This fast onboarding meant Ribbon could quickly start generating revenue from new ATS connections without the lengthy development cycles these integrations typically require.

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How Ribbon uses Kombo: