WeThrive: Streamlining HR Integrations with Apideck

The Company

Founded by Andrew Heath and Piers Bishop over a decade ago, WeThrive began as an employee engagement platform focused on addressing individual needs in the workplace. The platform provides organizations with insights across 16 key aspects of working life, helping managers identify areas for improvement. Over time, WeThrive has expanded its offerings to include mental health surveys, diversity and inclusion assessments, and most recently, performance management tools.

As employee number one, Lauren Rolfe has been instrumental in WeThrive's growth and development, taking on both customer success and product responsibilities as the company evolved.

The Story

A critical part of WeThrive's implementation process involves importing employee data into their system, including organizational structures, reporting lines, and demographic information. This process was originally handled through manual Excel spreadsheet uploads, which created several significant pain points:

The manual process was extremely time-consuming, requiring clients to format and upload employee data in specific templates. Any organizational changes necessitated manual updates, creating a particular burden for both large organizations and smaller companies without dedicated administrators. These manual processes often led to outdated information and potential errors, raising concerns about data accuracy. Additionally, the system was unable to automatically map managers to their teams, which significantly restricted the platform's reporting capabilities.

Lauren Rolfe explains the challenge: "The data is not static and needs to be constantly updated, especially for larger organizations. We needed a solution that would allow organizations to integrate directly with their HR platforms to automatically pull data into our system."

The Idea

Recognizing these challenges, WeThrive initially built native integrations with two HR platforms: Breathe and People HR. However, this approach proved unsustainable:

Each integration required a significant development investment, costing between £5,000-6,000 per integration. The testing and implementation process was lengthy, taking 2-3 weeks per platform to complete. Despite this investment, the custom integrations still lacked critical functionality, particularly around manager assignments. Furthermore, the market was demanding integration with many more HR platforms, making the individual integration approach unsustainable in the long term.

As Lauren notes, "We realized there were way too many platforms to integrate with individually. That's when we began looking for a unified solution."

The Solution

After initially working with Merge, the company proved expensive and couldn't deliver all the required functionality, WeThrive switched to Apideck. The partnership provided several crucial advantages:

Apideck provided a unified API, giving WeThrive access to multiple HR platforms through a single integration point. The solution delivered enhanced functionality with critical capabilities that weren't available before, particularly the automatic manager assignments feature. WeThrive benefited from cost-effective scaling, with the ability to add new integrations without proportional cost increases. The Apideck team offered responsive support and technical assistance that accommodated WeThrive's external development team. Additionally, the platform provided custom field mapping capabilities, enabling flexible data handling to meet specific client needs.

"One of the main reasons for switching to Apideck was the ability to automatically assign managers and their teams, which wasn't possible with our previous solution," Lauren explains. "Apideck was also more cost-effective and the team has been incredibly responsive to our needs."

The Results

WeThrive saved approximately £35,000-42,000 in integration development costs by avoiding the individual development of seven HR platform integrations. The company eliminated the need to maintain multiple separate integration codebases, significantly reducing ongoing maintenance requirements. Implementation time was dramatically improved, with setup time for new platform support reduced from weeks to days.

The company now seamlessly integrates with People HR, Breathe, Cezanne HR, Personio, IRIS Cascade, HiBob, and Workday through the Apideck platform. The integration service is offered as a one-time setup with a separate fee, creating an additional revenue stream for WeThrive. This service is particularly attractive to organizations lacking the time or resources for manual administration. Currently, dozens of clients are utilizing these integration capabilities across various HR platforms. This value-added service complements WeThrive's core SaaS subscription model and enhances their overall offering.

Lauren highlights a key benefit: "It's been pretty smooth since we started using Apideck. We've saved so much time internally, but more importantly, we've made life easier for the HR teams of our customers, which is a definite success."