6
Months from idea to go-live
350+
SME clients supported
100.000
qualified candidates placed
funnellab is a former agency that supports medium-sized companies and major clients such as Lufthansa and Deutsche Telekom with an AI-supported social recruiting platform.
2019
Hamburg
Recruiting
SaaS product development
funnellab GmbH from Hamburg has made a name for itself as a successful agency for social recruiting since it was founded in 2019. It now supports over 350 medium-sized companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Between April and October 2024, funnellab developed its own recruiting platform together with SPRYLAB in order to take a big step from the agency business to its own SaaS product. In doing so, the company aims to make the decisive transition from a pure service provider to a software provider. The main challenge was to automate the successful social recruiting processes and create an attractive user experience at the same time.
Goal: Transformation from agency business to automated and scalable SaaS platform
High expectations for a user-centered design inspired by leading SaaS platforms
The initial situation was clear: funnellab no longer wanted to operate as a traditional social recruiting agency, but wanted to bring AI-supported recruiting software to the market. “Our vision has always been that recruiting must be fully automated. As an agency, we have set up around 800 campaigns – that sounds like a lot, but compared to the overall market in DACH, it’s a drop in the ocean. That’s why we took the next logical step at the beginning of 2024: the transformation to a SaaS company. We didn’t just want to automate – we wanted to redefine social recruiting from the ground up,” explains Marvin Schulz, Managing Partner of funnellab.
At the same time, a challenging market environment for social recruiting providers emerged in the same year. “2024 was probably the first year in which things went downhill in our industry. It was precisely in this environment that we as a company saw and seized a great opportunity. We acquired a record number of new customers this year – including well-known clients such as Lufthansa and Telekom,” says Schulz.
An important goal of the new platform was to drastically speed up the application process so that candidates can apply within five to ten minutes via a chatbot. This should reduce the workload for both recruiters and applicants.
SPRYLAB came out on top thanks to its many years of experience with SaaS and platform projects. Following a comprehensive concept workshop, an MVP was developed, the core of which is the Job Wizard: In 15 simple, intuitively guided steps, recruiters independently enter all relevant information about the advertised position in a user interface – including job title, qualifications, degrees, experience, soft skills and salary expectations. From this, the system automatically creates a targeted applicant profile.
In the next step, an automated process interacts with Custom Business Logic Extensions and the connected automation software Make to generate ads for social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn that are precisely tailored to the target group. The customer simply provides the required ad designs, while funnellab provides support with onboarding videos and personal advice if required.
The campaigns run automatically until predefined criteria – such as number of applications or budget – are reached. Applicants who respond to these ads go through a pre-qualification process via funnellab’s digital recruiting bot. Recruiters maintain an overview of the dynamic dashboard at all times, which displays incoming applications in clearly defined categories (A and B applicants) so that they can contact the best candidates immediately.
“Social media platforms have an unimaginable amount of data. We use this data effectively and specifically for our targeting,” emphasizes Schulz. For customers, this only means that they have to provide suitable ad designs – all further steps are automated.
The integration of the existing funnellab chatbot was implemented efficiently. The agile project management with short development cycles and transparent communication was crucial for success.
“After an intensive period full of effort, the time had finally come: the first campaigns are running, the first employees have already been hired via our new software – and above all: the impact is visible. We are currently optimizing the process and selected functions with additional beta testers,” says Schulz, summarizing the current status.
Measurable successes with pilot customers are already visible – from a shorter recruiting cycle to lower costs per application. Above all, the integrated data collection and evaluation makes it easier to automate further process steps. funnellab has also received positive feedback from SME customers because the software significantly reduces the time required for a traditional recruiting campaign.
In addition to the immediately visible improvements, funnellab has attached great importance to a professional handover: The newly established in-house development team gradually took over the code, supported by SPRYLAB in training the new team. This knowledge transfer included assistance in the application process for new developer positions and extensive onboarding sessions.
About funnellab
funnellab GmbH is a Hamburg-based company founded in 2019 that supports SMEs in social recruiting with its AI-supported platform. Through precise targeting, chatbot pre-qualification and a central applicant dashboard, customers can also reach passive specialists and managers, fill vacancies faster and reduce their cost-per-hire. Over 100,000 qualified candidates have already been recruited for companies in industry, trade and services.
We are driven by exciting and challenging software projects. If you are looking for an IT service provider to grow with, we are the right partner for you.
Keithstr. 2-4
10787 Berlin
Germany
