Why buying doesn’t need to mean compromising on native experience
Jobylon’s product team has built a talent acquisition suite used by HR teams in over 80 countries to attract, manage, and hire candidates. Scheduling is central to what they do, which makes it an obvious candidate for building the functionality in-house. Alex sees it differently.
“Scheduling as a thing is very complicated. If you talk to a hundred different customers, they're gonna have very different views on what scheduling should be.” He describes the edge cases that multiply fast: group interviews, optional attendees, capacity rules.
The point is not that scheduling is impossible to build. It's that building it well requires constant, focused attention. "Cronofy has built a company focusing on that specific problem. This is what you're doing all the time - fixing a very real and difficult problem for users. For us to even attempt that I think is silly, to be honest. Then we would spend all our time on becoming Cronofy 2.0.”
For Jobylon, the decision was to white-label rather than build in-house, so that the scheduling function has a native look and feel within their platform. "It’s our self-scheduling function. It's based on Cronofy, but we don't really expose it. And it works really, really well. It really elevates what we can bring to our customers.”
But Alex is clear that white-labeling is a solid option with consequences, not a shortcut. For scheduling, white-labeling made sense because there's too much UI involved for a simple button integration to work. For partners like assessment providers, it's enough to surface the right data on both sides of the integration. The choice between the two models is worth thinking through before you commit.
Buying regrets: API deprecation and roadmap dependency
Whilst not building every feature in-house frees teams up to move faster, buying comes with consequences Alex has experienced firsthand.
When Adam raises the topic about situations where other vendors have deprecated APIs, Alex is candid. "We have that situation now going on, where by a certain date, this will not work anymore. So you have until this day to fix it. " A hard deadline at least makes prioritisation easy, but it creates pressure across a team already managing integrations with multiple systems. “It’s a constant worry and struggle.” Wanting to provide backward compatibility to their customers is also the reason why Cronofy’s API is still on V1 a decade on.
It's a problem that extends beyond any single integration. When vendors change their APIs without warning, every connected system becomes a liability. “When they tell us they changed their API, I’m like, oh no!” Alex reaches for a metaphor that sticks: "It's like the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you've painted it, you need to repaint it. Terrible situation to be in."
The challenges of integrating with a native look and feel
Vetting whether a solution will feel native to your platform is where most teams underinvest. "One thing we've learned the hard way is that you really need to test out the system you want to buy. There are two very different things about seeing it work within their constraints, and seeing it work within your system, for your users." A good demo is not a proof of fit.
Then there's roadmap dependency. “You can become slaves to their roadmap,” explains Alex. “If we need a specific feature and they tell us they can only do that in four to six months, that can be an issue.”
Jobylon's customers are opinionated and vocal. When a feature they need sits months out on a vendor's timeline, there is no shortcut. "You don't always have the same amount of control, which can be difficult."
Why customer-vendor relationships should feel like partnerships
Alex is direct about how Jobylon approaches vendor relationships: every buy decision should feel like a partnership, not a transaction. When forced to migrate APIs, or if a customer escalates a feature request, the quality of the relationship with a vendor determines how well a product team can navigate it. "You're making a very radical decision,” he explains. “You're simply taking something and putting it in your product. It should be someone that you trust, that you want to see going forward.”
"Every time we integrate, we want to go into it with a partnership situation. Same with Cronofy. We feel really close with you. We feel like we can go into customer meetings with you to help people adopt the product. Some people might say it’s a transactional thing, but I don’t think so. A partnership is so much more valuable.”
Alex's conclusion is that when buying, teams need to go in knowing what they're committing to long-term, not just what they're getting today.
Carving out roadmap time for developing differentiating features
Choosing a partner to handle their scheduling on an infrastructure level means Jobylon's product team can focus on what actually differentiates their platform: the hiring experience itself.
For Alex, that means being deliberate about where AI fits into their roadmap in 2026. Recruitment is classed as a high-risk territory under the EU AI act, so any partner using LLMs for scoring or decision-making needs to provide systems to describe why certain scores were given to certain candidates. Jobylon’s core customers are enterprise companies who have strict compliance requirements, so it’s vital that the product adheres to these needs.
"I think people sprinkle AI on top of a human built process a lot of times and then expect crazy outcomes. What we've been trying to do is actually really think about it as a tool, and see where it fits into our process, and how we can use it differently to build a system that really utilises AI instead of building on top of it."
That kind of space to build intelligent new features only opens up when your team isn't tied up maintaining scheduling logic across hundreds of edge cases and absorbing API changes from calendar providers.
Want to see how Cronofy’s temporal infrastructure could power scheduling and meeting features inside a talent acquisition platform?
