Indeed chooses WorkOS over Auth0 to strengthen their identity infrastructure

Indeed is one of the biggest job sites in the world with hundreds of millions of unique visitors landing on their website every month. It’s a bridge between job seekers and companies looking for new hires. For the team, an important metric is the number of positive matches between employers and employees, which is largely driven by how easily and securely organizations can sign in to Indeed and manage their hirings such as job postings and candidates. 

When catering to enterprises, SSO was considered as a requirement for many, but it wasn’t something that could be broadly offered due to the support overhead required to onboard each customer. The team had been using Auth0 and according to Abhishek Chhibber, Director of Product, “each customer onboarding process required hours of engineering support.” 

The existing process required his team to manually gather SAML connection details from customers and guide them through setting things up in their identity provider. With Auth0, the team lacked a simple and automated method to onboard customers at scale.

The search for a more complete SSO platform

With a mission to improve the “brittleness” of their underlying identity infrastructure and a looming contract renewal with Auth0, Abhishek sought alternative solutions that included AWS Cognito, Gluu, and WSO2.

When Abhishek found WorkOS, he was immediately drawn to the depth and quality of its documentation, which was a clear differentiation from other providers and allowed the team to quickly test and prototype in the staging environment. Another aspect Abishek appreciated was that while other vendors prioritized winning Indeed’s consumer business of 600 million logins, WorkOS provided dedicated and knowledgeable support focusing on enterprise SSO and SCIM capabilities.

As the team continued their evaluation, additional differentiations solidified their preference towards WorkOS.

1. The WorkOS Admin Portal was seen as a drastic improvement to the existing customer onboarding process. Instead of having to “jump on a call with the customer, stand by for 30 minutes to redeploy the login app to activate the SSO connection,” as described by Abhishek, the Admin Portal allowed the team to consolidate onboarding into just a few, self-serve steps.
2. SCIM provisioning was a high-priority feature Indeed planned to implement after improving the SSO experience. Vendor consolidation was an important criteria for the team and choosing one reliable provider to power their enterprise capabilities would reduce operational burden.
3. WorkOS provided a more scalable pricing model. With connections-based pricing for both SSO and Directory Sync (SCIM), Indeed was confident they could forecast spend that is better aligned with their growth in the enterprise segment.

Stellar customer support accelerates implementation

As Indeed proceeded with their WorkOS integration, the team was also impressed with the level of urgency and accuracy WorkOS was able to answer technical questions and resolve troubleshooting.

​​If you work with another provider, you probably won’t get the same level of support that WorkOS provided. The feedback loop was shorter, too. We’d post a question in a shared Slack channel, and immediately receive an answer.

— Hannah Han-Ciaravella, Senior Product Manager at Indeed.

Indeed’s customers see the difference in SSO providers

When Indeed completed their implementation with WorkOS, the difference in the customer experience for SSO was noticeable. 

Hannah recalled working with one customer who had asked whether Indeed supported their IdP, OneLogin, which is one of the dozens of IdPs WorkOS supports out-of-the-box. With the Admin Portal, the customer was easily able to follow instructions specific to their IdP and activate the connection without needing any assistance from Indeed. “The customer was pretty impressed with the flexibility and ease of configuration of our SSO,” said Hannah. 

Forecasting the future of Indeed’s needs 

As Indeed continues to welcome more customers to their platform, they have a partner to support their growth. While having a reliable provider to power their SSO and directory management needs is a great benefit, what truly sets WorkOS apart is its proactive approach to collaboration.

If a feature we needed didn’t exist on the WorkOS platform, we’d let them know and the team would have a meeting scheduled to talk about it. The willingness to hear our feedback was one of the key factors that led us to go with WorkOS.

— Hannah Han-Ciaravella, Senior Product Manager at Indeed.

Now, Indeed can onboard any and all customers and confidently provide the quality experience they’d expect on the world’s #1 job site.

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