How Taikonauten runs lean recruiting with 98% less admin

Taikonauten is a Berlin-based digital product studio specialising in UX/UI design, user research, and AI-first product development. It has a team of around 30 people and one person responsible for all of People and Culture. With no plans to hire a dedicated recruiter, recruiting had to run smoothly without adding more admin to an already full role. After switching from email and Jira to Join, Nancy Tobler cut weekly recruiting admin from three days to 30 minutes, while Taikonauten grew its annual application volume fivefold.

The Challenge: A borrowed ticket system that was never built for hiring

When Nancy Tobler joined Taikonauten six years ago, the studio was receiving around 160 job applications a year. Small enough, just about, to manage entirely in email.

By the time Taikonauten started working with Join, that number had become unmanageable. Not because the team had grown dramatically, but because the old system was never designed to scale. Every application arrived by email. Each one had to be manually entered into Jira as a ticket. Every candidate needed a reply, a status update, a calendar invite — all handled individually, all requiring Nancy to context-switch constantly between tools that did not talk to each other.

Three specific problems made the old setup unsustainable.

Manual ticket management consumed peak hiring weeks entirely. At busy periods, typically four times a year when active roles were open, Nancy spent close to three days a week just maintaining candidate records. Entering every application into Jira, adding comments, tracking who had been contacted: three minutes per ticket, and nothing automated about any of it. With no ATS to handle intake, every application was administrative work before it was a hiring decision.

Publishing a single job ad took half a working day. Each job posting had to be entered manually into every job board individually. The structure of each portal was different. The fields were different. Pasting and reformatting the same content across platforms could consume most of a morning. “With Join, it takes two minutes,” Nancy notes. A half-day task, now done before the first coffee break.

Scheduling interviews meant chasing candidates for days. Inviting five candidates to an interview required five separate phone calls. People were unavailable. Calls had to be returned. Calendars had to be coordinated manually. Each invitation, once a call finally connected, still needed a calendar entry, a location note, and a confirmation email. That is 20 minutes of coordination per person, minimum. “You’re chasing five people for at least two days,” Nancy says.

“I was spending three days a week just keeping the process running. There was nothing left for the actual work: the people side of the role.”

The Solution: One system that grew with the studio

Join wasn’t the result of a lengthy software evaluation. Nancy came across it, saw there was a free trial, and decided to give it a go.

Within the first months, the tool had already solved the problem that mattered most. Everything landed in one place automatically. There was no more inbox archaeology, no more Jira ticket creation, no more cross-referencing email threads. “We had something like a ticket system before,” Nancy says, “but Join brought it all together automatically, and it’s been growing with us ever since.”

Automated candidate management replaced three days of admin

Join’s pipeline management gave Taikonauten a single view of every candidate from the moment an application arrived. Automated stage triggers replaced manual updates. No more copy-pasting email exchanges into Jira comments, no more guessing who had been contacted and when. The entire candidate record, including all communication history, was visible inside the application itself.

The impact was immediate and arithmetic: Nancy’s weekly recruiting admin dropped from roughly three days at peak to 30 minutes. Not through delegation, not through hiring support. Through removing steps that should never have been manual in the first place.

One-click multiposting eliminated repetitive posting work

Before Join, publishing a role across Taikonauten’s preferred job boards was a half-day task. With multiposting to organic job boards, the same post goes out to LinkedIn, Stepstone, and others in a single action. Taikonauten has never used paid promotions. Every one of their 2,479 applications over five years has come through organic channels, and their annual application volume grew from roughly 160 when Nancy joined to over 800 today.

“Join helped with that growth,” Nancy says. “The reach came from the multiposting, and because everything was centralised, we could actually handle the volume.”

Automated interview invites with self-booking links ended the scheduling chase

The phone-call-to-calendar-invite process was replaced entirely. When a candidate reaches the interview stage, Join sends an automated invitation with a self-booking link. Candidates pick a slot directly, without any back-and-forth. The calendar entry, the location note, the confirmation: all handled automatically.

“Inviting someone used to cost me at least 20 minutes of coordination, just to reach them and get a time agreed,” Nancy explains. “Now they book themselves, and it’s done.” For a team often evaluating five candidates at once for a single specialist role, that saving adds up fast.

A customisable pipeline gave hiring managers visibility without friction

When department leads get involved in hiring at Taikonauten, they access Join directly. Nancy onboards them with a walkthrough of the pipeline, the permissions relevant to their role, and the conventions the team uses: which stage means what, how to leave feedback, when to tag Nancy versus moving a candidate themselves. The tool’s flexibility to add or rename stages means each hiring process can be tailored without rebuilding from scratch.

“The pipeline is flexible enough that we can adapt it to whatever the role needs,” Nancy says. “That’s made it much easier to bring in other people without losing control of the process.”

“Join is the transparency-building tool that recruiting actually needs. Watching it grow in features and quality over the years, it’s genuinely a pleasure to work with.”

The Results: Five years on, one platform and a reclaimed week

Five years after switching from email and Jira to Join, Taikonauten runs all hiring from a single platform. Nancy still handles People and Culture entirely on her own, but recruiting no longer dominates her week.

Recruiting admin dropped from three days a week to 30 minutes. The full pipeline, from application intake to candidate communication, runs with minimal manual intervention. What used to consume most of Nancy’s working time at peak periods now fits inside a single morning slot.

Job posting time went from half a day to two minutes. Multiposting to organic job boards in one action eliminated the most repetitive part of opening a new role. The time recovered goes back into writing better job ads and onboarding new hiring managers.

Application volume grew from ~160 to over 800 per year, all organically. Taikonauten has never run paid promotions. The reach came from organic multiposting combined with job ads that reflect how the company actually works. Nancy credits both the tool’s distribution and the quality of the candidate experience for making that growth manageable rather than overwhelming.

Specialist roles that once stalled for weeks now move faster. Taikonauten’s most challenging hires, including senior positions in UX, user research, and engineering, now progress more quickly because hiring managers can comment and decide in real time. One recent senior hire moved to offer within days once the right candidate arrived, because the team could evaluate and align without coordination overhead.

Taikonauten has evaluated whether a bundled recruiting tool could replace Join. It couldn’t — not at the same level of quality, and not for a better price. Five years in, the decision keeps making itself.

“For me, there’s no question of switching. I’d rather ask whether Join integrates with something new than replace it.”

Looking ahead, Taikonauten plans to continue using Join as their primary recruiting tool as the studio evolves. Nancy is exploring using the activity log more actively to track candidate communication history at a glance, and plans to share that feature with department leads as they take on more independent ownership of their hiring pipelines.