Begin by exploring Workable's capabilities for exporting data. This typically involves accessing their API which allows you to extract candidate, job posting, and application data. Familiarize yourself with the API documentation, endpoints, and possible data formats (e.g., JSON or CSV) that Workable provides.

Ensure your Kafka environment is set up and running. This involves installing Apache Kafka on your server or local machine. You'll need to configure a Kafka broker, create necessary topics for the data you plan to stream, and ensure Zookeeper is running to manage the Kafka cluster.

Write a script, in a language like Python, to call Workable's API. This script should authenticate using Workable's API credentials, request the desired data, handle pagination if necessary, and parse the response. Ensure the script can handle common errors such as network issues or authentication failures.

Once the data is extracted, it may need to be transformed into a format compatible with Kafka. If the data is in JSON, ensure it meets the schema requirements for your Kafka topics. You may need to flatten nested JSON structures or convert data types to match your topic's schema.

With your data extracted and transformed, you can now write a producer script. Utilize a Kafka client library appropriate for your programming language (such as `confluent-kafka` for Python) to send messages to your Kafka topics. Ensure your script handles partitioning and can retry on failures.

Implement logging within your script to monitor the data transfer process. Log each step of the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process. Capture errors, successful message deliveries, and metrics like throughput or latency, which can help in troubleshooting and optimizing performance.

Finally, automate the entire ETL process to run at regular intervals. This can be done using cron jobs on Linux or Task Scheduler on Windows. Ensure the automation handles failures gracefully, perhaps by sending alerts or retries, and maintains idempotency to avoid duplicate data in Kafka.

By following these steps, you'll be able to move data from Workable to Kafka without relying on third-party connectors or integrations, using only custom scripts and direct connections.