5 Things We'd Recommend When Implementing Ashby
We've now worked with a number of Talent teams implementing Ashby, migrating from another ATS or coming to us after they've already been using the platform for a while.
Ashby gives you a huge amount of flexibility in how you configure it, which is one of its biggest strengths, but it also means there are decisions you can make early on that have a big impact on how easy the system is to manage later.
There are a few things we find ourselves recommending again and again, so if you're currently implementing Ashby, these are some of the things we'd think about from the beginning.
1. Use grouped interview plans
This is something we'd always recommend thinking about early in an Ashby implementation, particularly if you want to get the most from the reporting functionality later.
Different roles will naturally have different interview plans, but that can make it difficult to report consistently across all of your hiring. Grouped interview plans allow you to map different interview stages into a smaller number of shared stage groups, so you're able to report against the same key milestones even when the underlying interview processes are different.
For example, different roles might have stages called Hiring Manager Interview, Technical Interview or Functional Interview, but you may want these grouped together for reporting purposes rather than treating every individual stage separately.
Keeping your grouped interview plan relatively simple and focused on the key milestones makes reporting much cleaner and can also support things like alerts and candidate experience surveys.
It's one of those things that's much easier to structure properly at the beginning than try to clean up once you already have lots of roles and interview plans running through Ashby.
We saw the value of this first hand when supporting Charta Health with their migration from Gem to Ashby, where the move gave us an opportunity to rethink interview plans, templates and wider workflows rather than simply recreate the old setup.
2. Create job templates
We'd recommend investing some time upfront in creating good job templates.
When you have multiple recruiters using Ashby, it's very easy for everyone to start setting jobs up slightly differently. Over time that creates inconsistencies in naming, interview plans, approvals and the data you're collecting.
Creating templates means everyone has the same starting point when they open a role, while also saving recruiters a lot of repetitive configuration.
It might feel like more work during implementation, but it saves a lot of time later.
3. Make use of sequences for sourcing
Ashby doesn't just need to be the place candidates arrive once they're already in your hiring process.
The sourcing and sequencing functionality means much more of your outbound hiring activity can sit within the same platform, giving recruiters better visibility of their outreach and reducing the number of different tools and workflows they need to manage.
If you're implementing Ashby, it's worth looking at your entire recruiting workflow and thinking about what could now happen within the platform rather than automatically recreating the collection of tools you were using before.
4. Don't overcomplicate your reporting
Reporting is one of Ashby's biggest strengths, but it can also feel overwhelming when you're starting with a blank page and have access to so much data. The good news is that this is becoming much easier.
With Ashby's AI functionality, you can now describe what you're trying to understand and use AI to help create the report rather than always having to build everything manually from scratch.
We'd still recommend starting with the question you're trying to answer rather than creating reports simply because you can. Think about what your Talent team, hiring managers and leadership actually need visibility on and build your reporting around that.
For teams already using Ashby, we’ve also seen how much value can be unlocked through better reporting, dashboards and data hygiene.
5. Use AI notetaking to improve interview feedback
Getting interviewers to submit good feedback consistently is a challenge for almost every Talent team. Ashby's AI notetaking functionality can help make that process easier by capturing information from the interview and supporting the feedback process afterwards.
Used properly, it can reduce some of the admin involved for interviewers and help improve feedback completion, while also making sure useful information from the interview isn't lost.
It's still important to have well designed scorecards and clear expectations around what interviewers are assessing, but the technology can remove some of the friction that traditionally gets in the way.
Build for how you'll work six months from now
The biggest thing we'd recommend when implementing Ashby is not to think purely about getting to go live, think about what happens after.
What happens when you add another recruiter? When you suddenly have 30 open roles? When leadership wants a headcount report? When you need to change an interview process across 15 jobs?
Spending a little more time thinking about structure, consistency and reporting during implementation can save a huge amount of work later.
We regularly support companies with Ashby implementations, migrations and optimisation projects, from the initial setup through to reporting, workflows and ongoing training.
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