Moving from Gem to Ashby: Why an ATS Migration Should Be More Than a System Switch
Migrating ATS isn't just a case of moving your existing recruitment process from one system into another. In fact, it's one of the best opportunities a Talent team has to step back and ask a much more important question:
If we were designing our hiring process again today, would we build it the same way?
We recently supported Charta Health with their migration from Gem to Ashby. With an established Talent team and multiple recruiters working across the business, the project wasn't simply about getting Ashby configured and ready for go-live. It was also an opportunity to create more consistency across the team's hiring processes and bring workflows that had historically sat outside the ATS into one place.
Start with the hiring process, not the configuration
One of the biggest mistakes we see during ATS implementations is replicating the existing system too literally. Old interview stages get recreated, existing scorecards are copied across and workarounds that developed because of limitations in the previous ATS suddenly become part of the new setup.
For this project, we used the migration as an opportunity to review how Charta Health wanted hiring to work going forward, rather than simply recreating what they already had.
A key part of this was their interview plans. We worked with the team to create clearer structures and make better use of Ashby's interview plan functionality, giving them a stronger foundation that could then be replicated consistently across different roles and teams.
Creating consistency across recruiters
When you have multiple recruiters working within the same ATS, having the right foundations becomes even more important. Without them, every recruiter can gradually start building jobs differently, naming conventions change, interview plans vary and before long processes become inconsistent and reporting becomes harder.
Charta Health had a Recruiting Coordinator supporting the team, so we worked closely with them to establish job templates and a structure that recruiters could use consistently when creating new roles. This meant that rather than every recruiter starting from scratch, there was a clear foundation already in place that could be adapted depending on the role.
The objective wasn't to remove flexibility, it was to make the best way of working the easiest way of working.
Bringing offers into Ashby
Another significant opportunity was the offer process, with parts of Charta Health's offer and approval workflows historically being managed outside of the ATS.
We configured their offers and approval processes within Ashby so that much more of the workflow could happen directly within the system. Their offer letters were updated to include custom tokens and we set up approval flows for each department, giving senior leaders structured visibility of the relevant offer details and making the approval process more streamlined.
For the Talent team, this means less manual coordination and fewer processes happening across different systems, while also creating much better visibility of what's been approved and when.
An ATS migration is an opportunity to reset
The technical configuration obviously matters, but some of the most valuable conversations we have during an implementation aren't actually about the technology. They're about taking a step back and looking at how the company hires today and where things could be better.
Questions like:
Are our interview processes too complicated?
Are recruiters working consistently?
Are we collecting feedback that actually helps us make hiring decisions?
Which processes are happening outside our ATS that don't need to be?
What should the gold standard look like for our team going forward?
An ATS migration gives you a really good opportunity to answer those questions and then build the answers directly into the new system, rather than carrying across processes simply because that's how they've always been done.
Once those foundations are in place, there’s also a lot more you can do with Ashby’s reporting and data functionality to give Talent teams and leadership better visibility of hiring.
If you're moving to Ashby, don't just recreate what you already have. Use the migration as an opportunity to build the hiring operation you actually want. We’ve pulled together some of the practical things we recommend thinking about when implementing Ashby, particularly around interview plans, templates and reporting.
Planning an Ashby implementation or migration?
We support Talent teams with Ashby migrations, configuration and the hiring processes around them, so you're not simply recreating what you already have in a new system. Get in touch.
