Team
We're a nimble team of humans working together to do big things.
Ashby is a remote-first company with colleagues working from 9 countries in North America and Europe. We meet in person at least once a year in Europe and in our office in San Francisco.
Our 2022 holiday book exchange ๐
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Many of our customers want to allow users to send emails on behalf of other users or groups. This is complicated and error prone to setup in Gmail. I added a feature within Ashby to make it easier to share email addresses with users and allow them to send email using these shared email addresses.
Something I've helped the team with...
During a post-mortem, we identified that frontend errors were getting missed during QA. I built a widget that shows a summary of console.log errors in-app so they're harder to miss.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Everyone talks about the importance of using async communication whenever possible. It was still surprising the first time someone at Ashby cancelled a big meeting with the explanation "this can just be an email"!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've designed and created some of the early building blocks we use to build new features (think Legos). It's been great to see the team embrace this way of building and watch the building blocks evolve without my help!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've built and continue to expand the internal knowledge base of our industry and our customers. It's critical to help the team make independent product and engineering decisions.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The team has consistently focused on the long term even as I've stepped away from engineering.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's design system. It's enabled the team to design and launch well designed products; often without a full-time designer! While we have room to improve, customers consistently comment on how well designed Ashby is.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented code that tagged all client Sentry errors with a link to a video recording of the user session. It was a small change but it continues to help us create repro steps for obscure bugs and fix them, often without a user even reporting it!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at the depth we can go with each feature we've built. While we can improve our customer's lives with a first version, it often uncovers even more impactful problems or inefficiencies we can solve. We've only scratched the surface of what Ashby can do for our customers!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our calendar and email sync from a brute force cron job to real-time sync. It's helped both customers and our team: customers now have the most up-to-date information when scheduling and following up with candidates and we've able to scale sync as we grow with minimal effort.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've added monitoring and observability to a lot of our infrastructure at Ashby: Datadog monitors to alert us when things go wrong, linking Sentry issues to DataDog traces, logging SQL explains for inefficient SQL generated by our query engine. It's greatly reduced the stress of being on-call, provided context when debugging a product issue, and helped us proactively catch performance bottlenecks before they become a real problem.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The impact that a small, engineering-focused team can have in building and shaping such a complex product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby University, our customer help center. It's been rewarding to see how helpful it is to customers as they onboard and learn new features.
Something I've helped the team with...
I designed and setup our changelog process to make it really easy for engineers to let our go-to-market team know which new features are ready to share with customers. All engineers have to do is tag a Pull Request in GitHub!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How awesome the humans are! Everyone on the team is as kind and collaborative as they are talented.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and built our HRIS integrations with Rippling and BambooHR. Instead of manually copying data on hired candidates from Ashby to their HRIS, customers can do it with the click of a button!
Something I've helped the team with...
I built a script that enabled our team to import our customers' candidate data from CSV files. It's enabled us to work with technology partners and recruiting firms that haven't yet integrated with Ashby.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The flexibility and breadth of the product was definitely something that surprised me when I joined Ashby. I was impressed by all of the existing capabilities of the product, and I'm excited to help expand and improve on what we've already built!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's in-app e-signature feature. Before, our customers had to generate the document in Ashby, upload it to an e-signature service like DocuSign, set up the signature blocks, get the signatures, download the signed document, and upload it back to Ashby. Now this entire process is automated!
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first month, I upgraded many of our core libraries to the latest major version (e.g. Create React App) and migrated us from TSLint to ESLint. With these changes, other engineers had faster build and reload times and more issues caught in CI (versus in production)!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at how well we live our "build for the long term" engineering principle. It's amazing how often I find myself building off of the building blocks of others, versus having to build new one-off components.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I want to make sure weโre on top of all our customersโ goals and tracking towards their definition of success. This is challenging at scale, so I created a metric called Customer Health that we track in our CRM. It allows us to quickly identify which customers arenโt on track yet and reach out to help them.
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve helped set up a system for engineers (or other non-customer facing roles) at Ashby to shadow customer calls. This is so important to make sure our customersโ feedback stays really close to our product team and that our engineers can hear about how the tool is used out in the world. Itโs always fun to bring our team closer to the customers we work with!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How powerful our analytics feature set is! After learning the ins and outs and seeing how customers use it in different ways, Iโm endlessly impressed by how many insights can be generated!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I redesigned and rebuilt the user interface for filters (which is used everywhere!) to make it easier to use while having much more flexibility than it had previously.
Something I've helped the team with...
I'm helping other engineers write more robust and modular CSS through pair programming sessions and creating reusable layout components in our design system.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Too many to list. Amazingly competent, thoughtful, and kind team. A sense of calmness throughout my week. Lots of well written documents. And last but not least, very sharp and candid leadership.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've helped streamline and automate a number of small processes so that account executives can spend more time speaking with customers and less time entering data.
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first quarter I collaborated with Jacob to land Ashby's largest customer yet!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
It's so exciting to see the passion for our product and the volume of people that reach out to us to learn more. It's a testament to the quality and power of the product our team has built.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I am excited to build a world-class marketing team that delivers a lot of impact to the business and has a lot of fun doing it. Over the next couple of months, our focus will be on building Ashbyโs brand identity, how we communicate with our prospects and customers, and then laying the foundation for inbound and outbound marketing motions.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Like all startups (and new jobs), I have been drinking from a firehose for the past month and absolutely loving it! The team has been incredibly welcoming, and thanks to the thoughtful communication culture at Ashby, Iโve been able to onboard a lot faster using great documentation.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
While it was a big part of why I joined, I still hadnโt fully anticipated how thoughtful the founders, Benji and Abhik, are in terms of communication, decision making, and process. The implication of this is the business is able to move faster, decisions only have to be made once, and, while there is still a great culture, there is a lot less spin and pointless meetings. Itโs awesome.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Scheduling improvements! It's now much easier for our customers to pick the scheduling method they want.
Something I've helped the team with...
I wrote about the "Jobs to Be Done" framework and to help product engineers think through user problems.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The product team structure. I love working with people who go to first principles and think critically about how products are built โ the unique team structure of ownership & autonomy at Ashby is a testament to that.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Iโm excited to help elevate our already best-in-class Customer Success and Support teams. Ashby is committed to being at the forefront of leading technology; our customers can expect the same across our Go-to-Market teams including a cutting edge customer experience.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Smooth! Everyone has been helpful, there has been a healthy mix of getting to know the team, diving deep into the product, and, of course, meeting our customers.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How aligned the teams are with our operating principles. They're not some esoteric guide; the framework is in practice each and every day, which yields tremendous cross-functional success.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to build onto the tools used by some of Ashby's power users, and to share my experience streamlining developer workflows. There's a unique satisfaction not only to making challenging tasks easier, but to expanding the limits of what a particularly motivated user can do.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
My onboarding experience at Ashby was great, and an exciting view into what a regular day at Ashby can be like. All the foundational processes are solidly defined, there's always someone ready to help, and there's tons of room to explore the platform, get to know the team, and ease into things.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I'm constantly surprised by the amount of care and thought put into the small pieces of what's a sprawling and complex piece of software. More often than not there's existing code, solid documentation, and always a knowledgeable teammate I can reach out to.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to help build a world-class sales motion for partnering with our prospects and customers as they evaluate their talent stack and strategy. I'm also excited to maintain and celebrate Ashby's customer-centric culture as we grow.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
So thorough! I've been really impressed by the thoughtfulness of Ashby's onboarding plan given its stage and size.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
While it was a big part of what brought me to Ashby, I continue to be floored by our customer's enthusiasm for the product: they're effusive about what Ashby does today and passionate about helping us continuously improve it.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Chapman and I worked on a document to breakdown two competitors of Ashby to help the Sales team improve their pitch to customers on our value add and key differentiators.
Something I've helped the team with...
On the Sales team, itโs important to have strong messaging around our product. I contribute to building messaging templates that the Go-to-Market team uses to engage prospects and make sure that we are highlighting the key aspects of the platform from a perspective of a day-to-day user.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Itโs surprising how much Ashby's leadership believes in a holistic approach to your work and life balance. People say they care about the two but, when the rubber meets the road, work tends to come first. Not with Ashby. If youโre not doing well personally and need time, that is priority, and you see it in how leadership discusses work when you need to take time off.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've defined our QA process from the ground up: from how new features get QA-ed to how bugs get repro steps to our test plans for each feature.
Something I've helped the team with...
I created a bug reporting process to bridge the gap between our customer service and engineering teams. Incoming bugs can quickly and smoothly be triaged and assigned to the right engineers for a fix.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
One of the things that drew me to Ashby is still one of the things that most amazes me - that such a complex, impactful product can come to life with a small (so far!), mostly remote, focused team.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
The company! Growing the people, the culture, the product, and communities are all within the sphere of influence for my role.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It's been both great and unique. The communication style here is very different...the space to work and get your job done is amazing.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The range of documentation tools! I'm sure i'll get used to when to use each one and how to find everything.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've built an integration for doing background checks with the click of a button (using Checkr). The integration allows the user to stay in Ashby and keep focus on the hiring process. Our own hiring managers use it for every hire and love it!
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we're obsessed about writing technical specs and documentation when starting a new project. I helped introduce a new process to improve collaboration in the spec-writing phase and ensure a broader perspective from the beginning. The feedback from the engineering team has only been positive.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I was most surprised about how well the team is collaborating. Ashby has an extremely talented team and someone is always ready to help out. There's a high amount of trust and lot of focus on knowledge sharing, documentation and distribution of decisions.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I'm working on a workflow to improve our process around collecting feature requests from our customers and reaching out once a feature is released. I love the work our team puts into delighting our customers!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've started drafting internal product documentation for our Support team. I love documenting and consolidating this information in one place for everyone to access.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Ashby is a customizable product which makes it a very powerful tool to use. Not all companies and jobs are the same, and I love how flows within Ashby can be easily adjusted to fit business needs.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
In my first 30 days, I booked 15 outbound meetings with great companies using a new email messaging strategy built around referencing the VP Eng. The approach received positive feedback from prospects; a talent leader said it was the best cold email he'd received ๐
Something I've helped the team with...
I proposed and implemented Guru as a knowledge sharing solution for sales and customer support. It allows our sales knowledge to be easily accessible via chrome extension. It's helpful for teammates who join the go-to-market team and need quick, digestible answers to common customer-facing questions.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Definitely the minimization of Slack! It's been a huge net-positive on my productivity and general wellbeing. I even posted about it recently on LinkedIn.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's internal cNPS dashboard. I care a lot about candidate experience and I've ported ours to some of our customers instances already. Hit me up anytime to talk candidate experience surveys ๐
Something I've helped the team with...
I helped our Go-To-Market folks out with talk-tracks on what recruiters and Head of Talents want to see during a demo: the complete journey of a candidate moving from application to offer and how we demo cNPS and surveys. Also I'm a big automation nerd, so built a lot of Alfred automation recipes for the Go-To-Market team.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Transparency. For instance, I find it refreshing that everyone has access to all our revenue metrics from progress against goal to churn.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
The most rewarding thing for me is building something that users and customers love and appreciate. I look forward to working closely with others to have a better understanding of how the product is used, and figure out the road to perfection together. Another thing that I look forward to is simply collaborating with my wonderful colleagues. The team at Ashby is sizeable and growing, and there's a large diversity in personalities, talent, and experience. I look forward to learn from everyone and understand their perspective.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Like most things at Ashby, the onboarding process is thoughtfully put together. At least speaking for us engineers, there's a clear vision associated with the onboarding process. For instance, for my onboarding process I received a list of suggested tasks from tiny to small to medium. These tasks have continiously been in progress since day 1, while also balancing time to meet the team and explore the product. I appreciate this focus on gradually building momentum, and I feel it makes the transition out of onboarding more graceful than might otherwise be the case.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Coming in, I knew there was a strong focus on thoughtful communication. What still caught me by surprise, however, is how much is actually communicated. I had the impression beforehand that people might choose to omit communicating something to avoid noise, or otherwise consolidate their messaging so it's a single interruption. I now realize it's more about managing the channels of communiciation rather than the amount of information. Because there's a broadly shared vision and understanding of how communication works at Ashby, it is relatively easy to deal with all the moving pieces and sharing of information.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and implemented the ability to multi-select candidates in our pipeline view and perform bulk actions. Customers use it multiple times daily and it saves them a lot of clicks!
Something I've helped the team with...
I revamped our input field components in our design system with a new more flexible API for layout and interactions. Other engineers have been able to quickly create visually pleasing forms and profile pages with minimal effort!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I'm surprised at how quickly the market has embraced us as a critical improvement to existing tools. People are really blown away when they see what we can do for them.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've helped onboard our second Analytics Support hire and developed relationships with several of our customers.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've improved internal resources for our Analytics Support team, which in turn has made it easier to provide those resources to customers.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The most surprising thing about Ashby is how quickly and intentionally changes or updates are made in order to better support employees and customers.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built our Sourcing module from idea to implementation. The hiring process starts with sourcing great candidates and it's great to see how much our customers depend on it.
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we encourage everyone to write up and share learnings they have over the course of their work. I've helped contribute to the large repository of interesting and quirky technical lessons we've learned as a team. Writing and sharing these has really helped me consistently grow my skills while I've been here.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much we've accomplished with a small team in such a short period of time. We've built powerful pieces of infrastructure that really give us the leverage to build features for our customers quickly and reliably.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to help refine and tailor Ashby's sales messaging and processes to drive adoption amongst larger organizations. Moving upmarket is never an easy feat, but I'm confident we have the proper product, tooling, and team in place to achieve these goals.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
The onboarding experience has exceeded all my expectations. There is clear thought and care to documenting existing processes and product information to reduce the reliance on tribal knowledge. The team has been incredibly welcoming and kind, and I feel connected, despite everyone being remote.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I'm surprised at how much customers love the product; I've never seen customers so immediately excited during a demo. It's clear to me that Ashby is genuinely fulfilling a customer need by delivering a powerful, consolidated product that eliminates painful, manual processes.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I implemented customer referrals in Ashby. This was my first big change that affected the core product!
Something I've helped the team with...
I added validation of user input throughout our internal operations app. Without these, many of the interfaces our go-to-market team used to setup customers was error prone. Now we rarely run into issues!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Autonomy and focus time are a big part of the culture at Ashby. We're empowered to explore all potential solutions to a problem and given the appropriate time to implement the right one.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
One of the joys of working as a team of one is Iโm able to impact (and learn about) many facets of the business, from sales to finance. I formalized deal flow management in our CRM, built all our sales metrics and ARR analytics from scratch, and wrangled our billings and invoicing process.
Something I've helped the team with...
I automated handoff of a customer from sales to customer success by configuring our CRM to automatically create customer check-in reminders once a deal is closed. Before this, we weren't able to keep track of customers and make sure they were having a great experience!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I joined Ashby when it was 7 people and I was expecting it to be more chaotic and disorganized (like the typical startup journey). While there are constantly new problems to solve, I'm delighted that decisions are made rationally with long-term success in mind. I also appreciate the clear standards around effective communication practices and documentation, something that most companies wait too long to implement.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I created a feature that enables our users to import data from CSV files and map it to any record or related record in Ashby. Previously, customers had to reach out to support, support reached out to an engineer, and the engineer had to configure and run a script to import the data. Now it's entirely self-serve.
Something I've helped the team with...
Originally meant to be a feature for our users, I added the ability to refresh the cache for reports. It coincidentally made the lives of engineers easier. If they changed any logic during development, they could easily refresh the cache to see the changes.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
It's amazing to see how every single person on the team is dedicated to building the right thing the right way for the long term. I've never experienced a group of people being so aligned in creating and maintaining best practices, documentation, and tooling to make the best possible product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've built our more of Ashby University and created guides on a number of Ashby's amazing features.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've built more internal documentation for the Scaled Success team based around customer goals.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How thoughtful everything is! Every process is thought through, well-explained, and considerate. The communication guidelines ensure that everyone's time is valued and work/life balance is incredibly important here. That thoughtfulness definitely extends into the product too which is built with so much care. My first walkthrough of it blew my mind โit's so robust!
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Ashby is executing product improvements at a high clip. Iโm excited to build out our product and feature launch infrastructure to position our changes in a more meaningful way to our customers.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
You are flooded with warm welcomes and excitement. Teammates you've never met are quick to remove onboarding blockers. You quickly realize how thoughtful everyone is about their respective responsibilities. Onboarding can sometimes feel like information overload but this feels like a page-turning novel.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Instead of company โvaluesโ we have operating principles + team attributes. This distinction has already proved a useful framework in how I engage with teammates and execute day-to-day work.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's auto-reject feature; it allows customers to create flexible rules to automatically reject candidates who don't fulfill certain requirements. It saves our customers a lot of time and, as part of this project, I improved the extensibility of the underlying business process engine that powers many of our features (including this one).
Something I've helped the team with...
Building a remote culture isn't easy and, as we've grown, it's been harder to get to know everyone without social events. I started a monthly game "night" (we play during work hours) to help us get to know each other and bond as a team.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Even as a startup, we're building great generic building blocks for the long haul.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Iโve worked to improve many people and culture initiatives here at Ashby, including new employee onboarding. I want everyone who joins Ashby to have an amazing experience! Itโs important that new team members feel welcome, are equipped with the right tools and knowledge base, and are immersed in the product from Day 1.
Something I've helped the team with...
I planned our in person company offsite! We all met in California and enjoyed a week of learning, collaboration, and social outings together. Iโm hoping to plan another company outing next year and Iโll also be working with smaller teams to provide more opportunities for in-person connection.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Itโs still amazing to me how much our team gets done while working pretty much entirely asynchronously!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I launched our Recruiting Ops community. This community was created to give Recruiting Ops professionals a hyper-focused group of peers to improve, learn, and grow together. It has over 70 members to date, and we're already seeing great engagement amongst the community!
Something I've helped the team with...
As the partnerships lead, I streamlined the process to request and onboard all types of partners. Our partnerships channel has been a great vehicle of growth for Ashby. Team members often wonder about the status of certain partners and they have much better visibility than they had before.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I've been surprised by Ashby's unrelenting commitment to build a world-class brand, product, and team. No stone goes unturned when making the tough decisions, and it shows in customer feedback, internal meetings, and feature launches.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our report generation to a worker-based infrastructure with caching. Running Ashby reports is computationally expensive because of how flexible it is and with this change, we've been able to increase the number and size of our customers without impacting our other features and services.
Something I've helped the team with...
I built our database schema migration system. It compares our Typescript models to what exists in our database and automatically generates an up and down migration that adds, removes, or updates tables, columns, foreign keys, and constraints.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How complex some of the problems are in recruiting. Giving talent teams the tools to get insights and be productive gives us really interesting problems to solve with software.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've worked with Ravan to improve and streamline our support processes so that we can maintain our support quality as we grow.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've helped improve internal documentation and the onboarding process for new hires.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How incredibly robust the product is. It seems like on an almost-daily basis I learn something new about what Ashby can do.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm really looking forward to expanding our presence within the EMEA region and partnering with driven talent acquisition teams!
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It's been amazing so far. Even though we are fully remote, the sense of care really transpires through the rigorous documentation provided by all teams. It gives you a sense of direction from the get-go. To make things even better, I immediately got to meet the GTM team in California!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The amount of genuine love we receive from our customers on our #ashbylove slack channel. It's really impressive and showcases how great our platform, people, and service are!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I have really enjoyed speaking with our customers and working with them to build strategic and insightful dashboards. Customers have unique reporting and recruiting needs, and I have been really fortunate to have the opportunity to help unblock recruiting teams using the power of data.
Something I've helped the team with...
As the first Solutions Engineer, I have started some foundational documentation to ensure the scaleability of this team. The Go-to-market team is an amazing group of collaborators who are bringing our different backgrounds together to hone in on a process and philosophy that works best for us and our customers.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Each and every employee here has the ability to make an impact on the organization. It is also encouraged here to make your voice heard โno matter what your role is, there is so much opportunity to get involved in cross-functional collaboration. Although it wasn't a huge shock that this is the culture of Ashby, it is just so amazing to see in action!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've developed the beginning of our customer onboarding webinar platform. Once we're up and running, this will be a key channel helping new customers get up and running with Ashby quickly!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've helped to foster a culture of open communication among team members, helping us work quicker, together.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much gets done, and how quickly. Every day we have exciting new updates to share with each other!
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to expand QA coverage and help ship high quality features to customers.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Onboarding has been amazing so far. There's a lot to learn, and I appreciate the help and patience I've received from the team.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Ashby is not what I expect from a startup. There is so much documentation and structure, but it's still easy to collaborate. It is surprising how much a small team can accomplish.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built a tool that lets candidates directly book their desired interview time with the companies they're talking to, saving hours of back-and-forth communication/coordination time per week! It's like Calendly but with more complexity: you can book with multiple interviewers and each interviewer can be picked from a pool. It wows every customer the first time they use it!
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first week at Ashby, I created a number of zsh aliases for common commands that I was running frequently. When the next engineer started, I shared the aliases with that person (my onboarding mentee) and didn't think much of that afterward. Over a year later, I discovered that successive newer teammates have been sharing and improving that original set of aliases! We now have our own repository to centrally update and share them.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The common mantra for startups is to build the MVP and iterate as quickly possible. At Ashby, we've instead been betting on a "festina lente" approach; we "hurry slowly." It's been amazing to me just how much taking time to build our product *well* has positively impacted both customer and developer happiness.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I'm excited to help customers be product champions and to have us grow together! We have an exciting platform and I'm excited to push our Analytics product forward!
Something I've helped the team with...
I'm developing a process for our support team to share documentation snippets in a quicker way when responding to customers.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Startup life can be hectic but the communication culture here at Ashby brings a fresh perspective that I haven't experienced before at prior companies. Communication here is deliberate and you don't feel bogged down by information overload or conflicting priorities.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to help us use to data to make the sales process smoother and more efficient.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Great! I had a very clear onboarding doc to follow and everyone has been extremely friendly and helpful!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
There is so much documentation! The team is amazing at documenting their processes and decisions which has made onboarding very smooth.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Seems like just yesterday LeetCode exercises were the celebrated norm of technology interviews. I'm looking forward to helping Ashby build products that will enable growing teams to truly find and retain the best candidates for their organization. These products will organizations craft a hiring process that is holistic, fair, consistent, and delightful.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It's been pretty smooth. The process and documentation are very intentional.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Most refreshing is Ashby's shipping culture. Ashby doesn't just celebrate code releases to production (which fosters a mentality that overly optimizes on one output). Ashby also celebrates the "little" things like new documentation, research done, test fixes, specs read and written, and even LinkedIn ad campaigns. The wins are big and small and the things that normally aren't as recognized get a platform to shine.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
As Ashby grew, I took on the full-time responsibility for our Analytics product. Within that scope, I've brought a dedicated focus to understanding our customers' product journey, starting at the sales demo through onboarding to the ongoing customer experience. In working closely with many of our customers, I defined a standard set of dashboards for common use cases and needs in the recruiting space. These reports are now the starting point for every new customer and available immediately, providing access that otherwise would take many weeks of analyst effort. It's amazing to see a talent leader's joy when they get insights into their recruiting process they never had before.
Something I've helped the team with...
On a topic that's less about the day-to-day of product management, I wanted to help our team members get to know each other in our remote-first world. To help with that, I introduced a people intro slide deck where everyone gets a slide to share more about their personal interests. At all hands, every new employee introduces themselves with that slide. We've been able to learn a lot of interesting things that we would have otherwise never known, and it's a ton of fun!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I joined Ashby primarily because of the people - they're talented and are a rare selection of all-around great coworkers. Apart from that, having seen our product help, enable, and satisfy customers, I've had a growing pride in what we do and what we're building. It was a bit unexpected at first, but now I look at all the other companies in the world that I admire, and I have a sort of excitement at the idea of helping them effectively build the team they need. It's fun and hard work, we have so much to build, but it's really rewarding.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I launched our recruiting blog!
Something I've helped the team with...
We're a global team so we're all familiar with different names, so I started an internal name pronunciation guide for the team. We've added it as a step to our employee onboarding, so every new hire updates it.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How warm and real the whole team is, and how passionate they are about their jobs.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I set up a new type of integration that allows Ashby users to automatically create and attach CodeSignal live interview sessions to their interview invitations. The integration is designed so that we can easily extend it to support creating more interview resource types in the future!
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve worked on streamlining our API validation to make it easier for engineers to add new endpoints quickly and safely. Iโve also started converting our API docs to the OpenAPI format. This will eventually allow us to generate API validations from our documentation and automate the process of publishing our documentation.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Iโve been surprised by how extensive the product is โespecially considering the size of the team. Itโs been very impressive to see how many different feature areas there are while onboarding. Everyone encourages each other to build for the long term and I think this plays a big role in why the team has been able to build such a powerful product with a small team.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built an integration with the Paylocity HRIS system that allows our customers to seamlessly send their hired candidate data to their onboarding module and avoid manually entering data that already exists in Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
I made it much easier for our team to see how many additional email lookups our customers have and when they expire. Our support and success teams used to have to manually calculate which email lookups are part of the base plan and which were purchased separately. They then had to figure out when additional email lookups expired and sometimes trick the system into doing the right thing. Now it's properly tracked and easy to adjust!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How mature Ashby as a company is. Everything's well documented, there's structure, and the product itself is of high quality which shows that it was built with the long-term in mind. At the same time, it's easy to communicate and make decisions without any bureaucratic hurdles. It's truly amazing to see how much a small team can achieve.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I have contributed to designing and improving our structured onboarding process for new customers implementing our All-in-One product. We now have a more streamlined process to get Ashby implemented faster.
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve created enablement documentation for our internal teams so we are all aligned on best practices for implementating Ashby with a customer!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
There is intention and thought behind everything that is done at Ashby. Whether it is within the product or internal communication/collaboration, things arenโt being done just because. I can see that this deliberate intention has fostered a great internal culture at Ashby that does not feel chaotic for a startup.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
There were some legacy settings in Ashby the confused nearly everyone โ customers, the support team, and developers. I overhauled the entire thing, making the UI more clear and intuitive and refactoring the logic behind it to be more straightforward and easier to extend if the need arises.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented a toast notification system for a fairly barebones internal application. Before, when someone made an update, there was no positive feedback to the user that the change they made actually went through. Now with the notification system, users have much more confidence that the changes they are making are taking effect.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
On the surface, applicant tracking systems don't seem that exciting โ Ashby turns that assumption on it's head! The more I learn about the application, the more excited about Ashby I become. The passion and excitement from the team is contagious and is clearly reflected in the quality of app that has been (and continues to be) built!
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to delight our customers and exceed their expectations. Plus, take on projects in which product support contributes to business growth and customer experience.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
The team is super friendly. I am lucky to have Abbye as my onboarding buddy ๏ผ she helps me make the most of my learning experience. The onboarding process is well-structured and easy to follow. The combination of documentation, webinars, live sessions, and meeting the team one-on-one works magically!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Friendly team, thoughtful communication, awesome customer feedback, and documented processes that set me up for success.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Creating customized dashboards and reports is my favorite part of being a Recruiting Operations Consultant at Ashby. Through these builds, we are able to cut manual work time for recruiting ops and recruiting teams down significantly. As someone who has previously been a recruiter, I know how much every second of the day matters and being able to cut hours off a recruiting team's workload is incredibly motivating and rewarding.
Something I've helped the team with...
I rebuilt and reconfigured standardized dashboards to make it easier to onboard customers using the analytics functionality.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The intentionality of both the product and growth of the company. The product is created with such great intention so that our foundation is prepared for change and scale. Outside of the product, team growth is planned with great care to ensure we are hiring the right people at the right time for the workload of the organization.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've been refining how we work with larger, and more complicated, customers to ensure they have a full understanding of the product and the ability to see value as soon as possible.
Something I've helped the team with...
I am building out competition focused content to ensure we have a strong understanding of the other platforms in our market and how Ashby delivers a differentiated experience.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The raw power in our product โwith a few clicks we can deliver insight and understanding that traditionally took hours, days, or weeks of working in spreadsheets. It's amazing to watch customers light up when they see what they are capable of with Ashby.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I have improved our sales process to help our start-up customers evaluate Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
We have documentation on nearly everything at Ashby which has been a game changer for the onboarding process. After introducing a new sales intelligence platform to the Go-to-Market team, I helped document the set up instructions and best practices.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The most surprising thing about Ashby is how many people talk about their positive experience with the tool and how quickly that message has been spreading to others! It speaks volumes to the engineering and design principles at Ashby.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I launched strategic partnerships so our customers can discover and get access to other great products at a discount.
Something I've helped the team with...
I helped launch a partnership dashboard in Hubspot so all my colleagues have insights into our active partners and partnership pipeline. Our team can now understand the impact of the broader partnership funnel and which channels within the funnel are most effective.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The async culture! Ashby employees embrace and respect async communications, allowing employees to focus on building and delivering a world-class product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Time to value. I'm excited to help customers adopt Ashby as quickly and easily as possible and provide their team with the value that changes the scope of their entire talent acquisition team.
Something I've helped the team with...
Overall, very quick and organized. By far the easiest onboarding logistically speaking of the past 3 jobs I've worked.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
People's energy. Everyone is thrilled to be here and work hard to build something amazing. Everyone is intelligent and experienced but humble and collaborative. Very much feels like a "let's do this together" mentality.
Emily Ellis
Engineering
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built the default dashboards presented on each job. While our reporting features are very powerful, not everyone has the time to build reports. The default job dashboard gives our customers a comprehensive set of metrics out of the box. I knew it would be useful, but I was still surprised at how enthusiastic our customers were about it when it launched.
Something I've helped the team with...
We'd sometimes ship bugs that didn't take into consideration all our product types. I modified our data generation script to create multiple organizations of different product types in our testing environments. Now both engineers and QA can be more comprehensive in their testing without manual setup.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
That "this meeting could have been an email" isn't just a joke. People actually send emails here instead of defaulting to Zoom calls. It's refreshing.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to help the QA process become more efficient and help us continue to ship high quality features that bring value to our users.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Two words...smooth sailing! The entire team has been extremely welcoming and there is plenty of high-quality documentation to sink my teeth into and hit the ground running.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How genuine and welcoming the entire team has been. I don't feel like "the new guy" but already a part of the team.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I have helped shape the sales process to help our start up customers evaluate the ATS market in clear and friendly environment.
Something I've helped the team with...
I love to write new email copy for the rest the team to use in outreach to prospective customers!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much our customers love using Ashby! Our #ashby-love Slack channel is buzzing all day with incredible feedback for the product and our customer support.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've been having a lot of deep technical conversations with the team on topics like database query performance, capacity planning, and infrastructure changes. This has led to a project that should increase query performance by 100x!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've improved our alerting system so that engineers have fewer distractions and even more time to focus.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The thoughtful passion that runs through the engineering team. Proposals and specs often get a lot of feedback โ and it's feedback that matters and written in a way that really helps.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Being an early hire on the CS Team, I've helped build out some of the core processes that the team uses when onboarding new and existing customers! Friday brainstorming sessions with my team are one of my favorite parts of the week and very productive!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've enjoyed helping bring insight into some of the more complex customer asks, and enjoy being able to relay that information to the rest of the team. Watching a request that I record from a customer go from idea, to being built, to being relayed back to the customer is rewarding!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much customization is available within the product!! In the short amount of time that I have been here, seeing customers' reactions to a feature has been so exciting!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I implemented syncing data from other recruiting software into Ashby. It opened up Ashby's powerful reporting features to customers who can't use our all-in-one product yet.
Something I've helped the team with...
I sped up our automated tests on CI by 10x; they now run in under 10 minutes. We're able to make changes and deploy much faster than we could before.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
What's always surprising to me, is how each existing feature in Ashby instantly produces some additional value to a new feature. For example, when I worked on a data integration feature all the data that got integrated was automatically exposed to Ashby's analytics features. If you build something at Ashby, very often you'll be able to take some existing building blocks and use them in a new feature with only a little bit of glue code.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Analytics customer kick offs! Providing a strong onboarding experience for our partners, driven by thoughtful discovery, enablement, and training ensures our customers have what they need to succeed using Ashby Analytics.
Something I've helped the team with...
I created internal documentation around adoption markers, timelines, and expected implementation maps that have helped sales and product teams see the progress and expectations for new partners.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Our teammates are very thoughtful with communication and async workflows. Everyone has the expectation of respecting others' calendars and rhythms, all while prioritizing necessary work.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built the infrastructure that serves all internal reporting at Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve built processes to route data across systems like Hubspot and Intercom so our Sales and Success teams can automate their workflows. And Iโve built dashboards. Lots of dashboards.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The attention to detail in the product. There are so many edge cases to consider for every feature in the platform. Not only has the team has covered just about all of them - thereโs always documentation I can reference to understand why each feature is designed as it is.
