Jim Miller Live on Shally's Alley

Hey everybody, you are live on Shelly's Alley. It is May 24th. May the 24th be with you. Oh, so I hope you guys are enjoying the beautiful weather here in, uh, in the world today. I've got an interesting two-way conversation lined up for you guys today. This is not my typical one-on-one, but there's a reason behind that. So let me introduce you first to Jim Miller. Jim and I first bumped into each other when he was doing some time at Google, where I had, I had already left a bit of a footprint, and he reached out and we've kept in touch over the years. And Jim is one of those, let's just say, imaginary visionaries that think about things that could be. And so we got along really well because we always are thinking about, you know, what could be, wouldn't it be great if. Well, apparently he, um, actually went ahead and came up with a wouldn't it be great if ATS CRM combo system. And you guys know that I don't talk about anything that I don't actually use, right? Like, my thing is I use it, I get results, and it works, or I don't talk about it. So if I'm talking about it, it's because it's tried and true. Well, I've been using this system for a few months now, and, um, it is like super easy. What is it, are you asking me? Well, we're going to talk a little bit about that, but Jim is working with a company called Ashby, and Willem is working as, I guess, a technician, technical product manager, Uh, co-founder, CTO, um, help desk, all of it, all of it, all of it. Shelly, jack of all trades. Um, anyways, so between the two of them, if I'm not mistaken, between the two of them, these are the brain trust behind the product, right?

We, we're not at all. Um, we— so I, I lead the people in the talent team, and, and Willem, I'll let him do his intro. I, I joined about 13 months ago, 14 months ago. The company was already well established. I joined because I was a customer. I was a customer twice, Recruiting Analytics and the ATS product. And I loved it so much, I actually came to— I asked the company if I could come and work here, and thankfully they said yes. But Ashby had been around for a good 4 or 5 years before I joined. So I had some product input as a customer, but it's certainly not my brain's trust. As I say, I lead the people and the talent team, and I'll let Willem introduce himself because—

Hey, it's not like I'm prone to exaggerating or anything.

My story is a little bit similar to Jim, but I joined basically since like day 50 or something. Matt, Benji, I've always been in TA myself, kind of like solving the problems that I always had, like, you know, not building the Frankenstack, you know, 5 or 6 tools that I normally would procure to buy to basically build a good talent function. Used Ashby and loved that so much that I also joined full-time. So yeah, we're both kind of like cut from the same cloth.

So now that I've used Ashby for a few months, you're telling me that all I gotta do is call you guys up and beg for a job and I can get a job? That's kind of the requirement is you have to use the tool for a while?

We'll check all of your analytics and see how strong your pass-through rate is first, shall we?

Yeah, let's not do that. My passout rates are much higher than my pass-through rates.

I have no access to anyone's data.

Yeah, but no, kidding aside, Jim is a thought leader in the industry, and as I said, we share thoughts and ideas on what is possible with technology. And just totally haphazardly, accidentally, I came on board with a client that used Ashby and they said, here's our, here's our, uh, system. And I just, I had to literally teach myself everything from scratch on how to use it because this is a startup that's never had anybody in TA, never had a— I mean, I'm, I'm it, like I'm the whole thing. So, um, I started playing around with it and it was like super easy to use. But anyway, Jim, why don't you tell us a little bit about why this is— why they attracted you and Willem and why they've got me talking about it. What is so different about this? Is this an ATS?

It is an ATS, but it's an ATS as it should be, if you excuse me using one of the advertising taglines. It's an ATS through and through, built with recruiters and recruitment coordinators and sourcers in mind. So it's thinking about how do people actually use an ATS? But it's not just an ATS nowadays. When I joined Google in 2006, all the ATS functionality was together. And then something happened whilst I was in that behemoth of a company. And then I left 15 years later and I come out and there's all these point solutions and ecosystems and so on.

Right. And the tech stack is 12 deep.

Yeah.

The Frankenstack, as Willem just mentioned. And Ashby's put that back together. So it's CRM functionality to help sources, it's scheduling and automation to help coordination, it's analytics woven throughout the whole product, and it's the ATS, and it's e-signatures and all these other little pieces of functionality that you don't really think about. And like I say, when I was a customer, I replaced 6 different products with Ashby and was just wowed. You know, this was Q4 2022 and the ATS had just been launched publicly.

Yeah, right. Well, let me— so let me jump on that if you don't mind, and not to step on your toes, but it— the, the claim that you just made has been made many times by many ATSs, right? The all-in-one solution where anything you need, where everything you need. Um, there's companies that start out as HRIS and then they add on, like Workday, they add on an ATS. They're like, oh, well, we also do that, but it's just like a— it's an afterthought and It's a way to try to save clients money by reducing their technology stack. However, it's not thought out as an ATS necessarily. It's thought out as an addition to, right? And then you've got companies that start in the other direction. They start out as a CRM, specifically a recruiting CRM like Avature, right? And they have specializations that they do really well. They have, whether it's marketing, you know, they have the sequences and they do the sequences and outreach really well, but then their search is terrible. Or they do the rediscovery really well, but then their sequencing is, you know, so there's always something that's broken. And then you have these others that are out there that, like Greenhouse, that really play nice with everyone and just leave their API open so they can say, well, we don't do all that, but we have partners that do, and all you got to do is click a button. Yep. But here's the problem. I used systems like that, and I, and I used Greenhouse for a long time. It is easy to add stuff. Here's the thing though, you're adding and adding and adding, and you're paying for all those other things. Not only are you paying for them, but you also do have separate logins. You also do have different, um, ways that those stacks or those pieces of the stack interpret things. Like the fields don't always match, so you have to do some mapping, right? So when I started playing around with Ashby, what I saw— and I don't want to take your thunder stick away— but what I saw was I don't really ever have to leave except for the one thing that I'm always going to leave for, which is finding people.

Yeah.

I cannot find people inside of Ashby because it's not designed as a database of social network profiles. Like, it's not a source itself. It's where you— it's a command and control center. But as soon as I put someone in there, I don't have to leave. So everything from the scheduling to the documentation, everything is launched from a very simple interface. And that's kind of what made me scratch my head and go, why doesn't this already exist? Why haven't we done this before?

I think, you know, a couple of different factors there. One, Ashby, despite the common belief that we were a point solution that became an ATS, the ATS was the core first product. We actually released our recruiting analytics point solution that works on other ATSs first, but what was built first was the ATS. And some of our alpha and beta customers love the analytics so much, or people who saw demos wanted to buy that separately because we weren't ready for them to be using the ATS at that particular time. And Willem can talk into more details because you're an alpha user, right, Willem?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, the, the other piece you're talking about there, so the, the focus on the system being one unit, we're really only now scratching the surface with what does it mean to have that, that all of the elements together talking to each other and the capabilities. And we, we were talking earlier about no one ever thought about how scheduling and sourcing functionality could work together.

No, it's always add Calendly. Exactly. Add ScheduleOnce. And so the sourcer has an account and they can use it in their email, but people book themselves on the calendar. And here's one thing that I always found absolutely irritating. I could not tell you how many appointments, phone screens my sourcers had unless I had access to their calendar. There was no way for me to report booked appointments, even with some of the more advanced systems that actually use the pro level of Calendly. It was just kind of this out-of-reach thing. Like, I knew that they were converting people, but— and I knew that they were scheduling people, but I didn't know how many phone screens they actually had. I had no way of counting that part of the, of the stack.

We've got the capability to add public booking links into the outreach sequences, so when you're sourcing, you can pull people in, but you can pre-program that link especially if it's a pool of silver medalists, for example, you can reprogram them to come into the stage in the process they'd historically left. And then it does all of the data calculations 'cause the analytics is there. So it doesn't mess up your pass-through rates 'cause it drops a 1 into the buckets behind them, all the stages they missed and so on.

All the stages they, right.

These are the little—

You don't all of a sudden have 27 appointments but only 3 candidates sourced. How did that happen?

Exactly. All of that stuff, all of that magic that, you know, you might need a software engineer to go and write code and build Tableau and all of this kind of stuff.

You're putting me out of a job, man.

It happens. It happens. Maybe Willem can add some bits to this. I also want to touch on one thing about finding candidates inside the tool. I think you're talking more of this kind of like sucking in the social network profiles and then adding them in. But once you do have— once you put them in there, right, regardless of where they're from, the structured data elements, um, and obviously resumes for, from folks who apply when you have applicants, right? Have you, have you been playing with the, the AI-driven natural language search?

I do, yeah, I do, with, with that and with the reporting as well. Um, but yeah, so to clarify, it's the, it's the front end of the, or the top of the funnel, or the front of the process where there are tools out there that specialize in capturing data and aggregating social profiles. So when you go in there, you're searching for a person and it brings in their About Me, their LinkedIn, their GitHub, or whatever. And it's a database of 300 million people or whatever. So those tools are out there. Those sourcing tools are out there. But those specialist specialized tools, they don't typically have the all the other stuff, right? So even those tools, like I still, I still depend on sourcing tools to some degree, but I'm always going to go do manual, like I'm always going to go to Bing and Google and directly into meetups and stuff like that. And so that's not, for me, identifying talent at the very, very top of the funnel is never something that's gonna be, you know, roboticized or automated because the trick to that is finding the right person. It used to be, Jim, you know this, it used to be finding a needle in a haystack, right? But nowadays it's finding a needle in a stack of needles. There's just way too much information. If you go out there and you try to find someone that has, you know, that's a left-handed Japanese-speaking native-born American with top secret clearance that knows Java and Oracle, you'll find 5,000 of them. And so, you know, so sourcing may be easy, but the problem is sourcing the right people. —focusing. Now, once you get them in, it's super easy to get them into the system, you know. But once they're in, everything else, the whole process is centralized to where I can do one click and see exactly where I am in the funnel with the pipeline against the REC, with projects, with sequences. I can see which sequences worked. It prevents me from me from stepping on contacts that have already been contacted because it tells me, hey, this person's already in a sequence. So there's all these things that because it's all in-house, um, you avoid these problems like double booking or like someone being interviewed outside of the process and the notes not being in there. And, you know, so that's the beauty to me of a system where everything is connected into a nerve center. And what I want to know is why we never did that before.

I don't know. I mean, I was part of the design team of Jihye, which was Google's in-house built ATS, and it was after your time at Google that we put that into play. It was 2011, and that had modular functionality around scheduling and some elements of CRM functionality added at a later date. but even that didn't have anything close to this level of integration across the core functionality of what a recruiting team needs from their tech stack. It's been fascinating watching the evolution of the product. I mean, Willem, I'd love to hear from you. I don't think I've ever asked you this question, but what's that journey like? You were one of the very first users in Anger and seeing it evolve.

I would love to talk about that, but like your question, kind of like why has this never been done before? Kind of like if I, I've been in TA for 15 years. I remember when I started out, like, basically was Excel sheets, and I, I saw the first ATSs really come to life, right? Like the, uh, the Resumator, I remember, and like there were a bunch of kind of like newer tools that kind of like moved you away from the Excel sheet.

Yeah, unless you saw CPaaS in green screen, you didn't see the first ATS.

Maybe I didn't see the first, but for me, in my— like, I was— yeah, this new generation kiddo that kind of like came in, and I was like, what the fuck are all these? Excuse my French. What are all these all these sheets about like, let's make this— yeah, spreadsheets. And then already kind of like the, you know, having a place where people could apply and that, that could be managed into buckets. And there was no automation, right, back then. That was already kind of like a thing. And then obviously there was more evolution in, in TA. TA teams got a certain kind of like, you know, let's go in-house, like no more agencies, more kind of like let's, let's, let's do this ourselves. And then you know, there were ATS that managed that way better, but there were always gaps. And, you know, that's how these point solutions evolved, because, you know, the, the traditional systems—

and that friction reduces productivity significantly.

It just dries you up. But it introduced productivity for the short term, and then later term, kind of like, because everybody was using it and basically there was more maturity, kind of like it— like the time was right now to kind of like build a sync. Like the TA function, the in-house TA function is kind of like matured a little bit better so we can kind of like build a product that serves like the modern recruiter. I think that's really why I fell for it because I was the poster child of kind of like Frankenstack your organization. I would buy 3 or 4 tools to kinda like get my TA job done. So that's why I was happy when I found out about Ashby that they were trying to fix this at least, right? The analytics product was there, but the ATS was still in its infancy. I believed Banji and Abik, the two founders, immediately when I saw the analytics product that they could build the scheduling functionality and the sourcing functionality. And the sourcing functionality was there in a certain aspect, right? Shelly, we've talked about sourcing many times when I lived in Atlanta. I've always built, I did my personalization and my messaging, et cetera. I would always buy a separate tool for that. And that just being part of the ATS.

Because it handled it much better than the ATS, right?

Yeah, and it's a single source of truth, right? The data loss between you know, a tool, and the other tool is just insane. Like, you know, you couldn't report on things.

See, that's it. That's exactly it. So you don't know how many times I run into this. The— some of the recruiters are using LinkedIn as their ATS. They find people and contact people on LinkedIn, but they don't put them in the ATS. They also don't put them in the CRM. The sourcers are in the CRM, and they're using the CRM to do sequences, and they track it in there. And then the hiring managers are using the ATS. And so you have no idea how often I'd find a candidate that was in the CRM, in LinkedIn, and in the ATS in 3 different stages.

One of the things I love is the fact that with some of our functionality, the ATS writes the outreach to the candidate for you, the automated copywriter for outreach. Because your ATS is writing it, you now copy-paste from the ATS to LinkedIn not the reverse, the other way around. Yeah. And that was what had driven the, the initial, like, candidate relationship management tooling to be put out there, because recruiters were being so lazy and forgetting to put the message back across.

One or the other, right?

You know, and that's where candidates start complaining. Hey, your company's sent me 5 messages. You already—

yeah, I already talked to you. Stop emailing me, you're spamming me. No, I'm not, it's the first time I contacted you. Oops.

And it's also the fact that you can, like, I think every job that you open has a lead state, so we just assume that there's always top of funnel work, right? So, you know, even though you do inbound, like, there's always some outbound stuff that you're doing. So with every job, there is a lead stage. And other tools that I've used before, and I'm not going to name them, but like, I would always have to go into their sourcing or in their, like, a different product. It starts at applicant. Yep. Yeah, exactly. So with, with Ashby, you could actually have a pipeline, you know, your new leads, restart, and then maybe pitch or whatever process that you run on the sourcing bit. On your actual job instead of like moving it away to a separate product or something. So I think that's also game-changing, you know, having the integrated scheduling in there, right?

It doesn't matter how they got there. If they were in the lead and they applied, you see that conversion. Exactly. And you see the time. If they applied and then became scheduled, right? There's two kinds of scheduling. And that's another thing that I think is a very big distinction with like Calendly, for example, and other integrators like that, even when you have built-in into Outlook Exchange where it's going back into the Exchange, it's either an individual one-on-one, like Jim interviews Bob, right? And it's tracked separately. Or you have to have a coordinator schedule these team meetings that are literally human. There's someone has to be a calendar person person, right? Here you have the ability of, I'll send you a link to my calendar, or let's have a link to the interview which can be joined by whoever the interviewers happen to be. Because you might have a dozen different people who are qualified to interview a candidate for this job, and you don't know which one's going to be available that day. So rather than having to run around— here's what I found is I'm running around like, oh shoot, Jim's not going to be able to make it today, now I got to send the invite to the other person because, and then they get an email saying your calendar has been updated and they're like, who's this other guy? I never heard of William. I was supposed to meet Jim. Well, Jim's not gonna make it today. So it's ridiculous, right? It's all done either, it's either an individual or a team link and it's all done inside of the calendar, which connects with, you know, your whatever you use, Gmail or Outlook or whatever. So that's important. And then it tracks all of those stages as well. So you don't lose that metric, you don't lose that trajectory.

Yeah. Shelly, how do you feel about poetry on Shelly's Alley? Poetry? Poetry HR? No, poetry as in poetry. A poet.

Oh, bring it on, man.

Someone asked me the question once, why did these two tools, ATSs and CRMs, evolve as separate software categories and not as a singular recruiting platform? And that's basically the question you've just asked me. Why has no one done this before? And I realized I wrote a poem. A while ago. Okay, this is my career. Once upon a time in the olden days, there were filing cabinets full of resumes. You reached out to a candidate to see if they'd flex, and you record their response in the office Rolodex. Then came computers armed with a database. You called the number of a candidate whose resume was ace. Then like magic, along came the ability to search. Boolean logic kicked the cabinet off the perch, but you still recorded all your comms in your ATS, be they ugly ducklings or swans. Online searches of resumes on job boards soon gave way to LinkedIn and its rewards, but the recruiters were lazy and they did hate to keep all the ATS info right up to date. So a clever soul with a technical mindset said a candidate relationship management tool is a good bet. So they rolled them out as a modular add with connections to LinkedIn. They were not bad. So now you can see in two places to view everything about your candidates. Your data was true. Money could be made adding to the stack, but the costs kept mounting with sales on the attack. Then our savior rode into the glen with the solution we need, built by Abik and Ben. They're our founders. Oh, man. And that was not ChatGPT written.

No, it's not. It doesn't sound like it.

You hear that immediately when it's not ChatGPT written.

Yeah, you can definitely hear that.

But that was saucy when I started out in the filing cabinet.

Me too, yeah. It went, when back when copy and paste literally meant cutting the top of the resume off, taping it to another one and faxing it, right? But I think I, so I don't know if I have an answer to my own question, but I think that a big part of the problem has been, well, two things. So two of the problems originate or come from. One is this need for risk mitigation, which leads to what we think an applicant tracking system is tracking applicants. But in fact, that's a fallacy. An applicant tracking system is tracking requisitions. The lifecycle is the lifecycle of open a job, people come into the job, Close the job, move on. That is not tracking candidates. That's tracking a rec, a job opening. So it's a fallacy. So that's one perspective is that the entire point of view is central to the rec, not the person. Hence CRM, which is central to the person, is the opposite view. And then the second problem is the legal or compliance. So I'm writing an article right now And I want you to take a guess how many laws in the United States actually directly impact recruiting. How many laws have oversight over what we do? Take a guess.

1,300.

That's an interesting guess. Actually, it's 48, and that's not including state local, you know, state, county, local laws.

I was including those in my number. Oh, right. Okay.

So it's insane how much— so the, the ATS has this, this use case of, um, making sure that we can provide evidence of all. So therefore you have companies that say, well, we have to disposition everyone within 48 hours. Which means that you get the applicants that you need and then everybody else you just categorically disposition even though you never even looked at their resume. So you're essentially creating this environment because of regulation. So I think regulation and the point of view are the two reasons that this never happened before. But you can definitely conform to the regulation with, with a unified system.

I think the, the key piece is what William was talking about earlier. What's the definition of an applicant? And I think I don't want to be lawyery or anything like that because I'm certainly not, but it's basically somebody who's applied for the job, given permission for their resume to be presented for a job, and they meet the minimum requirements of that job. I think that's roughly the OFCCP type. That's an applicant description of it. And therefore, because there are other stages that come before application in the tooling around the lead, so on, that enables you to keep those elements separate but have the tooling together. And that's pretty powerful when you think of it that way around. None of that was commentary on how we do that at Ashby, 'cause I don't know the legality elements of it. Right, right. I'm drawing on my historical experience of it.

That's a big part of it. So what can you do with Ashby that you cannot do anywhere else? What is like absolutely unique to the system?

Well, my personal favorite is the public booking link piece I talked about earlier. Okay, okay. You've got the ability to pull candidates, right, projects, and that kind of concept. So pretty much every CRM function has that level of functionality. You can use metadata tagging to, to corral those into particular groups, right?

So tags are like folders for all of those people.

So roughly, you know, Table stakes for any functionality, any, any CRM functionality at this point. But then you get that interaction with the public booking link, which enables you to send out the link to somebody that you've been nurturing to invite them into the process at whatever stage you want to pre-program. So they can come back in, they can interview at that stage, move through the process. So they're scheduling themselves. So you've got that lovely intersection there of two pieces of functionality bringing into the ATS to And then you have the data elements that are enabled by the ATS having the analytics woven throughout. That's all pretty powerful. You start to go even further with some of the custom fields that you can create. You can create custom fields either on the candidate profile or even in forms. So you can start to do nurture campaigns where you're sending out forms to gather information so that you keep the relationship going. But you're refreshing the information through this and it's all reportable because every single field, even the custom fields, are reportable and become part of the report.

That's true. Custom fields don't usually get reported in other systems. Exactly.

So you get to automation of know your candidate as well as the direct hook back in for the role when the role opens. That's, that's pretty special. Willem, have you got the capability to show any of that stuff? Most of the people— I'm guessing most of the folks watching have never even seen the product in action.

Probably not, no. Yeah, if you can show that— I, I have the system up as well if you want, but, uh, well, if you can show that public booking link, that'd be great. And I kind of—

yeah, I've got one in my, um, one you made earlier, right? Yeah, if you can see— who's that guy? I'm sharing my screen, right? Yeah, I don't see this.

Yeah, yeah, we can see.

I'm trying to, trying to see if I can bring you into it.

Let me see. Am I moving around now? Yep. All right, so basically, say I would want to hire this guy, um, and I basically bring up my, uh, my Chrome extension, which obviously the companion that we talked about, um, I can find your email. That's also one of the added values, by the way. Just, you know, we replace so many point solutions, but just this point solution is a small thing, but you know, we have this part of the product too. I can add you to Ashby, and from here I can basically draft you into a sequence, which is kind of a sequence or a project or a project or whatever. But in this case, I want to do a sequence because it has a public booking link in there. I'll just use you for the infrastructure engineer because I know for sure that there's a public booking link in that perspective. And then basically there is this, like in this first reach out message, we have an AI component which is also kind of game changing. It builds already a little bit of outbound for you. Obviously you're not an infrastructure engineer, so it's a little bit difficult to— for you, right?

And it's extracting variables from the profile.

It's like, it's like, yeah, it's the profile, but it's also the job description. If you've connected this, said I want to consider this person for this job, right? It's pulling both sets of information. So it's very different to the way that other approaches, other, other of these AI cooperators work.

But I also have an, like, a public booking link in. This is proprietary, built by us. So you would book a meeting in here, like, you would automatically be planned in, in the stage that, you know, which is whatever you are, pitch stage in my case. Um, like, if you book, if you go through this link, you would get into that stage. So basically that removes so much friction and obviously you can also just share this link separately if people get back to you and then they would also go into the pitch stage if you want to have them in the pitch stage. So you basically configure that and then it's just, you know, set up once and then it's done.

Right, so the candidate says, Shelly says, "Sure, yeah, tell me more about it." You open this up and AI helps you write a why this job is a match for you. And here's the public booking link. Now what I was talking about before, and I don't know if this is appropriate for this, but the public booking link can be used for sourcing. So I'm reaching out to you and I want to talk to you initially, but it can also be used as part of the interview plan further on where you can attach— can you show this— where you can attach multiple people to that public. So that very same link is, um, linked to a rotation of hiring managers that can be alternatives to each other for that interview. So in other words, when they click, when the candidate clicks on that to book themselves for their next interview, they will be booked with the next available hiring manager, not with just one person. Is that something you can show?

Yeah, for sure. Um, just a segue, kind of like I just opened up your profile. Obviously I've added you to, to Ashby. I've just sent you this email, right? So that should be in your inbox now. Like, let's say you would move into the, um, like let's say you've, you've moved into kind of like the recruiter screen. Um, my recruiter screen is, is set up that it automatically will book a time with me and one of my recruiters.

So basically, so the stages that have lightnings are stages that have automations built in. Yeah, so it will automatically send—

like obviously, you know, if you, if you think about— I'll go into the job. Like you're in my lead stage right now. Like this is kind of like what I, what I talked about, kind of like we have the high level Application, kinda like— Before the applicant and after the applicant. So leads, application review, active people, pending offer, hired. So you're in the lead stage, right? Like I've added you into my kinda like outbound sequence. So you're in a reach out stage. I'm waiting for you to do anything. Like maybe you reply, maybe I'm gonna pitch you, blah, blah, blah. But obviously in the active stages, these are really where the interviews happen, right? So basically this happens after people are interested. So either after kinda like resume review or after they've been pitched. Sufficiently, um, that would basically plan an interview. And in my case, this recruiter screen is an interview with me and one of my recruiters, but it could also be the hiring manager phone screen, which is an interview with, you know, the hiring manager, and it could round robin around like two.

It could be one hiring manager, or it could be a choice of three, or it could be two hiring managers, one first then the other. All of that is programmable in there. Yep.

Yeah, it could be anyone, right? Really kind of like— this is a great thing, and I think this is what, what's lacking in most most recruiter systems is that it's not deeply integrated into Google or Office, which means that you can't pull up people. It's just, you know, not everybody's given permission. Like, Ashby is really an app that you install into the Google Workspace or in the Office workspace. So it works for everybody. So in your case, if I wanna plan an interview, like I'll move you into my, to my recruiter screen. Kinda like it pulls the automation.

It should say right there, I sent it, that you sent me a message with the—

Yeah, it's gonna start. Like I can still cancel it if I like, obviously. Right, right.

I've done that. I've like, oops, oh no. And then I cancel. Yeah, I've done that.

Yeah, cancel it then. But if you don't, obviously it will send.

It'll send out the message.

And yeah, so let's wait for that a little bit. So here on the right is the feed. So this is where everything happens. And then, uh, there you go. There's that email that gets sent out. And obviously it sends from your actual workspace, right? So there's no spoofing in between. It's basically sent from your Google or from your Office.

It even shows up in your sent items. Yeah.

And so if you reply from your Google, like, it would sync into here. If you send an email from here, it's, you know, it will sync into your Google. So you as a candidate, you can now book into my calendar. You can click that link. You see me as the main interviewer. Yeah, I like that.

It's like you and your profile. It's really cool.

Exactly. So it's personal, right? Yeah. Defaults to my time zone. I'm in London today. Um, I can find the time. The one little neat thing is like this sound— this is European times, right? I'm in Europe, so it shows European times. If Jim would open this, it would actually show PM and AM. So little things like that make it like, you know, also, you know, just a distinction between Europe and the US. Just really great. You can book a time with me. And then it books a time with me and Denise. So Denise is the other person on the panel, right? And it looked at two calendars, mine and Denise's, and basically planned that time based on the credentials that you put in, right? And there's buffer times, all that stuff that you can— like, all everything that you're known for, for, right?

No more than 3 a day, or no more than—

yeah, like buffer time, this 15-minute thing, or like, you know, we— I can set Denise— maybe there are two interviews that can do it, Denise and Jim. I could say like Jim can do 2 interviews a day and Denise can do only 1 a week and Denise is already taken for it and it would default to Jim, right?

The, the beauty of all of this is everything is customizable and you can control that if you're the, the admin. It can be customizable at the, at the org level, the company level, or at the department level, or in the team level, or at the role level. So you can have multiple different recruitment processes in your company, or you can hold it to everyone follows exactly the same process. You've got the pooling, the capability, and the automation there to really take a lot of the pain out. And you extend this through, you asked about what's unique about Ashby. I think one of the other elements is quality of hire. So we have a 30, 60, 90-day quality of hire questionnaire that goes out to hiring managers, and it's quantitative, qualitative, and you can define your own numerical scale, We recommend the 5, so you've always got that middle number. And the questions, you can keep them consistent or inconsistent, but all of the data that pulls back is reportable and slice and diceable against everything else in Ashby. So all of a sudden this opens up opportunities.

So that piece of higher by source, quality of hire per recruiter, quality of hire per hiring manager, all of that.

But even more, think about the functionality I was just talking about, the interview customization. Yeah. Imagine building two different interview plans for the same job. Okay. Right. And it's a job that you hire quite often. Perhaps you allow your candidates to choose their own adventure as to which one of the processes they follow. Those processes get followed, the candidates get hired, and those hires now get a quality of hire score. You can now, in effect, A/B test two different interview plans to figure out which one gives you the highest quality of hire downstream. That's pretty—

I've seen that where it's like you have set interview plans that you can apply to requisitions and you can actually— I didn't know you could have both, like two in one. Yeah, yeah, I knew you can apply a— you can choose a plan to apply, but I didn't know you can actually run them.

It is, it is, it is a feature flag that we need to turn on for like this, but this is kind of like, you know, for specific use case. I did the same thing, by the way, Jim, for when I was still using actually in production, I would like, I would always distinguish between people that I have top of funnel. They would go through a different process than people that apply. Right. So I would have two processes for kind of like the top of funnel folks and the applicants.

It might be as simple as just a 45-minute interview for the top of funnel people and a half-hour interview for the people who've applied because you've got that extra 15 minutes of questions or sell time.

Right. You can also probably do this for for people that have, you know, specific needs. Like if, for example, they're hearing impaired or deaf, then you have, you know, another system that you use that's not gonna punish them for like a Zoom call where they can't really hear what's going on, right? You'll have a TDY or something like that. So you can have alternatives, you know, that they can choose. That's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. So what about, what about you? What's your, what's your—

I think the quality of hire is quite new that, that we, that we've shipped. Um, one thing that I'm very, very happy with is the AI. Like, obviously AI is a buzzword now, but I think the AI that we're putting in, like, our AI is really focused on recruiter enablement. Like, what I did when I was still managing the TA team is kind of like making sure that feedback could, would, like, you know, get fat back to the actual candidates. Like what we have now is AI briefing functionality. So after all the interviews have happened, the AI that we've built can basically make a good summary of all the feedback that came in from all the interviewers, build a very good overview of kind of like what everybody said. And you can use that internally for your, you know, your debrief meeting that you do with your whole hiring team. And you can also use it for maybe rejection messaging or like advanced messaging. To the candidate and saying like, hey, this is why we're moving forward. Like, this is what they like, this is what they didn't like. Or maybe when you're rejecting people, you can actually have some tangible kind of like, hey, this is what we really liked about you, but this is why we're not moving forward. And stuff like that, you know, which you normally did manually. And often if you do things manually, it doesn't get done at all. I think that is really the thing that I'm starting to love way more is the, you know, that you can actually, you know, do the uncomfortable bits about recruitment a little bit easier and just more quick.

A nice example I saw yesterday was collecting comp information. So you ask people what their comp expectations are for a role and you record it in a field which is custom and labeled comp expectations. You then have to go to a hiring manager and say, look, we can't afford anybody. Here's all the people that we've rejected. And historically, you know, you've got 5-bar gates on your notepad and, you know, bits of information and it doesn't necessarily come across. You can you can just pull a report on that straight away. You can create a table, you can create charts from it, and you can publish that straight to the hiring manager and say, here's all the people that have withdrawn from the process because we can't afford them. And here's the people that we can afford that you're saying no to. Go have a look at this column here and tell me about their profiles. And be like, yeah, these are the ones I really like, right? It's just, it takes the emotion out of some of the change management elements.

I'll show you. This is good. Like, I'm like, we haven't even practiced this, Jim, but my, like, I've built my own job progress dashboard. So there is a dashboard in Ashby that is a, um, kind of like that gives you all the information that you need.

Yeah, job sourcing, they're already there. I was actually going to ask if you could show, but go ahead. I, I have another question after this, but go ahead.

Yeah, for sure. Like, basically every job in Ashby has its own dashboard which will tell you 90% of the information. But like, to Jim's point, like, I always cared about like the, the compensation distribution, like when I would ask that in either, you know, talent screen or maybe when you, you, you got it from an application form or something. But I like— this is a, this is a dashboard that I've built proprietarily. It shows like high-level data. So these are the tiles, like obviously bar charts, like you can think about like volume, etc. But I also have an, an, um, a compensation request just overview, and I've bucketed all the people that I've screened into buckets kinda like that I can quickly present like, hey, everybody that I'm screening kinda like this is the distribution around kinda like what people are asking. It looks like everybody's asking for more than $150K while my budget is maybe, you know, $110K or something. I can basically bring this back to the hiring managers and say like, this is the actual distribution. You know, 45 people are asking for more. Maybe we should do something around this, right? Like, are we targeting the right people? And that is always was and is still a black box if you're not on Ashby.

Well, a graph is one thing, right? And I love a pie chart, by the way. I know that they're out of fashion these days, but the hiring manager, if they have access to this chart, you can click through this and go directly to the underlying candidate.

Yeah, you can click into that. You know, who are those 8 people that had that request? And basically you got to the 8 people, right?

This is what you can have when you have built-in analytics in the system. Exactly. Otherwise you couldn't do that. That's right.

Exactly. Then it's just window dressing like, oh, there's a nice pie chart, but you can actually not do anything.

You can't click through and take action. Okay, so one of the first things that I did, you know me, Jim, you know I'm like analytically minded and data visualization. I mean, I've been doing things with Tableau and Power BI and directly manipulating them. As soon as I came into this and I was like, all right, I wanna see what happened in the last year. How's the throughput been? How many people passed interview? How many, I wanna see what's up. How many candidates do I need to source in order to get a hire based on how many people have been screened and interviewed, etc. And I went in and I was like, oh my God, how am I gonna do this? And then I went to the reports templates and I was like, oh my God. At first I thought everything I'm ever gonna need is in here. It wasn't, but there were so many things that already were ready. Can you show us that template library? I mean, these are not things that I configured. I went in there and I'm like, oh, here's a candidate pipeline, a pipeline history, pass-through rates over time by sequence, by project, candidate flow, hiring speeds, different ways to measure time to offer, time to hire, time in process. I mean, job open times, sourcing reports, quality of hire, and it was already built in, like just for me to click on. That's when I was like, wait a minute, I don't have to build this out myself?

Are you kidding me? Yeah, and that's the great thing about having the data model for recruitment already mapped out so you don't have to build stuff yourself. But yeah, to your point there, we have a template library. It has all the reports that you can start from, and then you— like, this is, this is my use case often, right? Like, I would build a— I would ex— like, extract anything, everything into Excel or Power BI, whatever, build— like, spend hours to kind of like build, manipulating it to make it look— maybe I had like an overview of like, hey, what's the boss rates per recruiter? And I would present it to the hiring team or the VP or whatever, and then they would say, all right, nice, but what is it per source? And then you would be like, ah, damn, I have to go back and do the whole thing again for 2 hours. But actually, you know, you could do basically, okay, let's pull up this pass rate report, let's select kind of like the time that I wanna, um, that I wanna report on. Like, let's do last year, um, let's see what the pass rates are per source, right? This is the— this is— these are the pass rates per source.

That's your rates per source, yeah.

Actually You know, let's just do per hiring manager. Let's see, you know, who's dropping bombs here. Like, looks like, you know, for our, um, um, like Christine is passing 80% of the people through from technical evaluation to, to the hiring manager screen. Maybe we want to delve into that. You know, you present this, um, the, the, the VP of engineering says, I want to actually see every, like, what, what does this equate to for the recruiter? Because every field is reportable, you just change the, the group by, right? You just change it into recruiter and the same data gets crunched in a similar fashion and you see it for recruiter. And those kind of things are just insane that we have, you know, show active count and projected hires. We can obviously do forward-looking data, right? You can look at the active pipeline. We have the historical, the historical passer rates and we can project how many hires you would make for that. So that's also something that I really enjoy about Ashley. It's not just like looking back, like, oh, how did we do? But it's also the, projective stuff that you can bring to C-level and really get a seat at the table.

For me, yeah, that's from just building out from a template. But then there's the dashboards that already exist canned out of the box as well. Yeah, the dashboards have different reports. Yeah, that's right. I put this in place at FullStory where I was the VP of Talent there before. And the first day of this going live, the CTO logs in and we're on a call together. And he's like, hey, is this real time? And I'm like, uh-huh. And he's like, and this is my dashboard? I was like, yeah. He's like, can I filter this down to software engineering? I was like, yeah, just there. Cool. Now can I do it for the last year? Yeah, click that there. Wow, amazing. Click through. Hey, what's happening with that candidate? Like, click on it. Whoa, this is the data I've been asking for for 20 years.

Right. That's what blew me away. And our conversation changed. The CRM summary dashboard. You click on the CRM summary dashboard and it's like value instantly.

It changed our conversation historically, you know, all the way through my 20-odd years in this. It's been, our pipeline looks like this, everything's going to be okay. All of a sudden, the tooling is having that conversation and they can look at it anytime and they can see and they can click through and they already know. Our conversations turned into What's the hiring strategy going to be for this? How are we going to find this role I need in 2 quarters' time and hire the very best person with this piece of information, this skill set, so on and so forth? Just change the dynamic completely. You talk about upleveling your talent team to advisory status within an organization. Do it with a product.

With a click. Yeah. Can you show the time and process? And I'm going to give a quick example of something that happened there. Do you want to do the job dashboard?

Because then you can pull it all the way. Like, I'll talk about the concept of jobs versus openings while Willem pulls it up. Oh yeah, right. Openings, which is headcount, and then you have jobs.

Which one do you want me to show?

Job dashboard.

Yeah, just for a second.

Because then you can put down the time in process on the chart on that. So you have openings, which is headcount, and then you have jobs. And if you open the same job against multiple openings for the same position, in effect. So you want to hire 5 people of one multi-incumbent, right?

Always use the same job.

You start to build an aggregation of data over time, which obviously becomes much, much more accurate. This then becomes your starting point when you're qualifying a role to manage the hiring manager's expectations, because all the data on every time we've hired this role historically is here. Well, you can scroll down on here and shows all of this information on every single job out of the box. From the get-go. Yeah. And it also forms the post-mortem conversation after you've hired around how did we do, what do we need to do differently next time, and so on.

Yeah. So an evergreen rec is not a kiss of death anymore. Used to be an evergreen rec made it so you couldn't do any reporting because you didn't know when someone came into the process or whatever.

This allows you to segment it within an evergreen rec, and your one-off recs now don't become one-off recs. You can start to think about aggregating those one-off recs, even if you only hire one a year for 5 years, over time you'll get rich data. If you bring that back up, Wood, and halfway down you've got the time in process and the pass rate and the predictor chart. I think that's where Shelley wanted to be.

Yeah, the time in process. I wouldn't give you an example of the time in process.

Let me see. Time to fill.

Is this the— I can't see, the screen's too small. Is this the job dashboard on an actual job? The job dashboard, yeah.

No, go, go to a job. Oh, to a job.

All right. Yeah, go to a job with, uh, filled out data in the demo, uh, and then go to the job dashboard on the left. Yeah, there you go. So this is the dashboard I'm talking about, and you scroll down on this. So we've got 28 hires on this one, all the information about in, people you've hired, pass-through rate table, time and stage, source information, everything. Yeah, that's it with the hiring manager. That's your post-mortem, and it's everything in between.

That's the one. So hold it there for a minute. So it's been like 2 weeks since I started my new consulting engagement. And I have a conversation with the CEO and the CEO guy, it says, "I'm not seeing the results." You know, this happens to me every time. Every time. I know, I almost, I guarantee you by the end of the second or third week, somebody's gonna come to me and say, "I'm not seeing results." Even though I warn them in advance that it's gonna take about 6 weeks to see results, right? It's, they're always doing it. So anyway, he comes, "I'm not seeing the results. What's the problem? What's the holdup? You know, are we taking too long to get them in the funnel? Are we whatever?" So I went to this and it was very obvious right away because of that bar chart where the longest piece of the process was. And it was in scheduling interviews with the hiring manager. And so I'm like, look, we got, you know, it takes me 24 hours from source to screen. That doesn't get any faster. I mean, literally same day, you know, but when I send them to the hiring manager, it's taking 8 days. So then the CEO said, well, we got to change that. And he went and he got 4 other people to do the hiring manager interview. And have a rotation. And now it went down to 2 days. And he's like, wow, this is much better. Like, now I'm seeing results. I couldn't— I knew in my mind that something was delaying things because I knew I was doing my job. And I didn't want to say the hiring managers aren't doing their job because, you know, how often do you say that, right? But I actually was able to say what the problem was. And the problem was that it just took too long to schedule. It was because that person that was doing the phone screens had booked— his calendar was booked. I mean, he wanted to do interviews, but there were no spaces on his calendar to do interviews until 5, 6 days later. So we just made that available and it made a huge difference. That's an example of like solving a real-time problem where the hiring manager, in this case the CEO, has a perception that the bottleneck is on me. Yeah. On TA, but it's not.

We talked about legislation earlier. We've got this new Colorado legislation Leave it up, Willem, 'cause I'm gonna go back up to the top. We've got the Colorado legislation that says we've gotta put an end date, a closing date on JobsNow. Right. If you've got folks in Colorado or you're remote and you may hire in Colorado and so on. What date do you put on that? Well, this dashboard enables you to do the math real fast. It shows you how many candidates you need in order to make one hire, right? The data lives in this chart, it's up at the top and you've got that information. This one is 8 to 1, right, Willem? Yeah, you can estimate. I know the dashboard off by heart, but I can't actually read it.

8 to 1, yeah, candidates to offer ratio.

Okay, so how long do we need to have this role posted in order to get enough candidates? Well, if you scroll down on this one, you can actually see the over time, the application flows for this job. And this job has been opened multiple different times and obviously the demo environment, but you can create the view, pop it out, look exactly how many days does it take to get the end count of applicants that result in one hire. That gives you some idea as to how long to post a job for. Yeah, we all know that too much pipeline in recruiting and talent is cost and waste. We've been dealing with that all of our careers, and now more recently with the huge influx of inbound, this law actually helps us to a certain extent. But you need data views like this to be able to feel that.

Yeah, otherwise you're just guessing.

And all of a sudden you, you start to become very, very efficient as a recruiting team with data like this.

Yeah, that's right. You can have that conversation— thanks, Willem, you can close that out— you can have that conversation with the, the leadership about what's really going on. Um, so it, it helps you plan better, it helps you strategize better because all of the information is housed in the same place. Instead of having to go to different— and there is a need for analytics dashboards that gather information from your HRIS and your, you know, and all that. But they become— this was my job previously— they become really unwieldy because of the different code systems. You know, on one system it tracks by employee ID, on the other one it tracks by email, on the other one— and these don't talk to each other. The reporting is not as easy as just drag and drop. But, um, anyways, so I just wanted to say thank you guys both for coming on the show. This is— I'm, you know, I'm using it every day, and, uh, I learned a couple of things. Um, however, I do have two things that I need to ask everybody at the end of the show. And if you've been on, on here for a while, you know what they are. The first of those is I want you to give us something to think about, not a— not, not lecture, or something that you want us to know, but give the audience something for them to think about themselves, like think for themselves. What would be a question that you think they should ask themselves over the next few days?

What is it about how you move candidates through your recruiting process that is stopping you hiring the best person from your applicant pool? How's that for a question? That's good.

Yeah. What is it about your process?

Yeah, go ahead. Mine would be like, why are you still accepting like inferior software to manage your work? William, I wasn't gonna go there, but you know, for me it's got like, I talk to like, I've been, I've been doing kind of like the EMEA ecosystem for, for, for for 3 years now, and every single person I talk to has conceded that their software is not good enough, and they're like, okay, you know, this is what I have to deal with. Yeah. And I think that is the question that you should ask yourself, like, why are we— why have we accepted this as a TA function? Especially now, like, hopefully you've seen, like, that we— that we can help with these, like, with, like, in my opinion, kind of like super table stake functionality, right? Like Why is scheduling not a core thing in every tool, right? Like, it's just insane to me that there's so much software.

Like, why is not like— anyway, companies hire entire coordinator teams to do the schedule.

Yeah, the coordinator is a byproduct of a certain product. And obviously I think coordination is still super important, but it should— yeah, people should be super happy to coordinate instead of that it's a drag, right?

I think, yeah, coordinating everything but the actual scheduling of a meeting on a calendar, which can be done by—

yeah, yeah. But the analytics underneath coordination, like, that's another podcast for you, Shelley. Like, that's so intriguing. Kind of like, who cancels? Who— anyway, like, I can go on a tangent, right?

Who cancels? Who doesn't show up?

Who doesn't know scheduling all the, all the interviews? Like, you can, you can, you can, you can save so much money if you're doing volume recruiting, like a lot of recorded, like a lot of scheduling. Like, and this is also what our customers think about, right? I think that's also the, the, the The beauty of it is that you can, like, because Ashby fixes all that table stakes metrics, like people can really zoom in on like where the real cost savings are, et cetera. I think that's the— That's the big picture. Yeah.

Well, the last question is always going to— it always puts people on the spot, but who should be our next guest?

I can go first. Like my favorite, like she just came on the, on our Ashby podcast, Offer Accepted by Shannon, great podcast by the way to listen to, but it's a lean learner. She's doing a lot of interesting stuff in the interviewing ecosystem. She used to be an engineer, turned into a recruiter, now she hosts or she's the CEO of interviewing.io. Yeah, any podcast that she's on, I'm always game, so. Invite her. I'll be there.

I'll invite her. Doesn't mean she'll accept, but yeah, definitely I'll invite her.

One of my favorite podcasts that we've got our own Ashby Offer accepted, as Willem says, Anthony Holloway. He's just fantastic on our podcast and he's such a wonderful human being. And he'll ask you what you're thankful for today. All right. There's a lot to be said about stopping and thinking. Yeah, what am I thankful for? Well, I'm thankful for Anthony and the chats that we have, and I'm looking forward to meeting him, uh, next week after next. But, uh, yeah, you should have Anthony on.

Will do. Thanks a lot, guys. Really appreciate you being here. For those of you that, uh, yeah, absolutely. For those of you that are going to be tuning in, uh, next week, we have Marvin Smith will be joining us, a longtime friend of mine. So tune back in on May 31st. And until then, Please be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye, folks.