Abhik Pramanik

Culture

Kyra ran our first holiday book exchange, and it's been a hit with the team (to the point people mentioned it in our 1:1s). I added some photos from our recent meetups.


Ben added some improvements to our Slack guidelines. Sylvie added a way for us to learn more about each other in our weekly standup. We've been using both for over a month, and the team has been enjoying the changes!


How we use efficient and deliberate communication at Ashby to keep Slack notifications and meetings to a minimum, focus 36h out of a 40h week, and have fun along the way 😀.


How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive

aronow.io

Astronomer

Attentive

Aven

Benchling

Boulevard

Brightline

Brigit

Calm

Census

Clever

CloudTrucks

Coder is a remote infrastructure development platform that makes working with code easier than ever. Coder enables everyone from industry rookies to experts to develop code faster than ever before, using templatized starting points and ultra-secure workspaces.

Coder

Cohere

Cointracker

Color

Costanoa Ventures

Decimal

Deel is payroll for modern business. No matter where you're hiring, Deel helps customers run payroll, supporting 150+ countries with hundreds of worldwide experts. Deel helps their customers know that hiring, paying, and managing stayed compliant and easy in their all-in-one platform.

Deel

Deepnote

Deliveroo

Dune

Duolingo

EightSleep is more than a mattress company - it's a suite of products devoted to sleep fitness. Their goal is to make sure that your sleep is as high-performing as you are, helping you meet and exceed the bar for excellence in your waking life. Athletes and scientists alike love their range of highly customizable sleep tech because it helps them live healthier.

EightSleep

Figma

Format One

FullStory

Juni

Linear

Marqeta is a modern card issuing platform dedicated to empowering innovators to launch their products to the world. They have over a decade of experience as a trusted, high-tech solution for builders who need simple, scalable payment solutions.

Marqeta

Modern Treasury

Monte Carlo is a Series D data observability company helping its customers accelerate the adoption of data to eliminate downtime. 

Monte Carlo

Notion

Opendoor

Plato

PostHog

PostHog is an open source analytics platform. Their product is used by product, engineering, and marketing teams to understand user behavior, including product analytics, session recording, user paths, a/b testing, heatmaps, and more. The suite, founded through Y Combinator in 2020, has since been installed by over 10,000 companies.

Pragma Platform

Pulley

Ramp

Readme

Replit

Scratchpad

Sift

Snyk

Sourcegraph

Stytch

Talentful

Treasury Prime

VanMoof is a Dutch e-bike company creating stylish, feature-rich city bikes. They're the fastest growing bike company in the world, with an active community in over 50 cities worldwide.

VanMoof

Veev

Verkada

WeTransfer

Zippin

Engineering

Recruiting

Product

Halden Ingwersen

Stephanie Baysinger wants a seat at the table for recruiting ops. Because, according to the recruiting ops expert with 12 years of field experience, that’s where those in the role will truly shine.

“My strong opinion with recruiting operations,” she told Ashby when we sat down with her, “Is that it can’t be the catch-all for your team. You need to think of your recruiting operations team as a strong strategic partner. They’re key in helping you connect dots for your overall long-term vision of what you're trying to accomplish.”

Between knowing what the long-term goals of a company are and understanding the short-term moves needed to reach them, Stephanie explained, recruiting operations pros are most effective when business founders view them as a partner. Unfortunately, that’s not always what ends up happening.

“Part of my role is to make sure that what we build will scale along with us and not break in the next stage of business growth,” she told us. “It's this constant balancing act of trying to build things when the team needed them yesterday, and then feeling comfortable with knowing what you need to solve for right now to the next level.”

But it can be hard to stick to that high-level vision when there’s always more to be done. “Every day you log into your email and see everything from, *We need to redo our entire referral process to, Greenhouse has a bug today, can you fix it?* And everything in between!”

Though it’s seen an explosion in numbers in recent years, recruiting operations is still a growing field, and that leaves many teams confused with what, exactly, to do with someone in that position. The end result of this has been more tangential projects, side work, and putting out fires than Stephanie would prefer.

“One of the things I’m wishing I’d see is the role of recruiting ops as the central hub of information. It’s a great spot because we work alongside our recruiters, but then we're also partners with our HR team, and with finance. The number one skillset of a recruitment operations team is the ability to anticipate needs and anticipate how an action taken now might have a trickle effect later.”

## Becoming the expert

Stephanie’s advice doesn’t come from nowhere. She started in recruiting at a global consulting firm, doing high-volume, high-touch MBA recruitment to bring in new consultants.

But Stephanie says she was soon taking on more than just direct recruiting. “What I found myself doing was constantly looking for ways to improve our processes. That job taught me a lot about the importance of consistency, creating a global brand, and ensuring that any candidate that engaged with us left with both a global and local connection to the work. But what that also meant was that, as a global recruitment team, there were things that we wanted to standardize. To that end, I started stepping into an operations role to help all of our recruiters get the resources they needed so that we could create that global experience and brand in a consistent way.“

It sounds like a huge undertaking, especially outside of the confines of her actual job description, and it was. ”I was taking on a lot. I found that a lot of the problems we had stemmed from recruiter training. So I started a global recruitment training program for new hires in their first month. I would do monthly trainings to help all of our teams understand the operational rigor of the role. I could actually catch people in their first thirty days, and then follow up with them six months later and get all the best practices down at the beginning.“

Stephanie spent seven years doing this before moving on to HubSpot, where she formally pivoted into a more technical role. Though she entered HubSpot as a recruiter trainer, her role was situated within operations functions. This was perfect, because it let Stephanie build a score of programs to help train and enable HubSpot’s recruiters. She rose to a management level before making the move to Klaviyo, where she was the company’s first formal recruitment operations leader, building out her own team and her own systems.

In the course of her career, recruiting ops has gone from being a helpful add-on to a recruiting role to something that Stephanie herself is being recruited for. Most recently, Stephanie has found herself at Marqeta, where she’s the Director of Recruiting Operations. “What was exciting about this role,” she told us, “is that this was one of the first strategic leadership hires on the recruitment team, because we have a leader here who truly believes in the importance of enablement and operations.”

## The recruiting dominos

That upper-level buy-in and enthusiasm is key, Stephanie says, in part because it’s not the case everywhere. “I've seen some people describe recruiting ops as, *'we have our recruiters, and our sourcing team, and our coordinations team, and then everything else goes to recruiting ops.'* And that's a recipe for not having the clarity, power, and partnership of a recruiting operations function.” The role can be cloudy enough even without that attitude, Stephanie says.

On the other hand, a functional and thriving recruiting operations team is what unblocks so many of recruiting’s current problems.

“A true collaboration between so many different departments is this dance that needs to be flawlessly choreographed. You need to understand and be a really great partner to the ones determining our overall head count. But then that trickles down into so many other things. What are the strategic roles that I actually need? What budget might we have to hire new talent? What roles are we prioritizing and what's the strategy behind it? Then you start bringing in your HR business partners and your talent managers. And they're trying to help hiring managers understand how to build out an organizational structure. And then from there you're working with your systems team to make sure that there's data validity and that we're compliant. And then you have a recruitment team who gets to take those roles and actually hire incredible talent for them.”

It’s a dizzying list.

“And you can see, they all sequence,” Stephanie went on. “It's like dominos: you want them all to nicely collapse, but usually it's all trying to fall at the same time.”

Naturally, the biggest stress point is one of the earliest in that chain.

“I don't think I'm the only recruiting ops person who would wish there was a magic wand or a piece of technology that could help me manage my head count!” she said. So far, nothing has cracked that problem for her in specific, but that's just one more reason why a talented recruiting ops team is so valuable.

“Recruiting operations isn't a field that can just be put to the wayside. It's becoming a piece of a business operating plan that needs dedicated planning and rigorous rhythm, because that's how it functions best. What I've found has worked is being extremely transparent and learning from the previous quarter, as well as knowing that it's probably never going to be solved perfectly. It's just learning from the last time we did it and making the process incrementally better.”

## Making improvements

In a career so busy, in a role not everyone understands yet, with endless challenges to iterate upon, Stephanie hasn’t stopped going out of her way to keep making improvements.

“I surround myself with really smart people,” Stephanie says, starting out humbly. “I about think the things that I'm currently learning in my role about building a recruitment strategy, and I think that they've had to pivot and change so much in the last couple years. What I want us to do more of is really getting to know the candidates and their decision motivators and all the different reasons why someone might want to make a change in their career. Just truly building that relationship. As we think about the future of work, the strategy should be focused on where we find incredible talent. “

And where is that? Anywhere in the world, Stephanie tells us. “Now that box has been completely opened so that it's not limited by geography. And that creates an entirely new way of strategizing how you bring talent into your company! I've worked at places where we've thought about using a pod or a hub-and-spoke model. We would hire in different regions and people could work in a hybrid way, but there was always a home base or a place for someone to go. But what’s the motivator for the employees? What do they actually want?”

What an employee wants is changing, and rapidly, just like the workplace as a concept. “Part of the strategy is to think about not just what we need right now, but what we're going to need in the next couple years. What will be the economic needs of our company? What gaps are we hoping to fill, and how do we start hiring for those things now? And how are we up-skilling and giving our current employees the opportunity to gain those skills once they're already here? Part of the strategy now is hiring for the skills you might need in the future, as well as hiring for really incredible cultural additions to your company and providing them with those resources to grow and prosper in their roles.”

## The ever-changing tech systems
Recruiting ops might still be new, but Stephanie says this is the most exciting time to be here. “I'm really excited to dive more into a lot of recruitment and HR technology. I've seen that space just boom in the past decade. We started with a lot of homegrown tools, and then we found the limitations of the tools. And now, I probably get two or three emails a day from various vendors who do various things. This might become an entire strategic role on a recruiting ops team in the future, to be someone who can manage the tech and ensure that our systems are empowering our recruiters. I've just seen this space just skyrocket.”

So what’s Stephanie looking for when she’s picking out tech for her team? “UX and tools for our recruiters that are intuitive, that make their life easier. It used to be about, *can I measure how much time we saved?* There'd always be these ROI metrics of saved hours a week. But now the technology is more around the analytics and how the technology and the time saved can actually impact the bottom line of a company and interviewer investment.”

Stephanie even specifically mentioned some of her favorites. “Ashby has been a really strong recruiting tool. I'm being very serious! Having done a recruiting operations role, I'm finding I have no desire to reinvent the wheel anymore. When there's a tool or a piece of technology that you can plug in, that integrates really well with the other pieces like your ATS, and does some of the lift, that's the kind of thing I want. And then I get to focus more on data cleanliness and validation and not vanity metrics.”

Any tool that helps streamline Stephanie’s workflows is a good one in her book. “There's a lot that happens behind the scenes that keep the boat floating and keep us running in the right direction. And when we can automate those and find more ways to innovate, there's usually a really big conflict between time and capacity. And so I'm consistently trying to find ways to automate a lot of repeatable steps so that we can create more space for growth.”

## Moving forward

Though she’s still new to Marqeta, Stephanie is an expert in what she’s doing, and she’s got big plans. When we asked her what the first thing she’d do in a new role might be, she had an answer ready to go. “It's so cliche, but I would just go on like a true listening tour. When you're misaligned on the talent that you *think* your hiring manager wants, or you think the business wants, that's a lot of wasted time, which is wasted money, which is wasted resources and burned out employees.”

“I would make sure that I'm really truly understanding our value proposition that we want to give to future employees,” she went on. “And I want to learn about that from the executive level, diving into old board of directors decks. What's super important for us? What kind of people do we want to work with? What kind of culture are we trying to create at this company?”

The passion she's cultivated over her career is obvious, and it's a great model for anyone interested in being a standout recruiting ops professional - or hiring one. “I want to be so embedded as such a strong partner to all of the hiring managers and to the employees at the company. I just want to be so in sync with where the company's going, going to all the town halls and looking at our CEO's two, three, five, ten year goals. And am I aligning the recruitment strategy to that?”

She paused and smiled. “That would be probably the first thing that I'd do.”

You can find Stephanie on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniebaysinger/).

Stephanie Baysinger is a recruiting ops pro, with over a decade of recruiting experience. We spoke with her about how to help the recruiting operations team achieve the best results at any company. Here's what she had to say.

Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

Benjamin Encz

Ashby is excited to now be partnering with [Triplebyte](https://triplebyte.com/). Triplebyte is an engineer-focused job search platform, with a massive directory of skilled, fully-assessed software engineers. They’re working hard to help connect great engineering talent to the companies that need them.

![screenshot of triplebyte](/images/triplebyte-screenshot.png)
  
With Triplebyte Screen, you’re able to find the most talented engineers in your hiring pipeline, move them through a technical screen, and get to making your offer that much faster. And Screen scales with your business, so you’ll never need to ration out your assessments.

![triplebyte icon](/images/triplebyte-icon.png)
  
Working together, Ashby and Triplebyte will make it much faster to source, screen, and hire top-notch engineering talent, speeding up your pipeline and getting folks to work faster.  
  
For more information, check out [Triplebyte’s FAQ](https://triplebyte.zendesk.com/hc/en-us), and see how it all works in [Ashby University](https://www.notion.so/TripleByte-cc03b2749901410c9d009da199a725bf).

Ashby is partnering with Triplebyte - learn more about it here!

Ashby Has Partnered with Triplebyte

Ashby has now partnered with Fetcher, and we’re excited to bring you a new way to automate your outreach and speed up recruiting.  
  
Fetcher is a full-service, automated sourcing and outreach platform. By combining human insight with the latest in machine learning, Fetcher _fetches_ curated groups of qualified candidates right to your inbox.  
  
![fetcher logo](/images/fetcher-logo.png)  
  
If you’re currently using both Fetcher and Ashby, your Fetcher candidates will now be pushed into Ashby automatically. You’ll have a clearer picture of your overall pipeline for open roles as well as each candidate’s progress through the funnel.  
  
![fetcher’s setup in ashby](/images/fetcher-api.png)  
  
It’s live now, so head over to Fetcher’s integrations page and enter your Ashby API key to get started.  
  
Not fetching yet? Schedule a demo with Fetcher [here](https://www.fetcher.ai/contact).

Ashby and Fetcher are working together to help you source and hire - read on to learn more.

Ashby Has Partnered with Fetcher

If you’re reading this on a computer, thank [Alan Turing](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html).  
  
  
Turing was a scientist in the first half of the 1900s, and in addition to being a key figure in helping to end WWII, his work led to the development of computer science and artificial intelligence as we know it today. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve definitely used items in your everyday life that were created because of his ideas. If you _haven’t_ heard of him, it may be because much of his life’s work was classified after he was was convicted of the crime of indecency for being gay.  
  
  
When Ashby sat down with Arthur Woods, he proudly told us that his company, Mathison, was named for Turing.

“It was his middle name. And so that’s really the backstory of what the company is all about. I grew up in a rural town in Northern California,” he told Ashby. “I came out as gay halfway through college and joined the LGBTQ community. I really got into HR technology and entrepreneurship out of this interesting vantage point of feeling like I was breaking the rules in life in general, and wanting my career to reflect the same.”  
  
  
Mathison is a company that helps companies build their diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, track their success, and train and empower their teams to create the greatest impact. And Arthur’s passion for that mission comes through very clearly when he speaks about it.  
  
  
“As an entrepreneur, I found myself thinking about new, creative ways to solve problems and also to chart my own path. I became passionate about HR technology, in particular DEI. Realizing that we spend the majority of our waking lives at work, and work for so many people is not working! For so many people work isn’t a place where there's a sense of empowerment or belonging. And I was really inspired to dedicate my life to how we innovate to make work something that works for people.”  
  
  
Since launching Mathison three years ago, Arthur has watched DEI go from being considered an optional bonus to an essential category for more employers.  
  
  
“Yet the vast majority of companies are struggling to make progress,” Arthur said. “They’re driving blind right now: they don't know where their gaps are or what to do. There's this huge need to take action. We wanted to start Mathison to turn the lights on in the room and help organizations see where they need to focus their attention, and then give them the tools to take action.”  
  
  
In the course of that goal, Arthur literally wrote the book on diverse hiring. “[_Hiring for Diversity_](https://www.mathison.io/hiring-for-diversity-book) was a culmination of years of research, studying the hiring practices of hundreds of employers and uncovering their greatest gaps and their greatest needs. And what we found in our work was that employers, first of all, didn't really have a playbook or a roadmap for their DEI efforts. We had the opportunity to deliver that to them. After working with hundreds of employers we translated all of our insights into the book.”  

## **What research uncovered**

There’s material in the book for anyone who cares about DEI hiring, but Arthur had a target in mind when he wrote it. “The leader who is trying to go from this extraordinary intent to _impact_. And what we're doing with the book is giving folks case studies, resources, and direct things that they can do to put their DEI strategy into action. The whole notion is that we need everyone to be part of this solution. It's not enough for us to simply just put our DEI activity on the shoulders of HR alone. We actually need everyone to play an active role. And the whole book is about democratizing that responsibility.”  
  
  
To learn that, Arthur didn’t only focus on employers and leaders. He also connected with nonprofits, workforce development agencies, and finally, active job seekers themselves. “We did a study of hundreds of underrepresented job seekers to understand the barriers they’re facing and to ask them _what is it that we can do to ensure we're lifting the barriers for you_. _What are the challenges you are seeing as we walk into the hiring process? How can we make sure that everything that we do addresses those issues?_”  
  

> “It's much more realistic to tell our organization: we may be early on, we may not have all the answers, but let's do this together.”

  
In the course of research, Arthur had some incredible conversations and insights. And something that stood out to him was how narrowly many people tried to define “diversity.”  
  
  
“As employers, many people still have a very narrow definition of what diversity itself is. That largely limits our ability to be inclusive in our efforts, because it hinders our ability to actually support every community.” Arthur told us that they combat this by zooming out for a big-picture approach. “Our model is to embrace a much more holistic definition of diversity.”  
  
  
Arthur pointed out to us that a wall exists between those within a company focusing on diversity, and those applying to work there. And it isn’t always clear from the outside what those DEI efforts really look like. “Job seekers have little idea about an organization's commitment to diversity, their diversity goals, or the efforts that they have underway. Our ability is to tell that story externally and really give organizations the ability to communicate their commitment to diversity. They need to build transparency to stand out to that job seeker that doesn't truly know right now, how authentically committed the organization is.”  
  
  
Sometimes the biggest gaps in a DEI strategy are, oddly, the most glaring ones. “It seems like such an obvious thing, right?” Arthur said. “As an employer that actually is taking steps to be more or inclusive, how can we now help you tell that story authentically to job seekers? But most job seekers, the vast majority in fact, had very little idea about an organization's commitment to diversity or diversity efforts when they went to their career page or when they walked into the hiring process. So part of our vision is helping with that.”  

## **DEI and building in public**

Clarity and transparency is often the focus of Mathison’s work.  
  
  
“Organizations basically have the posture that they need to go do this work underground away from everyone and not really share their progress or results until the progress is noticeable,” said Arthur. “And what that does is limit awareness of the work to a select few in your organization. It hinders collective ownership and actually ends up making the work unsustainable. Limited people find themselves trying to drive this work forward and they can't make a ton of progress.”  
  
  
There’s another approach that works much better, says Arthur. “Instead, say: let's start by building collective transparency across our organization, around our DEI activities. Let's now empower every single person to play a role. Let's equip everyone with the resources to take action. And let's build a continuous conversation with our organization. So everyone feels like they're connected. And that's a very different posture than, _let's have one person go underground and figure this out and they'll report back once they make progress._”  
  

> “What a cool thing for your organization to say, _you're part of the journey with us_. We want you to be part of the solution, give us ideas, tell us what we're missing. You're equally part of driving this all forward.”

  
  
That desire to bury the work, to do it quietly, Arthur says, may come from a place of fear. “I think it's a fear of admitting to not being far enough along, or admitting to not being perfect. And honestly, that's just an area where we have to shift our mindset to thinking that every single step along the way is progress.” It isn't a bad thing to be working imperfectly. “No one has really figured this work out end to end. No one has the full playbook and no one has all of the answers, right? Our ability to make true progress, and our ability to bring everyone along, and be transparent, and be somewhat vulnerable is a whole different way that we can do this work.”  
  
  
Working this way moves the bar to an achievable height. “It's much more realistic to tell our organization: we may be early on, we may not have all the answers, but let's do this together,” Arthur advised. “That's a very different posture. And it's one that, by the way, I think is much more exciting for the team of people who come into an organization and care about DEI. What a cool thing for your organization to say, _you're part of the journey with us_. We want you to be part of the solution, give us ideas, tell us what we're missing. You're equally part of driving this all forward.”  

## **Building in DEI as a team mission**

If you’re starting a new business, prioritizing DEI from day one is key. “The very first thing that we recommend organizations do is to have a conversation with leadership. Ask: why does diversity matter to us? What does it uniquely mean for us, and what is going to be necessary for us to bring this plan to life? What role will we all play? What activities will we need to engage in?” Starting with leadership is especially important, Arthur says. “If leaders at the top can have that conversation, it articulates the vision, the pillars, and how they're going to measure success.”  
  
  
“In a lot of organizations,” he went on, “What happens is their leaders say they have a diversity challenge. So they go to the head of diversity or to their head of HR and they say, you need to go figure this out, solve this for us. And so there's a collective need at the top, but there isn't a collective responsibility. And it makes everything else much harder. The whole notion of this is that we must go beyond. Leadership is just where the conversation has to start.”  
  
  
The idea of collective ownership of DEI is so vital, Arthur says, that it’s how he closed his book. “The last chapter in our book was _How to Mobilize Your Entire Team in DEI_. And the reason that it was at the very end, was that it’s mostly foundational. We need everyone. And that's a philosophical shift for a lot of organizations to shift the responsibility from that head of DEI to the rest of the organization.”  
  
  
Arthur suggests that the leaders in these conversations find ways to become more comfortable with the concept of diversity as a collective project. “It's going to be out of the comfort zone for a lot of leaders that have been taught for years and years: _you need to have all the answers, you cannot admit to not knowing, and you need to lead from a position of strength_. It's actually a much greater position of strength these days to lead from a position of authenticity, to admit to not knowing and to be willing to listen.”  

## **Adapting to a shifting space**

Excitingly, much of DEI is moving in that direction. Arthur predicted greater transparency and accountability at all levels will soon become the norm in the diversity space. He also predicted that that idea of diversity as a monolith is finally cracking.  
  
  
“Diversity is very holistic,” he said. “There are many different dimensions we can see and not see. It's intersectional — the complexity of diversity exists in ways that we haven't acknowledged before. I think we're going to see a lot of communities that weren't typically on the radar previously, now in the forefront. And a great example of that is the neurodiverse community, which in the last year has become a much more prominent part of the conversation. A lot of folks have very proudly identified themselves in the community in ways that they never previously did. There are employee resource groups dedicated to the neurodiverse community. And I suspect we're going to see more and more communities emerge that others weren't quite aware of as the taxonomy of diversity continues to expand.”  
  
  
Unafraid of keeping up with these changes, Mathison is continuing to grow, and they’re looking forward to a big year ahead. “We're continuing to expand our technology, extend our team, extend what we're measuring, and really be a resource for growing organizations that want to meaningfully take action in this work.”  
  
  
We also asked Arthur what his own goals looked like. “For me personally, I consider myself a permanent student of the work. I don't really believe there are experts in the DEI, because the work is continuing to evolve every day. Instead, there are permanent students who subscribe to the work itself and continue to immerse themselves in it. That's the great thing about this work. There's always a new barrier to learn about. There's always a new viewpoint to understand. There's always a new community to better build awareness of. And we just have to continue to expand our horizons in the work if we want to continue to be equitable.”  
  

> “Diversity is very holistic. There are many different dimensions we can see and not see. It's intersectional — the complexity of diversity exists in ways that we haven't acknowledged before.”

  
One way Arthur is helping to do that is with [Mathison’s Equal Pay Summit on April 12th, 2022](https://www.mathison.io/equal-pay-summit).  
  
  
The summit, Arthur said, is all about, “Uncovering the latest trends in pay equity and pay transparency. There's been a lot of new legislation in states like Colorado and in cities like New York where we're seeing new requirements for pay transparency and job descriptions. As this is becoming a requirement, a lot of organizations are internally wondering, _what have we been doing for pay equity and transparency?_ Have we assessed how equitable our pay is, are we defining everything very intentionally for job seekers who might be severely underpaid in their previous jobs? And we might be perpetuating that pay equity gap when we give them an offer that matches what they're being paid today, right? So there's a huge systemic issue with pay inequity.”  
  
  
He described the depth of the problem. “If you think about the trickle down impact of when someone is inequitably paid, what it means in terms of the house they can buy, the school they can send their kids to, the lifestyle they have, and how they actually become future leaders and organizations, pay alone actually has an enormous impact. And so us being able to be part of this conversation with the community on the latest trends and pay equity, transparency, what they mean for leaders and organizations right now, and how we can take action. It's going to be a very cool conversation!”  
  
  
Attending (or watching a recording) is a great way to be a permanent student of the work yourself. As Arthur told us, “Our whole philosophy is that you should not have to wait in order to make meaningful progress. You should be able to have progress in action, at any part of the journey that you're on. I'm very excited about all the work ahead. It's only the beginning in so many ways.”  
  
You can learn more about Mathison at their [website](https://www.mathison.io/), or on Twitter, [@Mathisonio](https://twitter.com/Mathisonio).  
Connect with Arthur Woods on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurwoods/) or Twitter, [@ArthurWoods](https://twitter.com/ArthurWoods).

Arthur Woods is an HR expert who literally wrote the book on DEI. His business, Mathison, is all about helping companies address their diversity struggles. Ashby sat down with him to talk about his work, DEI, and what both founders and recruiters need to know.

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

We’re thrilled to announce that Ashby has now partnered with Gusto. Gusto provides full-service HR, payroll, and benefits management for businesses.

![Setting up your integration](/images/gusto-login.png)

Gusto eliminates stress and confusion around all things HR. Everything from health insurance to taxes to time and attendance tracking is handled for you in-app.

With Ashby’s high-level recruiting and reporting tools, it’s faster and easier to manage all of the elements of a happy, productive team in one convenient place.

![Using Gusto within Ashby](/images/gusto-add.png)

Learn more about it [here](https://gusto.com/product/integrations/ashby) or check out [Ashby University](https://www.notion.so/Gusto-4481c98b4fec46eab93a613411a2ee6e) to learn how to set up your integration.


Learn more about our exciting new partnership with Gusto in this article!

Ashby Has Partnered with Gusto

We're excited to announce our new integration with [Checkr](https://checkr.com/), a platform that makes it easier, faster, and fairer to run background checks.

Using Checkr’s advanced background check technology, companies of all sizes can better understand the dynamics of the changing workforce, bring transparency and fairness to their hiring, and ultimately build a better future for workers.

With this integration, customers can order and review background checks without leaving the Ashby candidate profile.

![Checker in Ashby](/images/checkr-screenshot.png)

To learn more about this integration, and to see how it can improve your hiring process, check out [Checkr’s User Guide](https://help.checkr.com/hc/en-us/articles/4421183201559) and [Ashby University](https://www.notion.so/Checkr-Background-Checks-788fc0d970ff40d3862044cdc2e2c0f5).


Ashby is partnering with Checkr, and you can learn more here!

Ashby Has Partnered with Checkr

Ben Asher


At Ashby, we leverage GitHub Actions for lots of small automated tasks. We recently introduced a reminder to deploy changes to production when the number of commits in the deploy passes a specified threshold.

For some background, we deploy by merging `develop` into `master` (via a merge commit). `develop` consists of commits squashed from pull requests. We default to smaller pull requests, so commits may pile up on `develop` if nobody needs to deploy to production right away. Suppose a production issue happens after a deploy and the deploy has lots of commits. In that case, it's harder for our team to roll back (e.g., it has database migrations) and harder to identify the commit(s) that caused the issue. 

To avoid letting deploys accumulate lots of commits, we wanted to figure out a continuous deployment strategy that would keep deploys small. We considered several strategies and, for now, landed on this automated reminder. The reminder has several benefits:

- Deploys are always attended. We wanted to avoid issues where an automated solution might deploy right when everyone signs off for the day in North America or Europe.
- No changes to our deploy process were needed. We're hiring [roles to dedicate more time to improving our deployments](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ashby/?departmentId=2c32d70f-d7cb-4a06-bd87-048084e3eb10), but we wanted to reduce deploy size while minimizing immediate effort.

Here's our GitHub Action in its entirety:

```yaml
name: Please Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches:    
      - 'develop'

jobs:
  please-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Maybe Ask for Deploy
        run: |
          if [ "$(git rev-list --count origin/develop ^origin/master)" -gt "$MAX_COMMITS_BEFORE_NOTIFY" ]; then
            curl -X POST \
              --data '{ "channel": "C02D678LP29", "text": ":rotating_light: The deploy is getting too big! Can someone (on-call?:pray:) please deploy? https://github.com/ashbyhq/Ashby/compare/master...develop :rotating_light:" }'\
              -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8'\
              -H "Authorization: Bearer $PROD_NOTIFY_SLACK_TOKEN"\
              https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage 
          fi
        env:
          PROD_NOTIFY_SLACK_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PROD_NOTIFY_SLACK_TOKEN }}
          MAX_COMMITS_BEFORE_NOTIFY: 4
```

The GitHub Action sends an automated message to our #ping-engineering channel when `develop` is behind `master` by five commits, ensuring that we keep the ship shipping throughout the day!

![Slack Message Screenshot](/images/gridhub-actions-deploy-reminder/slack.png "The automated message in Slack")


An automated reminder to deploy as an effective way to keep deploys small and safe.


Continous Deployment via a GitHub Actions Reminder


ES2022 introduces `Array.prototype.at` and we've come to love using it. `Array.prototype.at` can replace using the standard index operator `[]`:

```typescript
const arr: number[] = [];

arr[0].toString();

// Same as above!
arr.at(0).toString();
```

In the example above, even though index 0 may not have anything there, Typescript is happy to allow us to to call `toString()`. With `.at()`, we get a compiler error:

![Typescripts Compiler Error](/images/array-at/compiler_error.png "Typescript's compiler error.")

`Array.prototype.at` is not officially supported in all versions of Node. Check [node.green](https://node.green/) to see if you can use it!

Array.at provides better type safety than the standard index operator, and it works with Node 16!


Type Safety with ES2022's Array.prototype.at


[`jq`](https://github.com/stedolan/jq) is a tool I use at least two to three times a week (maybe daily when it's my week to investigate sentry issues in production), so I thought I'd write about it and its XML offshoot, `xq` (via [yq](https://github.com/kislyuk/yq)).

A lot of our day-to-day work involves reviewing API request and response data in structured text formats, whether it be debugging, reviewing input or output formats for vendor APIs, etc. Often, I find I have a question about a JSON blob, and that blob is too large to inspect by just giving it a "once over." Enter, `jq`. In it's most basic form, `jq` lets you query JSON documents, but it's also useful for linting and formatting minified JSON.

## Basic Usage

Let's say I have the following JSON blob:

```json
{"firstName":"Ben","lastName":"Asher","email":"ben@example.com"}
```

Copy this to your clipboard and run the following command (after you install `jq` with, for example, `brew install jq`<Footnote>Some other ways to install `jq` are [here](https://github.com/stedolan/jq)</Footnote>)

```bash
pbpaste | jq '.'
```

This prints the following:

```json
{
  "firstName": "Ben",
  "lastName": "Asher",
  "email": "ben@example.com"
}
```

What we did is pipe the output of our clipboard into `jq` and use the `jq` command `.` to print it with better formatting (and colors!). If the JSON were invalid, it would tell you where it's invalid. I've found this immensely useful for quickly fixing issues in our public API documentation since our API documentation vendor requires valid JSON in our sample responses that we present readers.

## Querying JSON

Things get even better when you need to query JSON. I often find myself investigating a Sentry error and debugging an issue that requires inspecting JSON involved in the error. Let's say I have a list of people in JSON format:

```json
[
  {
    "firstName": "Ben",
    "lastName": "Asher",
    "email": "ben@example.com"
  },
  {
    "firstName": "Ronald",
    "lastName": "Martin",
    "email": "ronald@example.com"
  }
]
```

If I want see just emails, I can do `jq '.[].email'`. That `jq` command string tells it to look at each array element (you can also do `.[0]` to select just the first one, for example), and from each one, select the `email` attribute. This prints:

```txt
"ben@example.com"
"ronald@example.com"
```

For a recent issue, I had data like the JSON above, and, if one of the object fields were missing, the backend code threw an error. The amount of data was too large to inspect manually. With `jq`, I could query each attribute, and, if `jq` couldn't find it, it printed `null`. So, to find which attribute was the culprit, I did `jq '.[].email' | grep 'null'` and replaced `email` with each sibling attribute until I got a `null`.

## Querying XML

`jq` is super powerful, but recently I wanted to do something like the example above, but with XML. Our customer job feeds for vendors are in XML and often contain thousands of jobs. I found out a new vendor would not ingest jobs that didn't have a valid two digit country code. Before we launched with the vendor, I needed to figure out how many jobs would be impacted. I figured there must be an equivalent for XML, right? There is, and it's a [tool called `yq`](https://github.com/kislyuk/yq) that wraps `jq` and supports multiple other formats. It ships with a tool called `xq` that you can use for XML.

Back to my task, I needed to figure out how many job postings in the feed would be dropped by the vendor. For simplicity, I'll use the snippet below as our "feed" and walk you through what I did. You can install `yq` with `brew install python-yq`.

Let's copy the feed to our clipboard:

```xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<source>
  <publisher>Ashby</publisher>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[Product Engineer]]></title>
    <country><![CDATA[US]]></country>
  </job>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[Full-Stack Engineer]]></title>
    <city><![CDATA[Remote]]></city>
    <country><![CDATA[CA]]></country>
  </job>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[Pilot]]></title>
    <city><![CDATA[Remote]]></city>
    <country><![CDATA[PT]]></country>
  </job>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[Software Engineer]]></title>
    <city><![CDATA[Remote]]></city>
    <country><![CDATA[DE]]></country>
  </job>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[VP of Sales]]></title>
    <city><![CDATA[San Francisco]]></city>
    <country><![CDATA[United States or Canada]]></country>
  </job>
  <job>
    <title><![CDATA[Data Analyst]]></title>
  </job>
</source>
```

Then save the contents of our clipboard to a file:

```bash
pbpaste > feed.xml
```

From here, I want to query countries. Countries are at the path `.source.job[].country`. I can do the following to quickly check them out:

```bash
cat feed.xml | xq '.source.job[].country' | less
```

Looking at that output, I see some `null`s and some country codes, so I know I'm in right place.

Stepping back, our vendor only accepts two digit country codes. The way our feed code works is that we look up the user-inputted country's country code (for example, via [node-countries](https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-countries)). If we can find the country code, we use it, and, if we can't, we use the original value (people sometimes input invalid countries like "Remote" or "United States or Canada"). Also, some won't have countries, so we see some `null`s.

## Operators

To know what the vendor is going to drop, we can use the length of the country field (only ones of length two will work), which `xq` (and `jq`) can calculate! To get the length of all country codes, I can do this:

```bash
cat feed.xml | xq '.source.job[].country | length' | less
```

That's right! `xq` and `jq` have their own operators, which you can pipe output to within the command. The operator above will output the length of each country, and looking at the output, we can see that we're getting `0`s where we had `null`s before, and `2`s for most things (phew!). To get our final answer, we can run the following command:

```bash
cat feed.xml | xq '.source.job[].country | length' | grep -v '2' | wc -l
```

This takes that output that we were viewing in `less` and pipes it to `grep`. With `-v`, we tell `grep` to only give us output that doesn't match, so that gets us all of the "bad" countries. Piping that to `wc -l` will count the number of lines and give us our answer.

## Conclusion

`jq` and its offshoots are super powerful, and I use them all the time, even if it's just the basic path-based searching of JSON files (or formatting to make smaller ones nicer to read). For everything else, I can usually find a useful operator (via Stack Overflow or [`jq`'s docs](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/)) that'll help me put together fancier queries.


How I use command line tools to inspect JSON and XML data that would be impossible to do by eye.


Querying JSON and XML with jq and xq

Graham Murdoch


In Typescript, when defining a type, it's nice to use a union of [literals](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/literal-types.html):

```typescript
type Sizes = "sm" | "md" | "lg"
```

This allows developers to quickly enter a valid value without having to import and expand an enum. In an editor like VSCode, you get a nice autocomplete prompt with the possible values.

However, sometimes you want a union of literals plus some flexibility for custom values. In this example, we want to allow CSS length units (e.g. `"100px"`). 

A simple solution is to combine the literals with a generic type that is a supertype of the literals:

```typescript
type Sizes = "sm" | "md" | "lg" | string
```

Adding the generic type weakens the type coverage since you can enter something potentially invalid that compiles (like `"lgg"`). You've also broken autocompletion for this type. VSCode, for example, won't show the literals as options in a useful way anymore.

One possible approach is to use a generic type that doesn't match the literal values (e.g. an object):

```typescript
type Sizes = "sm" | "md" | "lg" | { custom: string }
```

This restores autocompletion, some type coverage, and preserves a fallback option. However, it isn't quite what you want for CSS length units (and requires some superfluous decoration). 

## LiteralUnion

Prior to Typescript 4.1, a better solution was to use the `LiteralUnion` utility from the [`type-fest` package](https://github.com/sindresorhus/type-fest):

```typescript
import { LiteralUnion } from "type-fest"
type Sizes = LiteralUnion<"sm" | "md" | "lg", string>
```

While it still allows invalid values, autocompletion of the literal values works again!

## Template Literals

As of Typescript 4.1, we can do better. Using [template literal types](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/template-literal-types.html), we can more accurately model (and restrict) the range of values:

```typescript
type Sizes = "sm" | "md" | "lg" | `${number}fr` | `${number}px`;

const size: Sizes = "sm"     // ✓
const size: Sizes = "1fr"    // ✓
const size: Sizes = "100px"  // ✓
```

### Working with Enums

At Ashby, some of our older code uses enums and, for consistency, we continue to use them as the basis for possible values.

Historically, you couldn't really combine the approaches:

```typescript
enum DesignSystemSizes {
  sm = "sm",
  md = "md",
  lg = "lg"
}

type Sizes = DesignSystemSizes.sm | DesignSystemSizes.md | DesignSystemSizes.lg

const size: Sizes = "sm"     // 𝒙 - no literals in autocompletion
```

With template literal types we can!

```typescript
enum DesignSystemSizes {
  sm = "sm",
  md = "md",
  lg = "lg"
}

type Sizes = `${DesignSystemSizes}` | `${number}fr` | `${number}px`

const size: Sizes = "sm"     // ✓ - autocompletes literals and DesignSystemSizes!
const size: Sizes = "1fr"    // ✓
const size: Sizes = "100px"  // ✓
```

## Conclusion

With Typescript 4.1 and later, you can do some pretty interesting things to construct accurate types using literals and template literals. Exciting stuff!

Use template literals to create flexible types that accurately check possible values at compile time and support autocomplete in common editors (like VSCode).


Flexible Types that Support Autocomplete with Template Literals (Oh My!)

Arjun Nayini


When writing tests, especially longer integration tests, sometimes you want to run _nearly_ the same test, but with a few key variables changed. Instead of copying and pasting your integration test into another `it` block and changing the small details, you can use the `.each` table syntax [provided by Jest](https://jestjs.io/docs/en/api#describeeachtablename-fn-timeout):

```typescript
describe.each`
  variable1             | variable2
  ${"mystring"}         | ${true}
  ${"otherstring"}      | ${false}          
`(
  "Testing a variety of cases",
  ({
    variable1,
    variable2,
  }: {
    variable1: string;
    variable2: boolean;
  }) => {
    // Test content...
  }
)
```

The `.each` table syntax<Footnote>You can also define the table as an array of arrays or array of dictionaries.</Footnote> allows you to paste in a string that represents the different test cases you want to run.  The first row defines the names of variables that will be passed to each run of the test.  Each subsequent row represents a test run where the provided values will be bound to the variable names.

In example above, two tests will be run where:

1. `variable1 = "mystring", variable2 = true`
1. `variable1 = "otherstring", variable2 = false`

This technique can make tests a lot more readable. Note that in the above snippet, you'll have access to the variables in the body of the test content.

In using `.each`, I've noticed that it is often best when you don't want to change too much of the test logic based on the variables.  If your test ends up having a lot of `if/else` logic based on the variables, especially throughout the entire body of the test, I think it's better to just copy-paste as the additional complexity to read the test isn't worth it.


How to write similar Jest tests without copying and pasting code.  


Testing Using Jest Table Syntax

Ronald Martin


In standard Typescript, you can make an arrow function [generic](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/generics.html) by declaring the type variable before the arguments:

```typescript
const identity = <T>(arg: T): T => arg;
```

However, if you try this in a React `.tsx` file, the compiler tries to parse the type variable as a JSX tag:

![Typescripts Compiler Error](https://static.slab.com/prod/uploads/l73blu9g/posts/images/ysOnK_8JL2tvLGuUSS6I__Rh.png "Typescript's compiler error.")

To help the compiler know that this is actually a generic type variable, put a comma (`,`) after the type variable:

```typescript
// Note the comma 👇
const identity = <T,>(arg: T): T => arg;
```


How to fix Typescript compiler errors from generic arrow functions in .tsx files.  


Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

Ashby Has Partnered with Triplebyte

Ashby Has Partnered with Fetcher

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

Ashby Has Partnered with Gusto

Ashby Has Partnered with Checkr

Snippets

Continous Deployment via a GitHub Actions Reminder

Type Safety with ES2022's Array.prototype.at

Querying JSON and XML with jq and xq

Flexible Types that Support Autocomplete with Template Literals (Oh My!)

Testing Using Jest Table Syntax

Using Generic Arrow Functions in .tsx Files

Product

Resources

Company

Developers

Marqeta’s Stephanie Baysinger on Letting Your Recruiting Ops Team Shine

Ashby Has Partnered with Triplebyte

Ashby Has Partnered with Fetcher

Mathison’s Arthur Woods on the Right Way to Approach DEI

Ashby Has Partnered with Gusto

Ashby Has Partnered with Checkr

Snippets

Continous Deployment via a GitHub Actions Reminder

Type Safety with ES2022's Array.prototype.at

Querying JSON and XML with jq and xq

Flexible Types that Support Autocomplete with Template Literals (Oh My!)

Testing Using Jest Table Syntax

Using Generic Arrow Functions in .tsx Files

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