Benjamin Encz

Ashby Culture

When the Ashby team met for the first time, we took a moment to reflect on and codify the attributes we value most in those we hire, and on the operating principles that guide our work. We'd like to share that with you here.

Ashby’s Operating Principles

Alan

Altura

aronow.io

Assured is a claims automation insurtech backed by leading Silicon Valley investors.

Assured

Astronomer

Attentive

Aurora Solar

Aven

Our camps give kids both a place to start and plenty of room to grow outdoors as they build skills in a wide range adventure sports, including mountain biking, hiking, kayaking, rock climbing and paddling.

Avid4 Adventure

Benchling

iPaaS integration platform with a worldwide reach

Boomi

Boulevard

Brightline brings virtual behavioral and mental health care to kids and teens, with a focus on also supporting families. 

Brightline

The Browser Company

Calm

Census

Character.AI

Clay

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

Cognition Labs

Cohere

Cointracker

Color

Confluent

Convictional uses technology to make logistics easier for retailers and their suppliers by automating supplier integration, onboarding, and merchandising.

Convictional

Costanoa Ventures

Enterprise-grade accounting, audit, and tax software for your digital assets

Cryptio

Cursor

Dave

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

Docker

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

ElevenLabs

An AI customer service agent for help desks.

Flock

Form Energy

Format One

FullStory is an insight platform that aims to create a more perfect web experience by capturing website data to give clients like GNC, Carvana, and Lowe’s greater insight into how users access their websites.

FullStory

Galileo

Gorgias

Granola

GrowthAssistant

HackerOne

Harvey

Help Scout

incident.io

Infinite Lambda

Ironclad

January transforms the lives of borrowers by bringing humanity to consumer finance. Their data-driven products empower financial institutions to streamline collections, providing borrowers with straightforward and compassionate solutions to regain financial stability and control over their lives. 

January

Juni

A leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies

Kong

Kustomer

Leapsome

Lemonade

Lime

Linear

Linktree

Lovable

Machinify

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

Mastodon

Mercury

Metaview

Modern Treasury

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

Monte Carlo

Multiverse

NETGEAR

Notion is the go-to for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, blending everyday work apps into one. It serves as an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management. 

Notion

Compensation software that offers 5,000+ companies clarity for every pay decision.

OpenComp

Opendoor

Oyster HR

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

ProAmpac

Pulley

QFinds

Quora

Rad AI

Ramp

Readme

Recruiting Pundit

Reddit

Replit

Resend

Retool

peer network for senior in-house resourcing leaders

RL100

Scratchpad

With over 2k clients and 20+ years of experience, Sequoia Consulting Group  is a services, tech, advisory business that provides clients with a platform for rich analytics.

Sequoia

Shelby Wolpa Consulting

Engineering Updates

Recruiting Articles

Mike Clapson

If you work in sales long enough, you learn that the compensation plan tells you a lot about how a company operates.

At some companies, quotas feel arbitrary. They get handed out as an exercise in aspiration, not as realistic targets. When that happens, reps don't just lose confidence in their ability to earn, but they also lose trust in the business. And once trust erodes, it becomes much harder to build the kind of momentum that a world-class sales team needs.

We think about sales incentive comp differently at Ashby.

We have put a meaningful amount of thought into how quotas are designed, how incentives work, and how compensation evolves over time. The goal isn’t to create a model that looks good in a spreadsheet to the finance team; instead, it's to create a system that is fair, data-driven, motivating, and durable.

That matters for take-home pay, of course. But it also matters for something even more important: the feeling that if you do the right work, the right way, success compounds. Early wins build confidence. Confidence improves execution. Better execution creates more wins. We want our quotas and incentives to reinforce that flywheel.

None of this matters if the company flames out before you finish ramp, so it's worth starting with how deliberately Ashby has been built. We've grown efficiently, scaling revenue far faster than we've added people:

That track record of intentional, sustainable growth is what makes everything below credible. A quota system is only as trustworthy as the business it supports.

We design quotas to be "challenging, but achievable"

Those words sit at the top of our Sales Compensation Philosophy document.

Our aim is for roughly two-thirds of AEs to be at or above quota, and 

Ashby has a multi-year track record of staying close to that goal

. Most companies will never tell you what they actually model their quotas around — I'd encourage you to ask. The truth is that most companies expect ~35–45% of AEs to hit quota. They factor that into their productivity assumptions and build even bigger sales teams to account for the expected level of failure. They hide this with high OTEs and invite you to talk to a top-performing rep during the interview cycle. We think this model is broken.

Quotas that are too high can create burnout, turnover, and a sense that the plan is disconnected from reality. Of course quotas can't be too low either, because the business needs the sales team's revenue contribution (less commissions) to fund the rest of the company's growth and headcount. Ashby's goal is to balance both sides of that equation so that strong performers are very well paid while the company preserves sustainable sales efficiency.

One of the most important ways we hold ourselves to that standard is a quarterly quota evaluation process.

Most companies set quotas once at the start of the year and leave them static. When reality shifts, those static targets are exactly what create the burnout and broken trust described above.

We do it differently. Revenue Operations, Sales Leadership, and Finance collaborate every quarter to evaluate and, where warranted, adjust quotas. This is an intentional decision. It holds us accountable, and it gives us the flexibility to keep targets fair as a fast-scaling business changes around them. Quotas are not "set and forget."

More frequent assessment of quotas creates more operational work, but this lets us respond to reality — team growth, territory changes, shifting market conditions, and evolving productivity patterns. In practice, quotas move up or down by team or region when the data says they should. The result is not wild swings; it's appropriate adjustments that keep quotas current, credible, and fair.

Unlike most companies, where "quotas only go up," 

we have a track record of reducing quotas where appropriate

 — especially when we successfully hire a group of strong reps into a given team or segment. Our hiring is sustainable not only because of our strong product-market fit and large addressable market, but also because we add great AEs to already successful teams, where existing reps share what's working and help everyone succeed. That combination has helped us keep AE attrition low over the last 3+ years, even as the team grows.

We'd rather refine the system than pretend the original assumptions can never change.

A lot of sales orgs talk about being data-driven. Few actually anchor quota-setting in past performance and real operating conditions.

At Ashby, quotas are set using multiple data sources, including historical sales performance, top-down finance objectives, productivity assumptions, demand flowing into a region, seat capacity, and multiples on total sales compensation. Just as importantly, there is no single input that dominates the process; those signals are used together to narrow in on fair targets by region and segment.

We are not setting quotas based only on what we hope productivity could become. We look hard at what the business has historically produced, what current market conditions support, and what changes are likely to help or hinder attainment.

Ramp is another area where our philosophy shows. We use segment-specific ramp periods because different segments have different sales cycles, complexity, and time-to-productivity. The right ramp for a shorter-cycle segment is not the right ramp for Enterprise; fairness is not sameness.

We also put real analytical rigor into the ramp itself. We run a separate evaluation process that goes deep on both ramp 

 (how many months to reach full productivity) and ramp 

 (for example, a slower build across the first few months followed by a sharper increase). And because we're scaling quickly — roughly doubling headcount year over year — we compare ramp cohorts over time (this year versus last) to account for a changing selling landscape.

Just as importantly, our ramp philosophy is designed to give new reps a viable path to earning OTE while onboarding. Ramp is explicitly not a draw. New reps are not simply being advanced earnings they'll later have to claw back through future commissions.

Instead, ramp quotas, pay rates, and attainment mechanics are structured to help reps build confidence and momentum early

. New reps should have a path to both quota attainment and OTE during ramp, with uncapped commissions and consistent treatment for over-attainment.

Early months shape belief. A thoughtful ramp helps a new rep focus on learning, building pipeline, and winning the right way, rather than feeling buried by a fully loaded target before they've had a fair chance to succeed.

Our Enterprise Guarantee reduces friction, not upside

Enterprise selling is hard. Longer cycles, more complexity, and higher expectations mean a one-size-fits-all compensation approach breaks down quickly.

That's why Ashby pairs the Enterprise ramp with a Commission Guarantee. It's a step-functioned guarantee that provides a base level of variable earnings during ramp while still allowing the rep to earn OTE. More importantly, Enterprise reps receive the guarantee 

 are paid on deals they close during ramp — preserving real upside instead of forcing a tradeoff between security and earnings potential.

These details make a huge difference when you're a senior rep considering leaving somewhere you have a proven track record and active deals in your pipeline.

We want incentives to reinforce the right behaviors

Thoughtful quota design is only part of the picture. Additional incentives matter too.

Ashby's commissions and incentives are designed to reward ARR outcomes while avoiding mechanics that create misalignment. Based on sales team feedback in 2025, we now offer two tiers of accelerators, with the top tier paying AEs double their base commission rate above 150% attainment. We want to ensure that top performers are materially rewarded.

We also reward contributions that drive impact over the long term. One example is our Sales Outbound Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes cumulative self-sourced outbound closed-won revenue over a rep's career at Ashby, with milestone-based cash awards and public recognition. It celebrates long-term outbound excellence, not short-term quota performance. Cash awards start at $2,500 and go all the way up to $50,000 for achievements we expect to see over a period of several years.

A good quota and incentives system should do a few things at once: establish a fair and transparent compensation system, ensure high performers earn very well, and create a sense that consistently high-quality work creates meaningful success. When sellers trust the plan and believe the targets are grounded in reality, they can spend more of their energy on the work itself — and that's the outcome we care about most.

We’re building a thoughtful, high-performing Sales organization at Ashby. See our 

How We Think About Sales Quotas and Incentives at Ashby

Ashby designs sales quotas to be challenging but achievable, aiming for roughly two-thirds of AEs at or above quota, and re-evaluates them every quarter — adjusting down as well as up. Mike Clapson, VP of Sales, on how the plan is built and why.

This week at [Ashby One](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ashby-one/2026), we announced a new product we’ve been working on: an [AI Interviewer](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ai-interviewer-waitlist). Alongside that, we also shared that we acquired the team and assets behind Talent Llama in 2025 — an early-stage company building in this space. Since then, we’ve been rebuilding the product natively within Ashby. This is our first acquisition.

I want to share a bit more context on how we approach acquisitions, what changed my thinking on AI interviewing, and how we’re approaching this as part of the product.

## Why this wasn’t obvious (at least to me)

If you had asked me a year ago whether AI interviewing would be relevant for most of our customers, I would have been skeptical. A lot of what I saw in the market felt early — particularly video-based AI interviewers that put candidates in front of an avatar. My assumption was that this would not be well received, especially for knowledge worker hiring.

That changed once we started using Talent Llama internally in mid-2025. We were recently hiring for APAC team members without having a recruiter present in those timezones. We reviewed all resumes internally, and then offered two options to those advancing: schedule a call with our recruiting during their availability, or take an AI interview at a time that’s convenient for the candidate.

We saw 36% of candidates opt for an AI interview. And as we reviewed results internally, it was clear the Talent Llama approach was different: voice and text-based, without trying to simulate a human interviewer. It felt more elegant, and importantly, candidates responded to it more positively than I expected.

At the same time, we started hearing more from customers exploring this category. It began showing up in feature requests, RFPs, and conversations with teams running higher-volume hiring processes.

Individually, none of these signals were decisive. Taken together, they pointed in a clear direction: This is a space that’s evolving quickly, and one we’re likely to participate in over time.

## Why we decided to acquire Talent Llama

When considering acquisitions, we’re primarily looking for strong product and engineering teams who have gone deep on a problem we care about, and who are excited to rebuild within Ashby. Talent Llama fit that well.

Co-founders [Adam](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/letter-talent-llama-joining-ashby) and [Ben](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/letter-talent-llama-joining-ashby) are repeat founders who spent the last two years building, iterating, and learning directly from customers in a similar way we approached building Ashby at its onset. When we went through technical diligence, it became clear that they could both accelerate our timeline on an AI interviewer as well as contribute to our broader AI platform.

After the transaction closed in late 2025, the team has spent the first part of this year rebuilding Talent Llama on the Ashby platform. This matters because our shared platform powers every feature — enabling consistent reporting, stronger AI, and more reliable automation on a single, connected data set.

![Talent Llama team](/images/ashby-talent-llama-founders.jpeg)

## What we’re building (and how we’re thinking about it)

The AI Interviewer we announced at Ashby One is being built as part of our broader set of AI capabilities. Conceptually, it’s one piece of a larger shift towards agents that can help augment appropriate parts of the recruiting workflow; in this case, early-stage screening conversations.

There are a few reasons we think this belongs directly inside Ashby:

* **Workflow integration.** Interviewing is tightly connected to scheduling, scorecards, and downstream decisions. Keeping this in one system avoids fragmentation.  
* **Data context.** Because Ashby already has structured data across the entire hiring process, we can make these interactions more relevant and useful.  
* **Candidate experience.** We can design this as part of the overall journey, rather than as a disconnected step.  

At the same time, this is an area where we’re being thoughtful about product design. Our AI approach here will continue to follow the same principles we've applied elsewhere: transparency, human oversight, fairness testing, and clear guardrails on how features are designed and evaluated.

## Why now

More broadly, this fits into a pattern we’re seeing across recruiting where AI is starting to move from assistive tooling (drafting emails, summarizing notes), into areas that are closer to core workflows.

At the same time, hiring teams are under pressure to handle higher volumes, move faster, and still maintain quality. For some segments — particularly higher-volume hiring — tools like AI interviewers are already becoming commonplace.

For many customers, we’re still early on how AI interviewing will shape recruiting. Our goal, as is true for everything else we commit to, is to [build this in a way](https://trust.ashbyhq.com/?itemUid=25ecde5a-2c4a-450d-ab9e-01d5efa02128&source=click) that is actually useful in practice.

## What happens next

The version we announced today is an early step. Like most things we build, it will go through the same iterative process working with design partners ([sign up for waitlist here](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ai-interviewer-waitlist)), refining based on real usage, and expanding over time. As always, we’ll stay close to customer feedback as this evolves.

We’ll keep building from here.

Ashby acquires Talent Llama to build an AI Interviewer natively into its platform, improving early-stage screening and recruiting workflows.

Bringing Talent Llama's AI Interviewer into Ashby

Adam Stokar

When my co-founder Ben and I started Talent Llama, we didn’t set out to sell the company.

We were focused on using AI to help teams run better early-stage interviews in a way that was practical, fair, and actually useful in real hiring workflows. We were early in the AI interviewing space, but we were starting to see traction. We had a small set of customers, a clear roadmap, and were in the process of raising our next round.

So [joining Ashby](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/talent-llama) wasn’t something we were actively looking for.

What changed our minds from raising our next round to joining Ashby? Three things: the product, the team, and the long-term direction.

## 1. Product

We first got to know Ashby through an integration, as a number of our customers were already using their ATS. It ended up being one of the smoothest integrations we’ve ever worked on, which was an early signal of how well the product is designed.

From there, we spent more time inside the product and talking to customers. The feedback was consistently strong — not just on feature depth, but on how thoughtfully everything was built. Ashby felt like a system that was designed end-to-end, rather than a collection of tools stitched together over time.

As founders, that matters. We care a lot about product quality and iteration speed. Seeing how quickly Ashby ships, and how much attention goes into the details, gave us confidence that what we had built could evolve faster as part of their platform than it could on its own.

## 2. Team

The second piece was the team.

Over the course of multiple conversations with Benji, Abhik, and others across the company, we got a clear sense of how Ashby operates. The team is small relative to what they’ve built, but the bar for both the talent and the product they are building is very high. People are thoughtful, direct, and focused on doing the work well.

It also felt familiar. At one point, Ben and I joked that it felt like talking to a slightly larger version of our own team — similar pace, standards, and expectations around ownership.

That kind of alignment isn’t something you can manufacture. It made the decision feel a lot less like joining a different company, and more like continuing the same work in a more experienced environment.

## 3. Direction

The third factor was how Ashby thinks about where recruiting technology is going.

From the outside, it’s easy to think of Ashby as “just” an ATS. But the reality is that it’s a much broader system — and one that’s increasingly becoming the operating layer for how companies hire.

That matters for what we were building.

AI interviewing doesn’t work particularly well as a standalone tool. It’s tightly connected to scheduling, evaluation, candidate context, and downstream decisions. The more disconnected it is, the less useful it becomes.

Building this directly into a system like Ashby (where all of that context already exists) opens up a very different set of possibilities.

We came to the same conclusion independently, but Ashby is already much further along in building that foundation. Joining forces allows us to move faster than we could on our own.

## What We’re Excited to Build

Since quietly joining the Ashby team a few months back, we've been rebuilding our AI Interviewer on Ashby's platform.

Outside the feature specifics, our goals are to:

* Design interviews that feel practical for candidates, not overly artificial or performative  
* Make outputs useful for hiring teams, not just novel  
* Integrate tightly with the rest of the hiring workflow  

We’re also excited to contribute beyond just this product area as part of Ashby’s all-in-one suite. A lot of the work we’ve done has been around how to structure and run AI-driven interactions in a way that is reliable and transparent. Those learnings apply more broadly to where Ashby is heading with AI.

## Closing Thoughts

For us, this wasn’t about an exit strategy. It was about increasing the scope of what we can build and the impact it can have.

We’re joining a team that shares how we think about products, moves quickly, and has already built a strong foundation in a space we care deeply about.

While we keep building with Ashby, you’re [welcome to join the waitlist here](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ai-interviewer-waitlist). We can’t wait to show you more of the product over time.

**Adam and Ben**

A letter from Talent Llama co-founders Adam Stokar and Ben Chaikin on joining Ashby.



A Letter from the Talent Llama Co-Founders on Joining Ashby

Today at Ashby One, we brought together ~700 customers and prospects in San Francisco and over 1,500 more virtually for our fourth product keynote.

Each year, this moment is a chance to share what we’ve been building — and more importantly, how we’re thinking about the evolving state of hiring.

Over the past year, our business has grown from 2,400 to over 4,400 customers with >100% revenue growth across startups, mid-market, and enterprise segments. At the same time, we’ve scaled the team across engineering, product, and customer success to continue raising the bar on both [product velocity](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/product-velocity) and customer experience.

This growth reflects something we think about constantly: how to build a system that keeps up with how quickly hiring is changing.

Everything we announced at Ashby One ties back to that. Keep reading or jump into the recording below.

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## How we build at Ashby

Before getting into specific product announcements, I wanted to share a bit more about how we approach building.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve shipped more than 130 core improvements and new features. That means you’re seeing a meaningful change in Ashby at least every 3 days.

This pace is intentional, and it comes from a few core decisions:

* We organize product teams around real recruiting workflows (ATS, Scheduling, CRM, Analytics)  
* We build everything on a shared platform layer — reporting, automation, customization, and now AI  
* We stay deeply connected to customers through constant feedback loops and design partnerships  

One important extension of this philosophy is how we think about serving both startups and enterprise companies.

Building for enterprise pushes us on scale, governance, and flexibility. Building for startups pushes us on speed, usability, and strong foundations. Together, they make the product better for everyone.

That shows up across both the day-to-day experience of using Ashby and the needs of our most complex customers.

The result is a system that can grow with you — without needing to be replaced as your company scales. The outcome is less time in change management, and more time building a robust hiring system.

## The next generation of AI in Ashby

AI was a major focus of this year’s keynote — but not as a standalone feature set.

Over the past year, AI has dominated nearly every conversation in our industry. New tools are emerging quickly, and expectations for what recruiting teams can automate or accelerate are changing just as fast.

But most AI in hiring today still lives in isolated tools, disconnected from the systems where the actual work happens. That creates a gap between what AI can do and what teams can reliably use in practice.

Our approach is different.

We’ve always built Ashby as a unified system where your CRM, ATS, scheduling, analytics, and workflows all live on top of the same data foundation. That matters even more in an AI-first world, where the quality of AI is directly tied to the quality and completeness of the data underneath it.

This unique position allows us to:

* Apply AI across the entire hiring process, not just one step  
* Use real context (interviews, feedback, emails, pipeline data) instead of isolated inputs  
* Build features that are not only powerful, but reliable and safe to use in real workflows  

This is also why we’re seeing a very specific pattern in who is choosing Ashby.

Today, **70% of Forbes’ top AI startups use Ashby — up from 50% last year.**

These companies are building the next generation of AI products — and they’re choosing Ashby to build their teams.

It’s a strong signal that the same foundation that makes Ashby effective today is also what makes it well-positioned for what comes next.

With that context, here are the key AI announcements from this year’s keynote.

### AI Talent Rediscovery

We introduced AI Talent Rediscovery, which allows you to automatically surface high-potential candidates from your existing database.

Instead of starting from scratch, you can:

* Identify warm leads, silver medalists, and high-fit candidates  
* Leverage past interviews, feedback, and hiring signals  
* Take action immediately within your existing workflows  

### Ashby Assistant and Custom Agents

We launched the Ashby Assistant, a conversational interface that can answer questions and take actions across your entire recruiting dataset.

You can generate pipeline updates, draft emails, and interact with your data in a much more natural way.

Alongside it, we introduced Custom Agents, which allow teams to package complex workflows into reusable, standardized prompts.

The Assistant is also available in Slack, bringing Ashby into the tools your team already uses.

### Open Ecosystem: MCP Server

We also announced our upcoming MCP Server, which allows external AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to interact directly with Ashby.

This makes it easier to build custom workflows and extend Ashby into your broader AI stack.

### Scheduling Agents

Finally, we previewed Scheduling Agents.

Instead of automating individual steps, these agents take full ownership of scheduling — coordinating candidates, interviewers, and reschedules from start to finish.

This is a shift from task-based automation to fully managed workflows.

## AI Interviewer and the Talent Llama acquisition

At the end of 2025, we [acquired Talent Llama](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/talent-llama) and began rebuilding their product natively inside Ashby as our new AI Interviewer.

AI Interviewer allows you to:

* Run structured, conversational AI interviews  
* Evaluate candidates with strong signals  
* Review results directly within your existing pipeline  

![](/images/ai-interviewer.png)

A key focus here is candidate experience. The interviews are designed to feel natural, responsive, and human — not scripted or robotic.

We’re rolling this out in private beta and will continue refining it closely with customers.

You can [join the waitlist here.](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ai-interviewer-waitlist)

More broadly, this acquisition reflects how we think about building:

* A unified platform, not disconnected tools  
* Deep integration into existing workflows  
* Long-term investment in core hiring infrastructure  

## Expanding beyond hiring: People Workflows

The final theme of the keynote was expanding Ashby beyond traditional ATS boundaries.

We believe there’s a significant gap in what happens after a candidate is hired — especially in onboarding.

To address that, we introduced People Workflows.

People Workflows allows you to:

* Automate and scale the new-hire onboarding process  
* Coordinate across teams like recruiting, HR, IT, and hiring managers  
* Trigger tasks, communications, and data flow automatically  
* Maintain a high-quality experience after offer acceptance  

We’ve been developing this over the past year and already have more than 25 early access customers using it.

![](/images/people-workflows.png)

## Where we’re headed

If there’s one theme across everything we announced, it’s this: hiring is evolving quickly, and the systems supporting it need to evolve just as fast.

And all of this is not possible without a unified data architecture.

Our focus is on building a deeply integrated platform that continuously evolves through fast iteration on customer feedback:

* Keeps up with changes in technology  
* Supports companies from their earliest stages through enterprise scale  
* Extends across more of the talent lifecycle over time  
* Provides a single source of truth across every hiring and onboarding activity  

We’re excited about what’s ahead — and to keep building it alongside all of you. You can watch the keynote in its entirety below.

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A look at the biggest announcements from Ashby One, including new AI capabilities, People Workflows, and how Ashby is evolving as a unified hiring platform.

The Next Phase of Ashby: Key Announcements from Ashby One

Anum Hussain

My first day at HubSpot coincided with the kickoff of the Inbound Marketing Conference in 2011, back when a few hundred marketers gathered in a small hotel and the idea of a company conference was still an experiment. Over the next five years, I watched it grow into what is now [INBOUND](https://www.inbound.com/), a flagship event drawing 12,000+ folks to the Boston Convention Center each year to hear big ideas, new product launches, and celebrity speakers like Trevor Noah and Reese Witherspoon.

Over the course of those five years I went from working behind-the-scenes (registration desk, mic runner, directions usher) and helping prepare speakers to taking the stage regularly myself. I was ranked a top-five speaker by attendees three years in a row, which led to invitations to speak globally at events like Unbounce in London, Growth Hackers in San Francisco, SEOZone in Istanbul, and CTA Conference in Vancouver. Through these experiences I became obsessive about what makes a session great — the narrative flow, the audience engagement, the structure of the talk. I later became a professional speaker coach and ghostwrote entire keynote decks for executive leaders.

But when I joined the talent and people space through my role as Head of Content at Ashby, I kept hearing the same feedback about existing events in not just our industry, but all business sectors as the sheer number of events available has multiplied:

* “I see the same speakers at every conference.”
* “I spent a lot of my learning budget, but I didn’t really learn anything new.”
* “It sounded good, but it didn’t change how I work.”

I don’t think that’s because the industry lacks smart people. **I think it’s because of how most conferences are built**.

- - -

## An In-House Model for Designing Agendas

Traditionally, events rely on open calls for speakers. The loudest voices (or the ones with the most time to build a polished deck) submit proposals. Conference teams then play Tetris, fitting those talks into a day of programming and hoping it coheres.

But **some of the most innovative hiring workflows, thoughtful RecOps systems, and impactful talent strategies come from practitioners doing the work every single day — *and those practitioners are busy***. Keeping up with economic fluctuations and AI adoption is challenging enough; being expected to also turn your work into compelling narratives and structure into talk tracks is simply not in scope. So when we conceived of Ashby One, I knew we had to architect it differently.

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## Start With the Work, Not the Submissions

Ashby has a unique vantage point. We work with many of the top talent teams in the world from [fast-growing companies](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ashbyhq_brex-analyzed-over-35000-customers-to-determine-activity-7408916543243374593-ZFXT/) building entirely new operating models for hiring. Through customer conversations, community threads, social listening, and our proprietary dataset spanning millions of hiring moments, we have a living pulse on what’s actually shifting in talent acquisition.

**That’s where the Ashby One agenda begins**. Not with “Who wants to speak?” But with: "*What conversations does the industry actually need right now?*"

A select few of us personally craft the agenda based on those inputs. We pressure-test it internally and turn to our Sales and CS partners to review it and scope: Who is truly doing this work at a high level and how do we map the right expert to the right topic?

We also deliberately scan for a mix of voices across company size, geography, talent leadership and RecOps expertise, lived experience, and career stage. **Recruiting is one of the most diverse professions in the world. Our industry programming should reflect that**.

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## We Co-Build Every Session

We also don’t ask our speakers to show up with a fully formed talk. We often hear initial hesitation when we reach out to experts in their domain. They’re nervous about the major time suck it can be and don’t want to spend weekends stuck in presentation decks. Instead, every Ashby One session is co-built in-house. My content team partners closely with each speaker to:

* Refine the topic so it’s sharp and relevant
* Pull out the strongest insights from their real-world experience
* Shape the narrative arc of the session
* Build slides with our in-house design team
* Run speaker coaching and dry runs

By the time someone steps onto the stage, they’re prepared, confident, and excited to share something meaningful.

This model isn’t common. It’s also why our speakers often tell us it’s one of the best event experiences they’ve had. And why feedback from our audience at the inaugural Ashby One in 2025 was so strong we’re bringing the conference to two cities this year (hello [London](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ashby-one/2026/london)!).

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## Design the Day for Energy, Not Endurance

Ashby One is built around three tracks:

1. Talent Leadership  
2. Recruiting Operations  
3. Ashby Labs  

Talent Leaders and RecOps practitioners share a mission, but they don’t share the same day-to-day decisions. One is navigating executive alignment, headcount strategy, and talent density. The other is designing systems, enabling teams, and turning strategy into workflow. And the partnership across the two is essential. Meanwhile Ashby Labs is a dedicated product space where practice and interaction replace observation.

Within and across these tracks, we vary format intentionally.

### Product Keynote

We open Ashby One with our product keynote on what we’ve been building and where we’re heading next. This session is designed to ground the day in what’s possible when recruiting teams have a modern system built for the way hiring has evolved.

You’ll see the latest feature launches and product updates, along with real examples of how customers are using Ashby to achieve hiring excellence. We’ll also share how we’re thinking about AI across the platform — not as a collection of experiments, but as an integrated layer across the entire hiring process designed to help teams move from exploration to operational rigor.

Finally, we’ll pull back the curtain on our product philosophy: how we organize teams, how we approach building software for talent organizations, and how customer insight shapes the roadmap.

### Panels

Our panels are designed to stay current. Instead of locking topics months in advance, we build them to reflect the reality of the market in the weeks leading up to the event. At every Ashby One you can expect our pillar panels:

* Our **Hiring Excellence panel** evolves alongside the challenges enterprise teams are navigating in real time.  
* Our **Talent Trends panel** pairs proprietary insights from millions of hiring data points with leaders who live inside those numbers every day.  

### Presentations and Fireside Chats

Some ideas need structure and depth. Our in-depth presentations and structured fireside chats give space for a couple of experts to unpack an emerging shift in the space. These are focused and strategic to help inspire meaningful change within organizations across (think Quality of Hire, AI innovation, and more). And the format adapts to the speaker - some are more comfortable delivering a 40-minute session while others prefer conversation to guide them. Either way, we include visuals and prep the content to come alive intentionally.

### Lightning Talks

Energy matters.

Our Lightning Talks are ten minutes each, split across Talent Leadership and RecOps. In the time many conferences give you one voice, you’ll hear from at least three. These sessions are tightly scoped around specific programs and workflows. They’re designed for velocity and exposure, giving attendees more ideas without cognitive overload. And they’re a whole lot of fun, inspired by the lightning talks our employees give internally at our annual company offsites.

### Build-a-thon

And then, we build. For our RecOps professionals, we close the day not with theory, but with action. Our Build-a-thon invites practitioners to experiment together in a creative, low-stakes environment. Because building alongside peers is often more powerful than listening to another talk. What more beautiful way to network than to co-work?

### Ashby Labs

Ashby Labs is one of the product-focused experiences at Ashby One, built for deeper learning, hands-on exploration, real conversations, and practical takeaways you can use right away. Whether attendees are evaluating Ashby or already running it day to day, Labs is the place to learn real workflows and leave with clear next steps. This includes Labs stage sessions, 1:1 Labs meetings that can be booked, and direct access to Ashby’s product experts, customer stories, and key partners.

![](/images/agenda-design_all_blog-1-.png)

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## Final Thoughts

Building an agenda this way takes more effort, but we believe it matters. When people spend a day at a conference, they deserve more than a set of polished talks. They deserve r**eal ideas, inspiring workflows, and tangible context they can take back into their work the next morning**.

That’s why we’re so intentional about how we source both topics and speakers. Many of the people you’ll see on the Ashby One stage aren’t regulars on the conference circuit. Instead, they’re spending their days building the systems, programs, and operating models we’re talking about. Our job is to work closely with them to shape those experiences into sessions that are clear, practical, and genuinely useful.

From where we sit, these are some of the most thoughtful leaders and practitioners in the industry right now. Much of the work they’re sharing is still being actively built inside their organizations and will likely show up as case studies and broader conference conversations in the years ahead.

This is also very much a team effort. The agenda comes together through input from across Ashby: our community, our sales and customer teams, the data we see across the platform, and the incredible work of our marketing team who help turn those ideas into a great experience on the day. So taking this moment to say thank you to everyone that has contributed so far this year and in the years to come.

**If you can join us in [San Francisco](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ashby-one/2026/san-francisco) or [London](https://www.ashbyhq.com/ashby-one/2026/london) this year, we’d love to see you there.**

A behind-the-scenes look at how our team builds the Ashby One agenda, from sourcing real practitioner insights to co-creating sessions designed for immediate value.

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Ashby’s Operating Principles

How We Think About Sales Quotas and Incentives at Ashby

Bringing Talent Llama's AI Interviewer into Ashby

A Letter from the Talent Llama Co-Founders on Joining Ashby

The Next Phase of Ashby: Key Announcements from Ashby One

Inside the Ashby One Agenda: Why We Build Sessions Differently

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Ashby’s Operating Principles

How We Think About Sales Quotas and Incentives at Ashby

Bringing Talent Llama's AI Interviewer into Ashby

A Letter from the Talent Llama Co-Founders on Joining Ashby

The Next Phase of Ashby: Key Announcements from Ashby One

Inside the Ashby One Agenda: Why We Build Sessions Differently

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