How Brightline Realized 64% in Cost Savings by Consolidating 4 Tools Into Ashby All-In-One

It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager at Brightline. Courtney and her team are dedicated to delivering memorable candidate experiences.

Problem: An Inflated Talent Tech Stack

As the company and team grew, they noticed how their goals, workflows, practices, and policies needed to change. As a part of our ongoing check-ins, I spoke with Courtney about her experience evaluating Brightline’s talent tooling. 

“We wanted to build a cohesive and seamless experience, but shifting between our ATS, sourcing, scheduling, and analytics tools wasn’t delivering it. Each tool had its own onboarding, operating philosophies, integrations, and account managers. This made it incredibly cumbersome to manage. We knew this was a problem, but we didn’t know if there were tools in the space that could give us everything we needed.”

— Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager

Solution: All-in-One ATS

Courtney’s team took that comprehensive list to a number of top ATS vendors to understand if their software could support or improve their team’s efficiency. 

“To be great at recruiting operations, you have to be seeking excellence. To achieve excellence, you need to be putting structure around change, embracing technology, leveraging data, and striving for continuous improvement.”

— Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager

After seeing a number of solutions, Ashby quickly emerged as the no-brainer. But before committing, they ran a model across three scenarios. The model looked like this:

1. Status Quo: Keep the existing ATS, sourcing tool, and scheduling platform (aka three different tools) the team was using. This meant dealing with the same issues, but considering it provided a baseline understanding of the team’s underlying problems.
2. Build a New Recruiting Stack: In this option, they built the hypothetical technology they’d need in order to get the same functionality without choosing Ashby. This quickly turned out to be the most expensive option. 
3. Switch to Ashby: By purchasing Ashby, they could consolidate their ATS, sourcing, scheduling, pipeline visualization, and analytics tools into one system.

“Ashby empowered us to improve in all the target areas we set out to improve. The All-in-One product simply offered the most functionality while eliminating pricing across multiple vendors.Tangibly, this amounted to a 64% cost saving over the next five years. Naturally, our finance team was super happy.”

— Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager

Impact: Seamless Recruiter Experience and Improved Cost of Ownership

With Ashby, Brightline’s been able to bring every recruiting need under one roof. No context switching, no broken integrations, and working with just one customer success manager versus multiple — and I can confidently say it’s been just as great for me to be able to work with Courtney! 

She shared how since making the switch to Ashby, the recruiting user experience and workflows are 10x better than previously. 

“Implementation was suspiciously easy! It took us 1 month from signing to being fully migrated, onboarded, and confidently using the product. Even our IT team was happy with the process and stoked not to have to manage so many tools in Okta anymore. And now I work in one tool all day long vs. switching between multiple tabs and tools. I don’t know how to quantify the impact in terms of time saved, but the experience is 10x better and the team loves it.”

— Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager

She continued to share how operating out of one system paid dividends to their weekly workflows in a number of ways, including:

• Sourcing: Within their internal team, the team loves Ashby’s Chrome extension for sourcing. Direct booking links cut in half the time it takes to schedule candidates while ensuring everyone has the Zoom link and interview/interviewee details are confirmed. This was a feature the team didn’t have previously, and gives them peace of mind to have now. 
• Customization: Being able to customize EEOC surveys, interview questions, and feedback forms means the team can be constantly optimizing their process inside the Ashby frameworks..
• Stakeholder Engagement: Beyond the cost savings, Brightline’s recruiting team has become more strategic talent partners who can show leadership the data they want to see.

“Building an Executive Dashboard helped us show up more strategically and the leadership team can now quantify our impact on the business. Our dashboard reports on hires at a department level with progress to goal, DEIB, and source metrics. We also show our speed metrics (time-to-fill, hire, and in-process), offer acceptance and pass through rates, top-of-funnel activity, and finally a snapshot of the current funnel — and who is associated with it. While it may seem obvious, having the customizability to present the data in the opposite order to the way our internal team looks at it is so important to meeting our cross-functional partners halfway. Ashby makes it so easy to do that."

— Courtney Ryan, Recruiting Operations Manager

Hiring Excellence with Ashby

One of the foundational pillars of Ashby’s Hiring Excellence Framework is Operational Efficiency. Courtney was kind enough to dive deep into this through sharing how she optimized Brightline’s end-to-end recruiting experience, generated significant cost savings, and gained insights to empower the talent acquisition team. The complete session can be watched below.

Ready to unlock the power of Ashby for your startup’s hiring needs? Get in touch.