How Clay Leveraged Ashby’s Configurability to Double Headcount

Clay is an AI and data platform that helps go-to-market teams turn any growth idea into reality. The company is growing fast, doubling their roughly 600 employees by year end, which means they need a system for hiring that can scale with them. Danielle Poreh helps streamline recruiting at Clay. Her background is in human-centered design and engineering, and she approaches recruiting operations the way an engineer approaches a platform: start with a manual version, prove it works, then figure out how to compose the pieces into something better. For Clay, the goal was never to standardize hiring into something generic. It was to keep hiring “deeply human” while scaling it.

Problem: Time-Consuming Recruiting Processes That Don’t Scale

When a company doubles in a year, the manual processes that worked at an earlier stage quickly become bottlenecks. At Clay, the constraint was fearing automation would lower the hiring bar. The most valuable parts of how Clay hires ran on manual efforts: finding the right kinds of curious candidates, giving recruiters ample time for assessment, and capturing the human touchpoints of each hire. These high-touch processes were not primed to stretch to hundreds of hires per year. Here are some ways these issues become palpable every day.

Scheduling created invisible costs at volume

Clay ran recruiter phone screens through a separate scheduling platform, and each booking created an empty calendar event with no candidate data attached. For a sourced candidate, that meant a recruiter spending a couple of minutes manually entering a profile after every booking. Often, those interviews never got tied to any candidate record at all, which meant the RecOps team lost the data it needed to analyze the funnel. A couple of minutes per screen compounds when running over a hundred screens a week, causing both a time cost and a reporting gap.

The “human” story of each candidate wasn’t captured consistently

Early on, Clay's co-founders interviewed every single candidate, which kept a high, consistent quality bar. However, that could not keep up with scale. The qualitative texture that mattered most often included why a candidate was exciting, what would help them succeed, and what made them unique relative to others interviewed. Clay wanted to be able to preserve that depth of judgment and understanding without a founder in the loop. 

Most ATS platforms ask the company to bend its processes to fit the tool, but Clay needed something different. The recruiting team needed a system flexible enough to remove the friction from their existing processes, while letting them keep the practices that had helped them set a high hiring standard. Ashby was the right tool to provide the levels of customization they needed.

Solution: Automate the Rote, But Keep Humans at the Center of Hiring

Clay’s solution was using Ashby to automate the mechanical work, then use its flexibility to build the human parts back in deliberately. What made this possible is Ashby's job architecture, and ultimately its data model. Rather than a monolith with fixed workflows, the Ashby’ product is made of composable, individually queryable building blocks, which Danielle could adjust to Clay’s needs via APIs and webhooks.

"Ashby's platform reshaped a lot of the way I look at recruiting operations because of how it's structured. It's incredibly unbundled. You've decomposed every single part of what recruiting is into its own module: opening, job, candidate. That means I can touch every single part and puppeteer this into the type of ATS we need. The deeper I got into Ashby, the more I realized I can do a ton of different things within this system."
— Danielle Poreh, Clay for Recruiting, Clay

Scheduling links that standardize data and give recruiters time back

Clay moved its recruiter phone screens onto Ashby's public booking links. Now, when a candidate books a screen, they automatically generate a profile in Ashby and place the active application in the funnel, which eliminates the manual data entry and ties every interview to a record so reporting stays clean. The change took some enablement work to get the team used to a new system, but the payoff compounds at Clay's volume: hours of time saved, plus a cleaner candidate experience and data the rec ops team can finally trust.

"Enabling the team on Direct Booking Links did much more for recruiters than they originally expected. Before, there were too many places to check for information, whereas now everything lives in our source of truth. Additionally, recruiters can now have their own Recruiter Screens recorded in Ashby, so the Candidate Assistant can catch all the little pieces of context necessary to get candidates through to the finish line without all the back and forth. It's also a great opportunity for candidates to feel like the entire team is engaged and making the effort to get to know them and all the details about their journey."
— Franchesca Lara, Recruiting Coordinator, Clay

A hiring thesis that captures the human story by default

To replace founder-led interviews without losing their depth, Clay built a hiring thesis centered around a stream-of-consciousness set of questions a hiring manager answers about each candidate. These include qualifications, what makes the candidate exceptional, and how they’ll support them with parts of the role that they aren’t as aligned with or may be new to them. 

Clay built all this as an Ashby feedback form that generates at a specific stage and gets scheduled onto the hiring manager's calendar like an interview. This ensures the qualitative signal is captured by default, and the full story of each candidate is captured as part of the candidate record.

"At many companies, offer decisions are often based on scorecards and a live debrief. At Clay, our founders want to truly understand the whole human we are about to hire: their strengths and spikes, and also where we'll need to support them. Ashby and the flexibility of feedback forms helps us bring that same level of inspection and thoughtfulness without slowing down our hiring process. "
— Jen Ayala, Head of Recruiting, Clay

Impact: Scaling Headcount Without Losing What Makes Clay, Clay

Each of these automations buys back time, and at Clay's scale that time compounds into the capacity to double headcount without diluting the process. Referrals now drive close to 40% of hiring in a single quarter, built on a workflow that surfaces talent the old Slack-channel approach would have missed entirely. Recruiters spend less time on data entry and tool-switching and more time talking to candidates. Hiring managers capture the full human story of each candidate as a matter of course. Ashby powers every role, from executive hiring down to IC and sales, and as the data underneath it becomes more trustworthy, the system can become the source of truth.

"Being a source of truth isn't just about the data, it's about whether the process generating that data is actually consistent. We won't say Clay had that right from day one, it wasn't the priority. Now as we mature, one of the team's mandates is closing that gap. Getting stages, interview plans, and feedback forms configured across the board, so what's in Ashby actually reflects a consistent hiring process instead of a patchwork of them. We're not fully there yet, but every plan we consolidate gets us closer to a system you can actually trust without checking it by hand. First we made it work, now we're making it great."
— Ryan Ellis, Recruiting Operations Manager, Clay

The deeper shift is in what recruiting operations can be. With Ashby’s automation features, the recruiting operations team spends their energy on building rather than maintaining, which is how a fast growing company doubling in size keeps its hiring distinctive instead of generic.

"Every new automation feature Ashby ships takes something that used to need a technically skilled RecOps person to build a workaround and turns it into a few clicks. That barrier coming down is what lets us spend our energy on the creative part of the role, the stuff that actually differentiates how we hire, instead of holding a fragile system together. It's a direct line to Negative Maintenance, one of our core principles at Clay: fewer things breaking, fewer things needing a human to babysit them, so the humans can go build something better instead."
— Ryan Ellis, Recruiting Operations Manager, Clay

Danielle sat down with Ashby to talk through how Clay customized Ashby specifically for their needs, to keep their hiring uniquely “Clay.” 

Since building on Ashby, Clay has been able to:

• Stay on track for doubling headcount this year, with Ashby powering every role, from executive hiring down to IC and sales 
• Reduce hours of manual work off recruiters by moving to public booking links
• Codify a high, customized hiring bar through flexible feedback forms and individually architected interview loops, rather than flattening the process to scale it
• Build trustworthy reporting from day one, giving the team real-time visibility across hundreds of interviews a week

If you want a recruiting system you can shape around how your team actually hires, we'd love to show you what's possible.