How Confluent Built Security-First Talent Operations with Ashby

Confluent is a data streaming company hiring up to 300 people each quarter. At that volume, the recruiting function is both a pipeline to fill and a line of defense, because the people it hires touch systems and data that customers trust it to protect. Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent, runs that function as an operating system: security-aware, heavily instrumented, and built to move at the speed of a business that is always hiring.

Problem: Too Many Systems and Too Little Validation

For a company hiring at Confluent's pace, the recruiting practices needed to keep the business secure were happening at the wrong end of the process, and the actions that needed to be fast were hindered by being spread out across too many tools. .

Identity checks that came too late in the funnel

There is a growing  threat against remote tech companies via  fraudulent applicants who target roles with high pay and direct  system access; Confluent was seeing this exact pattern in Engineering and Customer Success roles. What made the problem dangerous was less about the fraud itself, and more where in the funnel it was detected. When the only reliable identity check sits at the offer stage, every fraudulent candidate who gets that far has already drained the attention and time of interviewers. 

“Our validation process for candidates was very much at the end of the recruiting process: our background checks, our right-to-work. And so that person has already made it through a full interview process. They've talked to a lot of people on the team. They've signed an offer with us. We've invested a lot in this person by the time that we are validating they are the right person.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

The offer process was bottlenecked by brittle integrations

Because Confluent uses Workday as their HRIS, their offer process depended on a Workday integration which had historically been slow to build and tedious to maintain. Confluent’s previous ATS could not stand up the kind of integration they needed without months of custom development and significant expense. Even then, the result was a brittle integration that often broke if a single field changed. This unreliable system handoff left recruiters manually entering compensation data into offers, which left them open to human-initiated errors.

Multiple systems often buried the data

Confluent ran interview scheduling across three separate tools: a ticketing system where the initial request was made, the former ATS where the feedback form lived, and a smart-scheduling layer on top. Reporting was just as manual. The team's quarterly business review (QBR) program, which puts hiring attainment and key metrics in front of each executive leader, ran on data dumps that had to be rebuilt in spreadsheets and slides every quarter.

“The whole process to run took three to four weeks from end to end, for about five QBRs. It was a very time intensive process, but it was really important to us because we are very data driven. We wanted to make sure our executives understood their hiring goals, how things were going, and where we needed them to lean in.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

What tied these problems together was a single need: a system flexible enough to identify   and weed  out fraud earlier, seamlessly integrate with their HRIS, and replace a patchwork of point-solution tools without compromising the security standards its business depends on. 

Solution: System Consolidation with Security Built-In

Confluent found that flexibility in Ashby:

1. With Ashby’s Candidate Fraud Detection, they could move validation to the top  of the funnel with initial application review.
2. With Ashby’s Workday integration, they could take the custom engineering and manual data input  out of the offer process
3. With Ashby Analytics, they could collapse the scheduling and reporting stack into one place

Moving fraud detection to the front of the funnel

Timing is what separated Confluent's rollout from a typical feature adoption. The team was already deep in the problem with security when Ashby’s Candidate Fraud Detection launched. They were examining IP and device signals along with social signals tied to a candidate's email and phone to flag where those factors do not line up. Because the recruiting team was already having this conversation with security, the decision was whether to keep trying to build the capability themselves or switch on the new feature. The case was easy to make as it didn’t require additional engineering time.

“As we were having these conversations with our security team, Ashby rolls out Candidate Fraud Detection. We were trying to figure out how we were going to set this up on our own, and now we didn’t need to; Ashby had solved that problem. Prior to turning on candidate fraud detection, about 20% of the candidates who were being archived as fraudulent had talked to someone at Confluent. We've been able to cut that in half.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

Confluent achieved these results by building an operating model around the feature with their Security team. Detection runs automatically on every application; a red, yellow, or green lens determines how much extra scrutiny a candidate gets. When something is flagged, recruiters verify LinkedIn, examine a candidate's work history for a trajectory that makes sense, and confirm the same person appears across Zoom calls. Certain flags are non-starters set jointly with Security, and any candidate flagged early gets a deeper security review before Confluent moves to offer.

The more instructive move was that Chiara created fraud training for Confluent teammates to follow. Detecting fraud at the top of the funnel only helps if the people running interviews further down know what a fraudulent candidate looks like. Chiara helped her team close that gap by making training a precondition for interviewing, and had this enforced within Ashby.

“We built an automation where when someone completed that training in Workday’s  LMS, it would tell Ashby. Only then could Ashby add that person to an interview pool as a now-qualified interviewer. We had it set up so that our coordinators were only scheduling interviewers from that interviewer pool, who were educated on candidate fraud and knew what to look for while they were interviewing.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

Making the offer process self-serve with a better Workday integration

Ashby’s Workday integration lets Confluent sync more than a hundred fields from Workday into jobs and through to the offer form without logging a ton of developer hours. The deeper effect is on where risk sits. An offer is the one document a candidate reads most closely, where any errors create business risk that is difficult to undo . Thus, pulling compensation fields in automatically does not just save time, it reduces liabilities during the highest-stakes manual step in the process.

“Because of the Ashby Workday integration, we've had an 80% reduction in the number of steps it takes to extend an offer. And we have a lot more confidence that those fields are saying the right things, because we've reduced manual data entry, which has been massively helpful for our recruiters.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

The configurability also moves control of the integration to the people closest to the work. When a change no longer requires a work order and a chain of intermediaries, the Talent Operations team stops being a downstream dependency and instead becomes the group that has agency to act when the business needs.

“The Ashby Workday integration allows us to match the pace of the business. When something changes in a payment plan or a compensation structure, we're able to configure that entirely ourselves and go live with it in 20 to 30 minutes.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

Consolidating the stack and automating reporting

Consolidation is often sold as a cost story, but for Confluent the more meaningful gain was having a single place to which they could direct their stakeholders. Before, three separate scheduling tools, a ticketing system, their former ATS, and a smart-scheduling layer, had each solved one slice of the job while pushing the work of moving between them onto recruiters. With Ashby they were able to consolidate into one coordination ticketing queue, removing any connective “tax” and giving the team a single source of truth.

“We were able to deprecate four different systems when we moved to Ashby. Having Ashby be our central place and the one place that we direct people to for information has been really helpful.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

The QBR program moved into Ashby Analytics. The team built its QBR dashboards in platform where recruiters could monitor the data through the quarter. That meant data hygiene was continuous rather than a scramble at quarter end. It also let the team share results with executive staff as they developed. What used to be a three-to-four-week effort to generate five QBRs transformed into the creation of 10 QBRs in about four days.

Impact: A More Strategic and More Trustworthy Talent Function

Taken together, these changes reset what Confluent's talent function is for. A team that once spent its weeks assembling numbers and validating candidates after the fact now spends that time shaping decisions before they are made, which is the difference between a function that reports on hiring and one that steers it. This kind of shift toward is what’s helping the Talent Operations team become more strategic partners with leadership. 

“With Ashby Analytics, we're able to spend a lot more time with our leaders, helping them understand why their numbers are the way that they are and how they can move the needle, rather than figuring out what the number is or spending four weeks to even get there in the first place.”
— Chiara Moore, Head of Talent Operations and Strategy at Confluent

That strategic advisor standing depends on trust. When hiring managers can assume the people on their calendars are real and leaders can assume the numbers in front of them are precise , talent becomes a function that literally and figuratively grows the business. For a company whose product rests on customer trust, holding hiring to that same standard is paramount.    

Chiara sat down with Ashby to talk through how Confluent built its candidate-fraud program, why it treats hiring as a trust-and-security problem, and what it means for a threat that, in her words, “everyone has but not everyone knows they have.”

By moving to Ashby, Confluent built a hiring function that protects the business without slowing it down. So far, they’ve been able to:

• Cut the share of fraud-rejected candidates who had reached a real conversation with the business in half with Ashby Candidate Fraud Detection
• Reduce the steps to extend an offer by 80% through Ashby’s Workday integration 
• Reduce the QBR process from three-to-four weeks for five executive QBRs to ten QBRs in about four days on Ashby Analytics
• Deprecate four systems and cut scheduling steps by 33% by consolidating into Ashby

Ready to build a talent function that catches problems early and moves at the pace of your business? Request a demo today.