How Dave Overcame Market Shifts While Increasing Recruiter Productivity 80% with Ashby

Dave is a mission-driven fintech company working to level the financial playing field. In its early years, the company made fast hiring progress through a mix of agency support and a small, but scrappy internal TA team. That early group laid the groundwork for the company’s first 100 hires and helped scale quickly while building the foundation for a more structured in-house recruiting model. 

As the business grew, Dave moved away from agency recruiting and began further building out their internal talent acquisition function that could flex with the market.

When Tom Chapman joined in February 2020 as Dave’s first business recruiter, the company had around 80 employees and a small TA team focused mostly on technical hires. Just four weeks later, the pandemic hit and forced a full shift to remote hiring almost overnight.

“Moving to remote wasn’t just a logistical shift; it was a complete rethink of how we engaged and assessed candidates. In some ways, it became a competitive advantage, because we could confidently tell candidates we were staying remote when others couldn’t.”
— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

Over the next couple of years, Dave scaled rapidly and built out a robust internal TA function while going public via a SPAC in early 2022. As the market shifted, company priorities evolved and TA had to adapt alongside them.

By mid-2022, the team had made meaningful progress, but many improvements were still based on gut feel or past experience. With increased pressure to operate more efficiently, it became clear that the team needed data, clarity, and a system that could scale with them.

Problem: Attracting Talent in a Down Market

In 2023, Tom stepped into a leadership role and led a reset of the TA function. With leaner resources (a team of 4 from 12) and a company focus on profitability, the team began rethinking how success should be defined and how to deliver outsized impact without sacrificing quality.

Tom leaned into tools like Capacity Planning to understand where recruiter time was going and how to structure work more sustainably. Rather than optimizing for volume, the shift was toward designing a healthier, outcome-driven process that was built on alignment, clarity, and long-term efficiency.

By analyzing historical interviewer hours, recruiter ratios, and offer acceptance rates, Tom could see exactly how much activity was needed to meet headcount goals without overloading the team. The data revealed that some teams required as many as 45 recruiter screens for a single hire, signaling that recruiters were rewarded for being busy with interview volume versus for efficiently sourcing hires. 

Tom used these insights from Ashby to propose a new goal for the team: target fewer than 15 recruiter screens per hire and standardize processes across all departments, with flexibility for role-specific needs.

“We went from measuring activity to measuring impact. It made success clearer for the team, better aligned to business goals, and more sustainable for everyone. We ended up with an 80% increase in recruiter productivity over 18 months. This included reducing recruiter screens by 40%, maintaining a 60 day average Time to Fill, and cutting hiring manager interview time 45%. We didn’t get it perfect right away, but having better data let us catch issues earlier and plan more intentionally. That opened the door to more consistent role validation and allowed us to focus on higher-impact work across the business.”

— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

With success metrics in place, doing more with less not only meant having the right tooling in place, it also meant being thoughtful about spending on talent technology. Up until this point, the team had a costly tech stack across a number of point solutions on top of their legacy ATS. 

Solution: A Lean, Powerful Tech Stack

Leadership was initially cautious about switching ATS platforms given the timely and heavy nature of historic ATS migrations. But with Tom’s promotion to Head of Talent, he knew he had to advocate for ways his team could contribute to the company wide goal of “path to profitability.” 

"I had been using [legacy ATS] a very long time, but Ashby came along and brought data I had never seen in an ATS before. This level of insight was huge to my player-coach role and bringing stakeholders along. So I went and pitched everyone and continued documenting all the issues we were facing until I got everyone bought in. Christian, our Ashby CSM, and Jim, their VP of Talent, were incredible collaborators along the way. They weren’t just pitching us the All-in-One product, they were helping me build a stronger TA function. Their guidance made a real difference in how I was able to drive internal buy-in and frame the value of the tool in a way that aligned with our goals."
— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

The implementation proved fast and seamless, taking between 2 and 3 weeks from start to finish. 

"Of course it was a bit daunting at first. As a new talent leader, I had this feeling of how am I going to do this all on my own. But once you start digging into Ashby... it's very intuitive. It feels like it was built for recruiters. And our internal RecOps Specialist, despite no prior experience implementing an ATS, was able to pick up the resources and knowledge provided to make the transition a success. This included working with Christian on the data side and having access to actually useful documentation — Ashby Knowledge Base is fantastic and the support team is so responsive."
— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

The resulting TA tech stack went down from 5 vendors to just two, cutting costs while improving capability. And once fully migrated to Ashby All-in-One, the TA team could focus on workflow refinement and automation. This included AI-Assisted Application Review to manage high inbound application volumes.

By defining role-specific criteria directly in Ashby, the integrated AI model analyzes each applicant’s resume against must-have skills, flags qualified candidates, and cites exactly how determinations are made. Recruiters can then:

• Prioritize applicants meeting all must-have criteria
• Quickly reject candidates who meet few or none of the requirements
• Batch similar profiles to stay in context and review more efficiently

“One of the biggest values for us has been how aligned AI-Assisted Application Review fits with our strategy of defining success criteria upfront and scoping roles intentionally. The AI-generated summaries make recruiter feedback feel less subjective and more actionable — especially for hiring managers who might otherwise hesitate to trust gut impressions. Now, when we advise on candidates, it’s grounded in what’s been defined as critical from the start. Recruiters feel more confident giving their opinion, and stakeholders are more open to receiving it.”

— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

The team is adopting more AI features in Ashby and looking forward to the suite of upcoming developments to come. The time saved is allowing them to invest those calories in other value-driven work.

“We’re not just reviewing applications faster — we’re engaging in better conversations earlier, with clearer signals and shared context. That’s a big shift for us.”
— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

These changes freed recruiters to focus on higher-value work, including partnering with hiring managers, coaching interviewers, and enhancing the candidate experience through tools like a Candidate Prep Deck and capped interview panels.

Impact: An Efficient, Data-Driven Team

Over 18 months, Dave’s lean TA team (and talent stack) achieved:

• 80% increase in recruiter productivity 
• 40% fewer recruiter screens while maintaining a 60-day average time-to-fill
• 45% less hiring manager interview time
• 32% drop in total interview hours per hire
• Offer acceptance rate increase from 69% to 85%

"The team is now empowered to use Ashby to solve pain points. Recruiters are coming to me with clear data and pulling out reports I didn't even think to create. When we were on [legacy ATS], I would have to try and find data for them. Ashby provides them with the autonomy to drive their own outcomes."
— Tom Chapman, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition

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