How Kong Closed the Gap Between Offer Accepted and Start Date with Ashby’s People Workflows

Kong is a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies. As the company continues to grow globally, it is re-evaluating its talent and onboarding processes for scale. Silvia Martinez, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager, is helping the talent function shift from scrappy and manual to structured, data-driven, and automated for the next stage of the growing business. They are rethinking not just how Kong recruits, but what happens after the offer is signed.

Challenge: A Pre-Boarding Process with Manual Handoffs and Communication Gaps

Without a central system to track tasks for candidates and internal teams, pre-boarding a new hire at Kong was tedious. The multi-handoff process for a single hire involved several teams, such as IT, people ops, the day-one employee experience team, and sales enablement. Email threads tied together a chain of to-dos across inboxes, Asana tasks, and a human constantly following up that each step was completed on time. 

The deeper problem was that once those handoffs went out, the work happened in silos. Each team did its part, but no one could see the whole. 

"IT would order the laptop, TA Ops would run background checks, People Ops would add people to Workday and send welcome emails. Everything was happening, but nobody knew where things were. If I wanted to know the status of a laptop, I had to go ask IT. If I wanted to see if somebody had a Workday account, I had to go ask People Ops. It worked in the sense that we were getting people through the door, but it was all over the place."
— Silvia Martinez, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager

The fragmentation reached the candidate, too. Because each team handled its own communication, messages to the candidate were inconsistent: some emails were sent from Ashby, some from Kong’s Gmail, and some from Workday. There wasn’t always timely communication during pre-boarding about background check status or reminders to complete tasks.  There was no reliable signal for new hires that their pre-boarding was actually moving forward.

The problem was not a lack of effort. Consistently running a pre-boarding experience for every new hire, in parallel across IT, people ops, and employee experience teams required an end to end solution.

Solution: People Workflows as the Connective Layer Between Talent Acquisition and Onboarding

Kong’s onboarding team had a clear picture of what they wanted new hire onboarding to look like: seamless automated handoffs to drive a dependable experience both internally and externally. Ashby's People Workflows was the solution, and the Kong team joined as a design partner to help inform the product's early development. 

Automation Drives Reliable Communication and Visibility

Now, when a candidate accepts an offer at Kong, People Workflows automates the tasks. 

• First, candidates get emailed their background check link, and a prompt to fill out the IT form with their shipping information and computer preference. 
• The candidate is notified as milestones are achieved.
• If a candidate has not completed a step within a set time frame, the system sends a reminder without needing manual intervention. 

Because the tasks now live in Ashby rather than scattered across tools, the team can set dependencies between them and stop chasing updates in Slack. The communication that used to come from different systems now sends automatically from one place. 

"The visibility is the biggest change. Before, I'd spend a couple of hours every week just answering, 'What's the status of this?' I'd have to go to a different team and a different Slack channel, and the person who needed to answer might be in a completely different time zone. It could take three days to reply to an email. Now it literally takes two minutes. ”
— Silvia Martinez, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager

Each downstream team involved with onboarding can see the status of every task. What used to require a recruiter to manually check in with each team now surfaces automatically. The notifications also provided peace of mind for the candidate, who can feel more comfortable and confident for their first day. 

A Single Point of Contact Provides a Consistent Customer Experience

Adopting People Workflows also meant Kong's Talent Team could go above and beyond to ensure a smooth welcome. With the Kong recruiter as the primary contact for a candidate during the hiring process, that relationship helps facilitate a seamless onboarding transition from  once the offer is extended and signed to welcoming them on their first day.

Customizable Workflows for Every Type of Hire

Onboarding is rarely one-size-fits-all; a full-time hire needs different onboarding workflows than an intern. Before People Workflows, anything outside the standard process required hours of additional manual work, often tracked through email chains. People Workflows let Kong build for hiring variations quickly and easily.

“We could just make a copy of the onboarding workflow in Ashby, remove anything that wasn’t necessary, and added in the things that were specific to interns. It’s a much shorter process, but Ashby let us keep it in one place and track it.”
— Silvia Martinez, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager

Kong also uses conditional logic by location. Welcome emails differ by region, in-office hires get a different email than remote ones, and background checks route to different providers by country. Kong is already planning more workflows for confidential and leadership hires, with sales onboarding moving into People Workflows next. 

Impact: Time Saved For Kong and a Better Experience For Candidates

The most noticeable change was how the low-level, high frequency coordination work virtually disappeared with the automations Ashby enabled. One example is background check initiation. Kong was averaging eight hours between a signed offer and kicking off a new hire's background check. With auto-enrolling new hires in their workflow and background check automations, that delta dropped to 10 seconds — a 99.97% reduction.

The Talent Ops team went from managing coordination for every hire to driving more strategic changes in the process. The shift shows up in their internal onboarding Slack channel, where the teams involved in pre-boarding coordinate. 

"We've seen about a 20% reduction in Slacks on that channel. And the ones we do get have moved from 'What's the status? Where is the laptop?' to 'We don't have this in our current process, maybe we should add it.' It's been nice to see a switch from ‘What's happening?’ to ‘Let's make it better.’ Ashby allows us to focus on those other operational opportunities to improve a process or provide a different level of support internally to hiring managers as well as candidates."
— Silvia Martinez, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager

That extra time allows them to focus on other operational opportunities within the talent workflow, whether it’s improving a process or providing another level of support to hiring managers and candidates. 

For candidates who convert to offers, the shift is equally concrete. They now receive proactive communication and confirmation at every step so they can feel confident on the first day in a new role knowing their pre-boarding was handled. At the pace of Kong’s hiring, that consistency matters even more; Kong regularly onboards over 10, sometimes nearly 20, new hires a week.

And because People Workflows sits natively inside Ashby's ATS, the handoff from recruiting to pre-boarding is seamless. The candidate pipeline flows directly into the onboarding pipeline, without needing a manual transition. Everything can be seen within the Ashby dashboard.With hiring targets continuing to grow, the ability to run a consistent, structured pre-boarding process at scale matters more than ever. 

Kong sat down with Ashby to talk through how People Workflows has changed their hiring process for the better.

Since implementing Ashby People Workflows, Kong has seen improvements across every part of the pre-boarding experience:

• Background check initiation dropped from eight hours to 10 seconds, a 99.97% reduction
• Coordination Slacks fell about 20%, shifting from status-chasing to process improvement
• Candidates get proactive communication at every milestone without manual intervention
• Four to five downstream teams receive automated notifications and have real-time visibility into their assigned tasks
• Multiple workflows (interns, start-date changes, and more) and conditional logic by region let Kong handle hiring complexity in one system
• The Talent Team has reclaimed the time previously spent chasing handoffs, and redirected it toward higher-impact work: data, process improvement, and better candidate experience
• Pre-boarding oversight shifted from individual attention to a centralized Ashby dashboard, giving leadership a live view of every new hire's status at a glance

If your team is still managing pre-boarding through emails and spreadsheets, we'd love to show you what's possible.