How Sony Sports Technology Rebuilt Recruiting from the Ground Up with Ashby

Sony Sports Technology hires around 600 people a year across engineering, product, commercial, and live-operations teams that support sporting events anywhere live sport needs covering worldwide. When Tim Chattaway joined as Director of Talent Acquisition, recruiting had been flagged as a critical risk to the business. Tim’s mandate was to fix it. That meant finding a system to rebuild the function from the ground up with a faster funnel, improved hiring quality, and more efficient processes.

Problem: A Function Flagged as a Business Risk

When Tim arrived, the recruiting operation was slow, expensive, and dependent on external resources. The tooling underneath it all could not give him a trustworthy picture of why.

Hiring took too long and lost offers

Software engineering roles were taking more than two months to fill; long hiring cycles were costing the business quality candidates. The protraction of their whole process gave each candidate another reason to accept somewhere else; offer rejections were a direct consequence of the time it took to get to yes.

"One of the big issues that we had when I started looking at the data from our legacy ATS was that it took us a hell of a long time to get people in. We were taking 65+ days for a software engineer, and we were getting a lot of offer rejections off the back of that. The long timeline kills deals."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition at Sony Sports Technology

The team leaned on agencies to fill roles

To fill more specialized roles, mostly on the software engineering and product side, the business relied on agencies for their talent search. That spend ran to roughly £600,000 a year, and put the outcome of the most important hires in someone else's hands rather than the team's own.

High-volume hiring ran on manual work

The team hires at a volume and a geographic spread that manual coordination cannot keep up with. A single operations role can draw hundreds of applicants. Hires happen wherever live sport is played, which means scheduling is often across time zones; their old tooling could not keep up. So the work of arranging interviews, assembling panels, and moving candidates forward was done through email.

"Before it was all manual. It was emails going back and forth: ‘Can you do this time?’ ‘No, I can't do that time.’ ‘Okay, let me go and speak to a manager.’ ‘Can they change the time?’ ‘No, I've got a meeting.’ That's where all the legwork becomes a drag on the process."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

Solution: Rebuild Every Process in a Single System

What Tim needed was a system with data he could trust to help alert where the hiring process was breaking, and one flexible enough to help establish new processes while they maintained their hiring velocity. Ashby gave Tim both.

"The tooling that we had at the time wasn’t working for this. I couldn’t get the right data, I couldn’t understand all the problems, and we couldn’t build a full process in what we had. So the first thing that I did was remove the ATS that we had at the time and brought in Ashby."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition

Reporting and data he could trust

Tim's core objection to the legacy ATS was that it could not show how it reached the data it was reporting. A time-to-hire figure with no visible breakdown behind means that a data-driven leader has no insight on what to adjust or how to improve. With Ashby Analytics, Tim can open up any single metric and dig into the explanation behind the number at multiple levels: the stage, the role, the time frame, and more.

"When you can't see how a number was worked out, you don't trust the answer. Probably my favorite bit about Ashby has been the data side. The fact that I can really dive into a tiny element of something like time to hire and start charting every single part of that."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition

That depth also changed how Tim shows up to meetings with executives. When a leader asks a question about a part of the process or a number that doesn’t make sense, Ashby's AI report builder helps him answer it in the moment.

"When someone throws a bit of a curveball and I'm not expecting it, I can quickly go in and just say, ‘Build me a report on this,’ or ‘I need this,’ and in about 10 seconds I’ve got the report with the answers that I need. It allows you to come back to someone without going, ‘Let me pick that up after the meeting.’ Because after that, it's not important anymore and people have forgotten about it."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

Recruiters who own sourcing end to end

Rather than rebuild around agencies, Tim removed them. He phased them out and restructured the team around full-stack recruiters who source, run the process, and make the offer themselves. This ensures that every hire stays in the team's hands, and every candidate has a single point of contact. The visibility Ashby gives into each pipeline is what lets a lean team make a hiring call quickly and keep moving.

"When you have a system that allows you to see every element of the process, and where you're at, gives you a quick picture of: Do we have enough candidates? Do I need to go out sourcing? Have we got enough applications through for the right candidates? Everyone can go in and check and see if they're happy with the talent pool that's in there ready for them."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

Owning sourcing outright has also helped Tim cut the cost the business had been spending on agencies.

"Since using Ashby, we've reduced our agency spend from 600,000 pounds a year to zero. We've not used an agency in two and a half years, coming up to three years."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

Doing the math, that’s nearly £2,000,000 saved. The recruiting function was becoming less costly as well as less risky. 

Automation that maximises recruiter capacity

The volume and global spread that made manual coordination untenable is what automation helped absorb. Tim’s team built bespoke, automated processes, broken out by sport, so that candidates can virtually self-serve through the steps and recruiters spend their time on judgment rather than logistics. 

"A big win for us was Ashby's advanced scheduling tool. We can bulk email everyone, send out diaries, put together hiring teams and interview pools, and get candidates to book themselves directly. And then it auto-schedules it, and has transcripts within it. It’s just changed the way that we recruit."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

The effect on an individual recruiter's capacity is a strong measure of how that automation is letting recruiters focus on the most important aspect of their job: finding the best talent.  

"The manual elements that a recruiter has to do outside of reviewing are incredibly limited. Now it's all done completely for them, which means they have more time to spend looking at the CVs, making sure they're right, direct sourcing if need be. They can focus on the important bits of finding the right candidate, not worry about logistics of getting them through the process."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition 

Ashby also helped take some of the manual load off the interview teams. Shortening processes and cutting the number of people pulled into each interview meant the business spent far less of its engineers' time, which drove cost per hire down from roughly £6,000 when Tim arrived to around £900.

"The first full quarter of Ashby, we had something around 900 hours worth of interviews, which was averaging out somewhere between 15 and 18 hours of interviews to get one hire. This quarter we're looking at around 300 hours, but that's only two and a half to three and a half hours per hire. That is a colossal shift in the amount of time people are spending interviewing. I want them building amazing products, not sitting in interviews."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition at Sony Sports Technology

Impact: A Better Equipped Recruiting Team Bringing in Better Hires

Rebuilding the recruiting function with Ashby shifted the team from a potential liability for the business to a function that hires at scale, controls its own outcomes, and earns the trust of the hiring leaders it serves. The same team that was once seen as a drag on delivery now hires around 600 people a year across the globe, with six recruiters and no agencies, and it does so on data Tim can defend line by line. That combination of high volume held to a high standard is what makes Tim’s talent team one the business relies on.

A clear signal of this shift is that Tim no longer watches the metric that first defined the problem. Time to hire for engineering fell from 65 days to around 20, and it has settled into a range he trusts enough to stop policing — and one well below the 37-43 day average threshold we noted earlier

"It's not something I really look at too much anymore because we're in a good place. As long as we sit around that 20 day mark, I'm happy."
— Tim Chattaway, Director of Talent Acquisition at Sony Sports Technology

Tim sat down with Ashby to talk through how he re-engineered Sony Sports Technology' recruiting function and how a six-person team hires at global scale without agencies.

With Ashby, Sony Sports Technology turned a recruiting function once flagged as a business risk into one of its strongest functions. So far, they have been able to:

• Cut time to hire for software engineering from 65 days to around 20 days
• Reduce cost per hire from roughly £6,000 to around £900
• Eliminate roughly £600,000 in annual agency spend, down to zero
• Hire around 600 people a year globally with a team of six recruiters
• Cut interview load from 15 to 18 hours per hire to around 2.5 to 3.5 hours per hire

Ready to build a recruiting function that hires at scale on data you can trust? Request a demo today.