Texting in Ashby: Fast, Compliant, and Built for Recruiting

Recruiters already text candidates; but usually from personal phones or third-party tools that are disconnected from the ATS. That creates risk, slows down collaboration, and leads to missed opportunities.

Ashby Texting is built to fix that. It brings texting into your core recruiting workflows with the benefits of being trackable, compliant, and easy to use. Whether you’re hiring for corporate, high-volume, or seasonal roles, Ashby helps your team move faster by reaching candidates where they are.

Integrated and trackable by default

Ashby adds native SMS support directly inside the ATS. When texting is enabled for your organization, you’ll see SMS as an option anywhere you’d typically email a candidate, like interview scheduling, reminders, or sourcing outreach.

All messages (sent or received) appear in the candidate feed alongside emails, notes, and other activity. This gives everyone on the team full visibility into every conversation, without switching tools or systems.

Compliant out of the box

Ashby handles consent management and 10DLC registration behind the scenes. Just request the feature in-app your admin center to get started.

You can collect SMS opt-in on your application form, or trigger a consent request before the first outbound message is sent. If a candidate hasn’t opted in, Ashby will queue the message and send it once they reply “START.” Candidates can opt out at any time by replying “STOP,” and all consent changes are automatically logged. If consent happens outside of Ashby (like during a phone call), recruiters can override it manually.

Ashby provides a single, shared phone number per organization, so messages don’t come from random or unrecognizable numbers. This improves trust, ensures brand consistency, and reduces confusion for candidates at a time when recruiting-related scams are commonplace.

Recruiters can reply to messages from within Ashby or directly via email—whichever is faster. Notifications can be customized to alert recruiters via Slack or email when a candidate replies, opts in, or updates their consent status.

Templates and automation so your team moves faster

Teams can send messages manually or use Texting Templates with full Ashby token support for personalization.

Admins can create shared templates; recruiters can manage personal ones. This saves time and ensures consistent, high-quality outreach. SMS is also fully integrated into interview workflows. From the Schedule Interview activity, you can:

• Send Direct Booking SMS when scheduling Send Confirmation SMS after booking
• Enable SMS-based Interview Reminders
• Automatically send texts when a candidate enters a specific stage

You can toggle any of these to use SMS or email, depending on what works best.

Note: This initial release is limited to support SMS based messaging to US and Canadian phone numbers. Support for WhatsApp messaging in order to text candidates with international phone numbers will come later.