Team
We're a nimble team of humans working together to do big things.
Ashby is a remote-first company with colleagues working from 13 countries in North America and Europe. We meet in person at least once a year in Europe and in our office in San Francisco.
Our 2022 holiday book exchange ๐
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and built our HRIS integrations with Rippling and BambooHR. Instead of manually copying data on hired candidates from Ashby to their HRIS, customers can do it with the click of a button!
Something I've helped the team with...
I built a script that enabled our team to import our customers' candidate data from CSV files. It's enabled us to work with technology partners and recruiting firms that haven't yet integrated with Ashby.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The flexibility and breadth of the product was definitely something that surprised me when I joined Ashby. I was impressed by all of the existing capabilities of the product, and I'm excited to help expand and improve on what we've already built!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's design system. It's enabled the team to design and launch well designed products; often without a full-time designer! While we have room to improve, customers consistently comment on how well designed Ashby is.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented code that tagged all client Sentry errors with a link to a video recording of the user session. It was a small change but it continues to help us create repro steps for obscure bugs and fix them, often without a user even reporting it!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at the depth we can go with each feature we've built. While we can improve our customer's lives with a first version, it often uncovers even more impactful problems or inefficiencies we can solve. We've only scratched the surface of what Ashby can do for our customers!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our calendar and email sync from a brute force cron job to real-time sync. It's helped both customers and our team: customers now have the most up-to-date information when scheduling and following up with candidates and we've able to scale sync as we grow with minimal effort.
Something I've helped the team with...
I've added monitoring and observability to a lot of our infrastructure at Ashby: Datadog monitors to alert us when things go wrong, linking Sentry issues to DataDog traces, logging SQL explains for inefficient SQL generated by our query engine. It's greatly reduced the stress of being on-call, provided context when debugging a product issue, and helped us proactively catch performance bottlenecks before they become a real problem.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The impact that a small, engineering-focused team can have in building and shaping such a complex product.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Help engineers make time to build intentionally while still being responsive to customers so that our super efficient engineering team can scale with the company's needs (and build software that scales as well)!
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
There are *lots* of documents. As someone who keeps asking for reading recs, this is reading recs 'r us.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How effective the codebase is at not requiring too much deep rewrites for extended feature sets. There's a truly "designed" feel about this.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
Many of our customers want to allow users to send emails on behalf of other users or groups. This is complicated and error prone to setup in Gmail. I added a feature within Ashby to make it easier to share email addresses with users and allow them to send email using these shared email addresses.
Something I've helped the team with...
During a post-mortem, we identified that frontend errors were getting missed during QA. I built a widget that shows a summary of console.log errors in-app so they're harder to miss.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Everyone talks about the importance of using async communication whenever possible. It was still surprising the first time someone at Ashby cancelled a big meeting with the explanation "this can just be an email"!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's in-app e-signature feature. Before, our customers had to generate the document in Ashby, upload it to an e-signature service like DocuSign, set up the signature blocks, get the signatures, download the signed document, and upload it back to Ashby. Now this entire process is automated!
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first month, I upgraded many of our core libraries to the latest major version (e.g. Create React App) and migrated us from TSLint to ESLint. With these changes, other engineers had faster build and reload times and more issues caught in CI (versus in production)!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I continue to be surprised at how well we live our "build for the long term" engineering principle. It's amazing how often I find myself building off of the building blocks of others, versus having to build new one-off components.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I redesigned and rebuilt the user interface for filters (which is used everywhere!) to make it easier to use while having much more flexibility than it had previously.
Something I've helped the team with...
I'm helping other engineers write more robust and modular CSS through pair programming sessions and creating reusable layout components in our design system.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Too many to list. Amazingly competent, thoughtful, and kind team. A sense of calmness throughout my week. Lots of well written documents. And last but not least, very sharp and candid leadership.
Emily Ellis
Engineering
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built the default dashboards presented on each job. While our reporting features are very powerful, not everyone has the time to build reports. The default job dashboard gives our customers a comprehensive set of metrics out of the box. I knew it would be useful, but I was still surprised at how enthusiastic our customers were about it when it launched.
Something I've helped the team with...
We'd sometimes ship bugs that didn't take into consideration all our product types. I modified our data generation script to create multiple organizations of different product types in our testing environments. Now both engineers and QA can be more comprehensive in their testing without manual setup.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
That "this meeting could have been an email" isn't just a joke. People actually send emails here instead of defaulting to Zoom calls. It's refreshing.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm excited to improve our content management system and make it easier for our team to share both inspiration and insights into industry-leading recruitment practices.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
The onboarding experience has been excellent. Everything is meticulously documented, and there is a clear expectation of what I should be doing and what my level of understanding should be. My onboarding buddy checks-in regularly to ensure I'm not blocked, and I feel connected and supported with what I'm working on.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The scale of the product and process despite the size of the team and how long Ashby has been around. Each part of the product has an incredible amount of depth, giving users the tools to control whatever they need.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've integrated an in-app Onboarding page so users can learn about Ashby without leaving the product. Customer Success updates the onboarding guides, which show automatically in the product without the need for any manual work.
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we run our web applications in different environments. When having several browser tabs open, it's easy to forget which environment you are on without checking the URL. That can sometimes be dangerous! I changed the favicon color per environment in all our web apps so everyone is aware by looking at the browser tab. It also makes it easier to jump between tabs.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How Ashby uses the company's culture as a competitive advantage. Ashby is rooted in thoughtful communication, ownership, and effectiveness. Starting from the top, transmitting it to every new hire, and ensuring it keeps being that way. It works.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've built an integration for doing background checks with the click of a button (using Checkr). The integration allows the user to stay in Ashby and keep focus on the hiring process. Our own hiring managers use it for every hire and love it!
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we're obsessed about writing technical specs and documentation when starting a new project. I helped introduce a new process to improve collaboration in the spec-writing phase and ensure a broader perspective from the beginning. The feedback from the engineering team has only been positive.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I was most surprised about how well the team is collaborating. Ashby has an extremely talented team and someone is always ready to help out. There's a high amount of trust and lot of focus on knowledge sharing, documentation and distribution of decisions.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built advanced filter functionality on Offer Custom Fields. This is an improvement on the flexible Custom Field concept, and unlocks a wide array of use-cases for our customers. Moreover, I think this feature is an example of how features can be more: they continue to build on top of existing building blocks. This is something that the Engineering team at Ashby excels at: developing not just particular features, but constructing building blocks and developing on top of those to incrementally improve the entire product over time.
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, it's the norm to develop features in a way that promotes collaboration and allows others to move faster. During some of the features I've been working on, I've had an opportunity to improve internal tooling for developers. One example is a template string constructor to format Markdown messages. This allows us to automatically and uniformly escape user input, and format URLs, DateTime, and other objects without worrying about escaping or using the correct syntax.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Coming in, I knew there was a strong focus on thoughtful communication. What still caught me by surprise, however, is how much is actually communicated. I had the impression beforehand that people might choose to omit communicating something to avoid noise, or otherwise consolidate their messaging so it's a single interruption. I now realize it's more about managing the channels of communiciation rather than the amount of information. Because there's a broadly shared vision and understanding of how communication works at Ashby, it is relatively easy to deal with all the moving pieces and sharing of information.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I designed and implemented the ability to multi-select candidates in our pipeline view and perform bulk actions. Customers use it multiple times daily and it saves them a lot of clicks!
Something I've helped the team with...
I revamped our input field components in our design system with a new more flexible API for layout and interactions. Other engineers have been able to quickly create visually pleasing forms and profile pages with minimal effort!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
I'm surprised at how quickly the market has embraced us as a critical improvement to existing tools. People are really blown away when they see what we can do for them.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built our Sourcing module from idea to implementation. The hiring process starts with sourcing great candidates and it's great to see how much our customers depend on it.
Something I've helped the team with...
At Ashby, we encourage everyone to write up and share learnings they have over the course of their work. I've helped contribute to the large repository of interesting and quirky technical lessons we've learned as a team. Writing and sharing these has really helped me consistently grow my skills while I've been here.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How much we've accomplished with a small team in such a short period of time. We've built powerful pieces of infrastructure that really give us the leverage to build features for our customers quickly and reliably.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I created a feature that enables our users to import data from CSV files and map it to any record or related record in Ashby. Previously, customers had to reach out to support, support reached out to an engineer, and the engineer had to configure and run a script to import the data. Now it's entirely self-serve.
Something I've helped the team with...
Originally meant to be a feature for our users, I added the ability to refresh the cache for reports. It coincidentally made the lives of engineers easier. If they changed any logic during development, they could easily refresh the cache to see the changes.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
It's amazing to see how every single person on the team is dedicated to building the right thing the right way for the long term. I've never experienced a group of people being so aligned in creating and maintaining best practices, documentation, and tooling to make the best possible product.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built Ashby's auto-reject feature; it allows customers to create flexible rules to automatically reject candidates who don't fulfill certain requirements. It saves our customers a lot of time and, as part of this project, I improved the extensibility of the underlying business process engine that powers many of our features (including this one).
Something I've helped the team with...
Building a remote culture isn't easy and, as we've grown, it's been harder to get to know everyone without social events. I started a monthly game "night" (we play during work hours) to help us get to know each other and bond as a team.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Even as a startup, we're building great generic building blocks for the long haul.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I moved our report generation to a worker-based infrastructure with caching. Running Ashby reports is computationally expensive because of how flexible it is and with this change, we've been able to increase the number and size of our customers without impacting our other features and services.
Something I've helped the team with...
I built our database schema migration system. It compares our Typescript models to what exists in our database and automatically generates an up and down migration that adds, removes, or updates tables, columns, foreign keys, and constraints.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How complex some of the problems are in recruiting. Giving talent teams the tools to get insights and be productive gives us really interesting problems to solve with software.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built a tool that lets candidates directly book their desired interview time with the companies they're talking to, saving hours of back-and-forth communication/coordination time per week! It's like Calendly but with more complexity: you can book with multiple interviewers and each interviewer can be picked from a pool. It wows every customer the first time they use it!
Something I've helped the team with...
In my first week at Ashby, I created a number of zsh aliases for common commands that I was running frequently. When the next engineer started, I shared the aliases with that person (my onboarding mentee) and didn't think much of that afterward. Over a year later, I discovered that successive newer teammates have been sharing and improving that original set of aliases! We now have our own repository to centrally update and share them.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The common mantra for startups is to build the MVP and iterate as quickly possible. At Ashby, we've instead been betting on a "festina lente" approach; we "hurry slowly." It's been amazing to me just how much taking time to build our product *well* has positively impacted both customer and developer happiness.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
Seems like just yesterday LeetCode exercises were the celebrated norm of technology interviews. I'm looking forward to helping Ashby build products that will enable growing teams to truly find and retain the best candidates for their organization. These products will organizations craft a hiring process that is holistic, fair, consistent, and delightful.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
It's been pretty smooth. The process and documentation are very intentional.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Most refreshing is Ashby's shipping culture. Ashby doesn't just celebrate code releases to production (which fosters a mentality that overly optimizes on one output). Ashby also celebrates the "little" things like new documentation, research done, test fixes, specs read and written, and even LinkedIn ad campaigns. The wins are big and small and the things that normally aren't as recognized get a platform to shine.
Something I'm excited to work on at Ashby...
I'm looking forward to expanding and improving our current integrations! I want Ashby to seamlessly integrate into whatever stack our costumers use.
My onboarding experience at Ashby...
Surprisingly seamless! The onboarding process is very well thought out, aiming to build momentum to help you gain more confidence as you complete bigger and bigger tasks. Not only do you get a wealthy knowledge base to support you, but you're paired with an onboarding buddy who will help you in case you get stuck along the way.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency! Having worked in early stage startups I'd hear the phrase "move fast, break things" a lot. Through a combination of engineering ownership culture, great architecture, and well thought out processes, Ashby manages to move incredibly fast with minimal regressions.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I set up a new type of integration that allows Ashby users to automatically create and attach CodeSignal live interview sessions to their interview invitations. The integration is designed so that we can easily extend it to support creating more interview resource types in the future!
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve worked on streamlining our API validation to make it easier for engineers to add new endpoints quickly and safely. Iโve also started converting our API docs to the OpenAPI format. This will eventually allow us to generate API validations from our documentation and automate the process of publishing our documentation.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
Iโve been surprised by how extensive the product is โespecially considering the size of the team. Itโs been very impressive to see how many different feature areas there are while onboarding. Everyone encourages each other to build for the long term and I think this plays a big role in why the team has been able to build such a powerful product with a small team.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built an integration with the Paylocity HRIS system that allows our customers to seamlessly send their hired candidate data to their onboarding module and avoid manually entering data that already exists in Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
I made it much easier for our team to see how many additional email lookups our customers have and when they expire. Our support and success teams used to have to manually calculate which email lookups are part of the base plan and which were purchased separately. They then had to figure out when additional email lookups expired and sometimes trick the system into doing the right thing. Now it's properly tracked and easy to adjust!
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
How mature Ashby as a company is. Everything's well documented, there's structure, and the product itself is of high quality which shows that it was built with the long-term in mind. At the same time, it's easy to communicate and make decisions without any bureaucratic hurdles. It's truly amazing to see how much a small team can achieve.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
There were some legacy settings in Ashby the confused nearly everyone โ customers, the support team, and developers. I overhauled the entire thing, making the UI more clear and intuitive and refactoring the logic behind it to be more straightforward and easier to extend if the need arises.
Something I've helped the team with...
I implemented a toast notification system for a fairly barebones internal application. Before, when someone made an update, there was no positive feedback to the user that the change they made actually went through. Now with the notification system, users have much more confidence that the changes they are making are taking effect.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
On the surface, applicant tracking systems don't seem that exciting โ Ashby turns that assumption on it's head! The more I learn about the application, the more excited about Ashby I become. The passion and excitement from the team is contagious and is clearly reflected in the quality of app that has been (and continues to be) built!
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I've been having a lot of deep technical conversations with the team on topics like database query performance, capacity planning, and infrastructure changes. This has led to a project that should increase query performance by 100x!
Something I've helped the team with...
I've improved our alerting system so that engineers have fewer distractions and even more time to focus.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The thoughtful passion that runs through the engineering team. Proposals and specs often get a lot of feedback โ and it's feedback that matters and written in a way that really helps.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I implemented syncing data from other recruiting software into Ashby. It opened up Ashby's powerful reporting features to customers who can't use our all-in-one product yet.
Something I've helped the team with...
I sped up our automated tests on CI by 10x; they now run in under 10 minutes. We're able to make changes and deploy much faster than we could before.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
What's always surprising to me, is how each existing feature in Ashby instantly produces some additional value to a new feature. For example, when I worked on a data integration feature all the data that got integrated was automatically exposed to Ashby's analytics features. If you build something at Ashby, very often you'll be able to take some existing building blocks and use them in a new feature with only a little bit of glue code.
Something I'm proud of at Ashby...
I built the infrastructure that serves all internal reporting at Ashby.
Something I've helped the team with...
Iโve built processes to route data across systems like Hubspot and Intercom so our Sales and Success teams can automate their workflows. And Iโve built dashboards. Lots of dashboards.
Most surprising thing about Ashby...
The attention to detail in the product. There are so many edge cases to consider for every feature in the platform. Not only has the team has covered just about all of them - thereโs always documentation I can reference to understand why each feature is designed as it is.
