New data on recruiter productivity and insights from 29 Talent Leaders

Welcome to the 15th edition of Ashby Talent Digest, a community newsletter surfacing recruiting insights, podcasts, events, and more from across the web.

Insights Corner

As Quality of Hire takes center stage, we've seen a sharp increase in interviews per applicant. From Q2 2022 to Q1 2023, the average number of Applications Interviewed per Hire surged, even as teams operated with fewer resources, and has now plateaued. This rise has increased the cost per hire in terms of recruiter time spent. But will this higher investment yield better quality of hire? 2025 may hold the answer.

Dive deeper into this insight and more in our recently refreshed Recruiter Productivity Talent Trends Report.

Ashby One

Join us on May 15 in San Francisco for Ashby One! This one-day event is dedicated to inspiring and connecting TA Leaders, Talent Operators, and RecOps experts from around the globe. Early Access tickets are now available. We anticipate the conference will sell out in just a few weeks!

New on Ashby

You can now automatically create Slack channels tied to a candidate’s interview schedule. These channels will invite the appropriate Ashby users in Slack and post a message template to help you coordinate interview logistics.

This eliminates the hassle of creating, archiving, and managing channels – especially useful at scale across dozens of candidates. You can eliminate one-off side conversations and ensure everyone has the context needed to deliver a great interview experience for candidates.

Check out our re-designed Ashby Product Updates page created to give you a curated feed of everything that’s new with the platform!

Other noteworthy additions:

• Verify answers using AI-assisted analysis during application review
• Group emails for alerts and scheduled dashboards
• Streamline your hiring process with Conditional Activities (Enterprise)
• Preview emails when selecting your email templates

ICYMI Webinars

2025 Hiring: Actionable Trends to Shape Your Strategy

Experts Michaela Ricketts , Kevin Connolly , and Matthew Ellis shared actionable strategies from Ashby’s Recruiter Productivity Report to help hiring teams tackle 2025’s challenges. From leveraging Quality of Hire metrics to improving efficiency, attendees gained practical tips to adapt and thrive in the evolving talent market.

Watch the replay

Ashby 2024 in Review: A look at major releases from the past year and what’s coming next

Ashby’s product team walked through the biggest 2024 platform updates across Scheduling, CRM & Sourcing, ATS, and Analytics, showcasing how AI and automation streamline workflows, nurture candidate engagement and drive talent density. Attendees saw firsthand how these enhancements improve efficiency, elevate hiring outcomes, and create a more seamless recruiting experience.

Watch the replay

Recent Guests on the Offer Accepted Podcast

The Offer Accepted podcast brings together top talent and hiring leaders to explore key strategies in recruiting and talent acquisition. Our most recent guests include:

• Selcan Sengul , Senior Director of Talent & People Operations at Taxfix , shares how to transform candidate communication into a human-centered experience. From personalized rejections to aligning with DEI goals, she explores how transparency, empathy, and thoughtful feedback loops create a memorable hiring journey that reflects company values.
• josé benitez cong , Chief People Officer at Humane , explores how balancing humanity and data transforms recruiting into a strategic advantage. From re-recruitment as a retention strategy to building talent pipelines aligned with long-term company needs, José shares actionable insights on cultural alignment, trust, and lasting impact.

Short on time to listen? Check out the key insights in the episode notes on our blog!?

Up next? Cara Brennan Allamano , Co-founder of PeopleTech Partners + Former CPO, Lattice .?

Recruiting Takes from Around the Web

• Insights from 29 Talent Leaders: Matchr highlights industry trends, challenges, and strategies for success, highlighting 10 key recruitment trends for 2025 with actionable insights.
• Skills-based Hiring Practices for New Entry-level Hires: National Association of Colleges and Employers provides an overview of hiring practices, revealing that nearly two-thirds of employers now prioritize skills-based hiring for entry-level positions, shifting focus from traditional metrics like GPA.
• The Career Prenup: Building Trust Before Day One: Matt Alder and Rhona Barnett-Pierce discuss the rise of "career prenups," highlighting the need to proactively address severance in offer negotiations, building trust and signaling transparency in an uncertain job market.

Partnership Updates

Our Partnerships team continues extending our integration functionality. There are now 160+ integrations in the Integrations Marketplace, and the list is growing weekly! Here are the ones we’ve added since our last update:

• RocketDevs [Other] — The RocketDevs integration with Ashby allows seamless syncing of candidate information, job postings, and pipelines between Ashby and RocketDevs.
• Xobin [Assessments] – Xobin is a leading online talent assessment software, used by 5000+ customers from 55+ countries to assess, interview, and hire top talent 20x faster, saving 10x time, money and effort.
• Lightscreen AI (YC F24) [Assessments] — Lightscreen AI provides cheat-proof automated technical interviews with high quality verifiable evaluations.
• Crosschq [Assessments] – 360 reference check validates skills, competencies, work history and culture match — all without bias — so companies can focus on making the best hires.

Check out Ashby University and Ashby Release Notes for more information about these features, and reach out to [email protected] with any questions and feedback.?

Ashby Customers Hiring for People Ops/Recruiting Roles

Looking for a new role? Here are open jobs hosted on Ashby that are live as of this newsletter release:

• Head of Recruiting Operations at Ashby (Remote - North America, South America)
• Head of People (Remote Europe) at n8n (Berlin Office, Germany, United Kingdom)
• Recruiter, GTM & G&A - EMEA at Vanta (London, UK)
• Talent Acquisition Manager at bunch (Berlin, Germany)
• Head of Talent at TwelveLabs (San Francisco, CA, USA, OR Remote)
• Recruiting Lead at Parkade (San Francisco, CA, USA, OR Remote)
• Recruiter at PermitFlow (Remote - USA, Canada)
• Recruiting Operations Specialist at Notable (San Mateo, CA, USA)
• Lead Technical Recruiter at Patreon (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Recruiting Operations Manager at Harvey (San Francisco, CA, USA OR New York, NY, USA)
• Lead Technical Recruiter at MagicSchool AI (Remote)