Ashby Scheduling 2.0: Next Generation Scheduling for Modern Recruiting

Modern recruiting scheduling requires a level of depth and capabilities that don’t exist with more traditional tools. Today TA teams are being asked to balance high volume scheduling with exceptional candidate experience – while often operating with very lean departmental headcount.

An ATS that can support automation, accuracy, and complex scheduling processes is a requirement for top talent teams. After several years of working closely with customers and executing our vision, we’re excited to announce Ashby has achieved this. We’re calling it Ashby Scheduling 2.0.

These new releases bring a ton of additional value to core scheduling and mark the launch of our Advanced Scheduling Automation Add-on. In this post, we’ll detail:

1. Core scheduling improvements focused on speed, candidate experience, and quality of interview outcomes released in Q1 2024.
2. Our new Advanced Scheduling Automation Add-on with AI-powered auto-scheduling, interviewer training, Scheduling Requests, and more.

First, let’s recap our core scheduling improvements.

Core scheduling updates

Our core scheduling functionality has reliably served our customer base from small startups to publicly traded enterprises with bi-directional calendar syncing, self-serve scheduling links for direct booking and availability requests, communication templates, automation, and more.

Released over the last quarter, here is everything new in scheduling – available to customers across all plans.

Automation for sending scheduling links

Direct booking and candidate availability links can be sent automatically when candidates enter a specific interview stage.

These automations will trigger and send out the connected email template with these scheduling links. This helps keep candidates moving in your process while removing manual tasks from your workflow.

Read more here setting up this automation at Ashby University.

Interview reminders

Create customizable reminders sent to interviewers and candidates over email/Slack before an interview.

Interview Reminders help eliminate regrettable no-shows and prompt attendees to switch into the right frame of mind to support higher quality interviews.

Read more about Interview Reminders here.

Dynamic interviewers

When setting up your schedules, you can set interviewers based on hiring team roles.

This is great if hiring team roles change for any reason during your hiring process. You don’t need to worry about updating and rescheduling with the right person.

Company Holidays

Setting holiday blocks directly in Ashby makes it easier to fine tune company-wide interview availability around holidays.

This ensures you don’t need to rely on employees to mark their calendars or try to manage it on a separate company-wide calendar that lacks interviewing context e.g. travel around holidays.

Debriefs

Ensuring you get debriefs scheduled as soon as possible is crucial for high quality hiring decisions. The option to add a debrief activity to any given schedule will be rolling out over the next week to all customers.

From here, you’ll be prompted to schedule a debrief directly from Ashby with all the previous interviewers and context from prior rounds.

Debriefs also give you the opportunity to try out the new auto-scheduler. The auto-scheduler will automatically generate proposals based on the interviewers' availability for scheduling the debrief.

Driving the debrief process from Ashby helps improve hiring decisions by ensuring you can schedule timely debriefs.

Advanced Scheduling Automation Add-on

For teams with sophisticated scheduling needs, we’re releasing a new add-on that helps handle high volume and more nuanced scheduling workflows.

See an overview below or check out a walkthrough and deep dive here: Advanced Scheduling Automation Add-on. Available to purchase as an add-on for all Plus plan customers.

Auto-scheduling

The new auto-scheduling workflow automatically generates multiple schedules for your team, helping you handle complex interview panels and loops.

This auto-scheduling functionality can happen as soon as the candidate submits availability, or as you're working through your regular scheduling workflow. The auto-scheduler will also consider the recent interview load when generating schedules and you can always jump into a proposed schedule to adjust as needed.

Interviewer training

Manage qualified interviewers and trainees directly within Ashby.

Enable interviewer training for your interviewer pools in Ashby so you can set up shadows, reverse shadows, and track the qualification status of all your interviewers.

This makes it easy to schedule the right mix of qualified interviewers and those training to become qualified interviewers.

Scheduling requests

When you need to hand off and track scheduling requests to a dedicated team, you want to know everything that’s in process, who owns what, and high priority requests that need special attention. 

Now, you can create, track, and process scheduling requests directly in Ashby.

This gives you the benefit of creating scheduling requests in the same system where they’re being scheduled with all the context of the recruiting data you have in Ashby.

Hold scheduling

When scheduling across many busy calendars, you may want to hold a particular time slot while you confirm details.

Schedule a “Hold” on interviewer calendars while choosing to create the event silently or notify at the time of creation.

Automatically swap declined interviewers

Interviewer declines often create extra work for recruiting coordinators after finding that one time that works for everyone on the hiring panel.

Fortunately, when using interview pools in Ashby, we can lean on some of the work you’ve done upfront.

If an interviewer declines, we can automatically swap in an alternate without you needing to go back to Ashby. We’ll notify the organizer when this happens, so you know exactly who declined and which alternative was put into place.

Ashby Scheduling 2.0 and beyond

We are so excited to bring some of the ideas and concepts we’ve had for many years to the scheduling capabilities of Ashby. These updates help teams handle the intricate challenges of scheduling high volume and complex schedules.

All core scheduling updates are available today, and you can get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to learn more about the Advanced Scheduling Automation Add-on. If you’re interested in giving Ashby and all the powerful scheduling updates a try, you can book a demo to learn more.