Why January Chose Ashby to Scale Hiring from Series B and Beyond

January had built a solid foundation for growth after raising a $12M series B in late 2023. When the time came to grow headcount, the company hired Taylor Roa as Head of People & Talent. Taylor’s top priority? Replacing the legacy ATS and niche tools with a scalable, integrated system to support their hiring goals and future growth.

Problem: Costly Tech Stack Lacking Scalability

January’s talent acquisition team encountered several roadblocks when preparing to fulfill its new hiring targets:

• Inefficient Recruitment Processes: Reactive hiring workflows led to delays and inefficiencies. Previously, hiring managers drove a thoughtful interview process but struggled with consistency in speed to hire.
• Limited Data Insights: A lack of visibility into key metrics made it difficult to track progress and inform strategic decisions. For example, their previous ATS couldn’t track the average time candidates spent in each hiring stage.
• Scaling Concerns: A range of 3rd party integrations made January's legacy ATS clunky, adding new manual tasks to common workflows. These additional steps got in the way of  building scalable processes.

On top of it all, managing three different systems (an ATS + two point solutions) was expensive and hard for a startup to justify.

“Our [Legacy ATS] required me to write a document for how to use different parts of the tool. Anytime you have to do that, you lose people and that’s just not scalable. With Ashby, I don’t have to explain how to use it. In [Legacy ATS], you have to dig to find the features. With Ashby, we got early praise from the business on the UI. Our CEO said ‘Ashby’s search function is 1 trillion times better.’”

– Taylor Roa, Head of People and Talent

Solution: A Feature-Packed Platform for Growth

January evaluated multiple ATS solutions but chose Ashby for its flexibility, intuitive design, and focus on actionable data. This came to life in a few ways — as early as the first week on the platform.

• Improved UI: The team immediately noticed smarter search functionality where various queries were able to pull information from far deeper into candidate profiles than their legacy system. 
• Usable Mobile App: Unlike past experiences where mobile simply provided a view of the ATS, the team was excited to be able to take action in Ashby’s mobile experience. A quick action could be taken while on the train. 
• AI-Powered Filtering: Given Taylor’s hiring strategy prioritizes outbound candidates, using Ashby’s AI-Assisted Application Reviews allows his team to much more efficiently sift through inbound volume and use the saved time in outbound outreach. He specifically cited using the feature to surface the 15 best profile matches and save time reviewing 500+ applications. 
• Data-driven Visibility: January’s team moved from reactive to proactive hiring strategies, and closed four open roles within the first 30 days of implementation.
• Faster Scheduling: January's team leveraged Ashby’s Knowledge Base to master Ashby Scheduling in less than a week. The team immediately saved several hours of time with scheduling automations.

In a recent Talent Trends Report on Recruiting Coordination, we analyzed 5.1M interview events to better understand how much time teams using Ashby Scheduling features are saving. The analysis matched January’s experience, highlighting how Ashby can help schedule candidates 40% faster than legacy tools. 

Impact: An Easy-to-Use System Ready for Scale

January implemented Ashby in a matter of days, onboarding quickly with Ashby’s High Touch Customer Success team.  Taylor’s previous experience implementing Ashby assured him that January was choosing a partner that brought long term affordability and dedicated support. He quickly saw the transformative impact of Ashby’s more recent innovations, especially to everyday productivity.

“For the recruiter who makes the pitch to buy Ashby and migrate to it, I expect 99 times out of 100, it’s going to be a big hit and that will probably score them some points. And that’s not even using the tool — just identifying it exists and bringing it into your company.”

– Taylor Roa, Head of People and Talent

As the team continues to grow, Taylor is excited that Ashby comes built-in with functionality that he’ll need in future stages, including functionality like Quality of Hire and Recruiting Planner. As additional stakeholders get added, he’s confident Ashby will scale with the team. 

“It’s not that they built it for recruiters or they built it for founders or they built it for hiring managers. I think every user of the tool has different needs, and every one of those users is satisfied with what they get in the tool. I’ve never seen an ATS that accomplishes that.” 

– Taylor Roa, Head of People and Talent

Ready to scale your startup with Ashby? Request a demo today.