How French Startup amo Automates Reporting and Improves Founder<>Recruiter Relationships with Ashby

amo is a Paris-based startup building apps for friends. Focused on helping people deepen their friendships, amo's apps offer an antidote to today's big social platforms that prioritize strangers over friends.

When Kristi Edleson joined to lead Talent Acquisition, she knew the team needed Ashby. 

“I’ve been following Ashby from Series A to now Series C, and the speed of feature releases and how quickly so many nice-to-haves have been launched has been super cool to see. It was a pretty easy decision for me to come in and switch from [Legacy Provider] to Ashby.”

It was a pleasure working with Kristi to implement Ashby at amo. I recently got to reflect on the change with her and see how it has helped them operationalize efficiency. 

Challenge: Efficiently Growing a High Quality Team In-Office

With aggressive hiring goals and a need for qualified candidates committed to building social connections, the team knew a fully in-office culture required a talent stack that matched the speed and innovation with how they operate internally. 

As a user of Ashby prior to amo, Kristi wanted an ATS that could efficiently manage the volume and complexity of their recruitment efforts. The almost immediate switch to Ashby came from a few core needs:

• Better Customization: While amo’s previous ATS touted simplicity, the tool’s inability to tailor the system to their specific needs hindered their recruitment process.
• Real-Time Data: A lot of stress in founder-recruiter relationships stem from a lack of information. Having to manually pull and share out data was taking too much time and was often unreliable in the legacy tool. 
• Unified Candidate Experience: Rather than hearing from multiple people at the company, the team wanted candidates to have a clear stream of communication with one person on the team. This also required specific permissioning for external sourcers and agency partners. 

“For me, of all the tools I have seen and used over the years, Ashby really has the best offering. From being very agile to being incredibly quick to set up… and then doing everything from the little basics to robust reporting. I’ve used so many ATS’s and knew when I got here that I would just need Ashby."

— Kristi Edleson, Talent Acquisition at amo; formerly Meta, Doctolib, Dropbox

Solution: Agile ATS with Robust Reporting Displayed on the Big Screens

Agility in startups is key — and Ashby has been able to help the team manage their needs while remaining agile at their core.

Solving Customization 

On customization alone, Kristi’s team makes use of Ashby’s end-to-end funnel features. This includes:

1. Different stages for different jobs: Rather than forcing the same stages for all jobs, the team was impressed to see all the ways Ashby can customize different jobs without impacting others. Managing both pipeline engineering roles and evergreen roles, customization across different jobs helps cater each role to the right candidate experience. 
2. Direct booking links: Not only does Ashby provide special scheduling links for specific job and interview stages, but the ability to embed them as a substitution token in email sequences leads to “Aha” moments for the team in terms of efficiency in their outreach. 
3. “Send As” email feature: Even if a sourcer is emailing a candidate, they will use the Send As features in Ashby to have the emails come from an in-house recruiter. This not only unifies the experience for candidates to develop a relationship with one person at the company, but it also makes it easy for another sourcer or recruiter to step in if the original sourcer is suddenly out of office and pick up the process without missing a beat. 

“Ashby really allows you to customize any part of the funnel you want. Everything from building your employer brand and building a customizable web page that easily integrates with existing systems to tracking your candidate flow, to making customized messages for sourcing, to the chrome extension… just basically every step of the process is thoughtful. So there's not really one particular thing that I'm missing at any point of the recruiting process."

— Kristi Edleson, Talent Acquisition at amo; formerly Meta, Doctolib, Dropbox

Automating Reporting

While amo’s Legacy ATS had reporting, Kristi shared that “it didn’t really work.” This left her previously pulling manual reports and fixing data discrepancies in order to share out updates. With Ashby, everything has become automated. 

Kristi uses Ashby to automatically send out two reports a week to founders and hiring stakeholders:

• At the beginning of the week, a pipeline dashboard goes out showing real-time updates on week-over-week interviews, number of phone screens, technical screens, and all pipeline metrics that hold the team accountable to keeping the machine running. 
• At the end of the week, an automated report goes out on progress to goal. This includes clear updates on where recruiting wants to be for the quarter, where they are currently at, and passthrough rates. 

“At our bi-weekly sync with founders, we no longer review numbers because everyone just knows them. Rather than digging into a graph and trying to understand what’s happening, we’re picking a subject area to deep-dive on and using valuable time together to discuss it.”

— Kristi Edleson, Talent Acquisition at amo; formerly Meta, Doctolib, Dropbox

The transparency in data has also helped contribute to the important office culture amo is committed to. The stakeholders involved in hiring have a fun competition going around for who is fastest at submitting their scorecards or who has spent the most time on interviewing. This information gets shared internally through a “Top Interviewers Report” Kristi was able to build seamlessly in Ashby. 

“Our data-driven culture led to screens all over the office that show our product metrics. I came back from vacation to find that we now also have a recruiting dashboard displayed live! It includes charts from Ashby on referrals by pipeline and overall hires made recently to keep everyone informed of where they can help and get excited about the team growing.” 

— Kristi Edleson, Talent Acquisition at amo; formerly Meta, Doctolib, Dropbox

Easy Permissions Across Internal & External Stakeholders

Kristi has an in-house recruiting team that is powered with contracted sourcers and an external agency. Ashby supports three different permission groups. This allows:

• Sourcers to use the Ashby Chrome Extension to source candidates easily from LinkedIn and be placed into Ashby as new leads. 
• Agency Partners to upload candidates and see feedback on the candidates provided without access to any other parts of the system.

“The AI-generated sourcing prompts are also super cool. It’s all these little things that you think are nice-to-haves, but actually make your entire machine run more efficiently and smoothly for everyone who touches recruiting. Of course, the human touch is still incredibly important to us and our employer brand. The AI simply provides a helpful head-start on some ideas about what to write in candidate emails, and that has really been a time saver.”

— Kristi Edleson, Talent Acquisition at amo; formerly Meta, Doctolib, Dropbox

In analyzing the use of the AI Tokens specifically across the Ashby customer base, our findings already reveal there’s a considerable (~46%) lift in reply rate for campaigns using AI personalization (35.3% vs 24.1%). More on this can be found in our Candidate Sourcing report.

Ready to elevate your recruiting process with Ashby? Request a demo today.