Today, we’re releasing AI-Assisted Application Review to all customers in Ashby. It’s designed to help you manage high inbound application volume and one of the biggest improvements to our customer’s productivity we’ve launched to date.

Check out a full walkthrough below:

<div style={{position: "relative", paddingBottom: "56.25%", height: 0}}><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/f39e1f94c21941988c494703e25c6118" frameBorder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowFullScreen style={{position: "absolute", top: 0, left: 0, width: "100%", height: "100%"}}></iframe></div>

We know a big part of adopting new AI technology into your workflow means having the proper assurances around privacy, compliance, and safeguards to protect against candidate biases.

In this post we’ll detail how the new AI-Assisted Application Review feature works, and importantly, how Ashby helps you adopt this technology in a responsible way.

### The rise of inbound application volume

We’ve seen a number of trends contribute to the influx of inbound applications over the last few years:

![inbound application volume](/images/01-applications-per-job-by-job-type-updated-jan-24-v2-2x.png)

* Macro factors leading to more applicants on the market with longer job searches
* Remote work taking hold creating bigger pools of talent for each job
* The proliferation of technology that makes it easier for candidates to apply

Talent teams have the tough job of managing high volume inbound channels while delivering on candidate experience and still carving out time for high touch recruiting activities.

Your team may be asking questions like: How do we prevent application review from being a huge time sink? How can we surface promising applicants and quickly get back to them? How can our team spend more time on high-value hiring activities?

The new AI-Assisted Application Review feature offers a step change in efficiency for reviewing applications while responsibly using the latest advancements in AI.

> We receive a high volume of inbound applications, and our team was spending significant time managing the initial review process. The AI-Assisted Application Review feature from Ashby has been valuable in helping us efficiently sort through this influx. It allows us to quickly flag candidates who meet our key skill requirements while still maintaining a human-centered approach to final evaluations. - Hootan Altafi, Head of Talent Operations, Dandy

Read on to see how it works.

### How AI-Assisted Application Review works in Ashby

In your Job settings you now have the option to define criteria that’s used by the integrated AI model to analyze applicant resumes.

![setting criteria for AI assisted application review](/images/02-defining-criteria.png)

This allows you to document criteria directly in the ATS and introduces a new level of objectivity and consistency for your reviewers.

Applicants are evaluated against each of the criteria you've defined. Under the hood, when you run these application reviews, the AI is parsing through each resume, trying to find evidence as to whether the candidate "Meets" or "Does not Meet" the criteria you’ve defined. Once complete, the AI returns the best determination, along with rationale for how the determination was made.

![candidate list with criteria](/images/03-candidate-list.png)

You can then filter and segment your application review based on any specific combination of criteria you define. This offers a marked efficiency improvement to your application review process.

![filtering candidates](/images/04-filtering-by-criteria.png)

By structuring and segmenting applicants based on criteria they match, you immediately start to recognize time-savings. You can:

* Review applicants that meet all your must-have criteria first and get back to them quicker
* Verify and reject candidates that meet few or none of your criteria
* Construct a dynamic set of filters in a few clicks to suit your own approach 

When you’re reviewing applications you’ll always see the AI output along with citations for how the determination was made.

![ai citations in output](/images/05-citations-in-evaluation.png)

Then, it is up to the reviewer to advance or reject. 

Using this segmented approach means you’re no longer guessing what type of resume is coming next during your review. Not knowing what type of resume you’re evaluating with each new application is often what leads to the "time sink" during manual review.

By grouping similar applications (based on criteria you set) you stay in context during the review of each batch. 

This is what enables you to review efficiently across a large volume of applicants.  VP of Talent at Ashby, Jim Miller, details how this approach [helped him review 1500 applications in 6 hours](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/recruiting/ai-assisted-application-review-in-practice).

### How Ashby helps you responsibly adopt AI technology

It’s not enough to just build an AI-powered feature that helps with productivity. We spent a significant amount of our product development addressing the various implications of using AI in this part of your hiring process. Here are the ways we’re helping you responsibly integrate AI technology into your workflows.

#### Proactive Monitoring and Compliance with AI Legislation

The AI legislative landscape is rapidly evolving. Recently, we’ve seen NY Local Law 144 take effect with Colorado SB 24-205, Illinois HB3773 and the EU AI Act slated for enforcement in 2026.

We’re tracking these requirements and have already taken measures to ensure your team is set up for compliance with these regulations. This includes:

* A bias audit conducted by an independent third-party. We’ve contracted Fairnow to support both audit and AI model inventory requirements.
* DPAs and other contractual measures in place with sub-processors to ensure customer data is not used by them to train models.
* Flexible support for configuring applicant disclosures, including the ability for applicants to opt-out of AI processing.

As these regulations continue to evolve so too will AI in Ashby to stay at the forefront of compliance.

#### Taking Multiple Steps to Avoid Bias

We’ve built into the product several features to help protect against bias, both implicit and explicit. This includes in-app warnings around specificity and best practices for prompting,

![guideline for criteria](/images/06-guideline-warnings-vague.jpeg)

as well as more direct warnings around potential Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) violations.

![EEO warning](/images/07-guideline-errors-eeo.jpeg)

Additionally, before resumes are sent to AI models for processing, we redact PII to avoid the possibility of bias being introduced from model training data.

We’ve also made our third-party bias audit results publicly available here: [Bias Audit for Ashby’s Criteria Evaluation Model](https://www.ashbyhq.com/downloadables/ashby-bias-audit-08-2024.pdf).

Removing the potential for bias to support an even playing field is a priority and we’ll continue to invest here while employing proactive product thinking. 

**Clarity and Transparency Around AI Model Outputs**

Like other AI features in Ashby, you can view the citations of source material next to the analysis. These citations make understanding the AI evaluations transparent. No black box.

![more detailed citations](/images/08-double-click-transparency.jpeg)

In cases where you see an AI output that you don’t agree with, you can flag, report, and override the analysis. This gives you fine-grained control over outputs and ensures you’re not compromising important parts of your review process. 

![flag-ai-evals](/images/09-flag-evals.png)

You’ll also notice some criteria may be marked as skipped or unknown.

![undecided examples](/images/10-undecided-example.jpeg)

If the AI can't make a determination, the criteria evaluation will be marked as unknown. If the resume is unreadable, the criteria will be marked as skipped in the output.

#### Empowering Talent Teams

Our approach takes an optimistic view on AI’s ability to enhance the productivity of talent teams, while increasing fairness and transparency for candidates. 

While AI surfaces key information to support decision-making, it’s ultimately the qualified humans on your team making an advance/reject decision. Fundamentally, the technology is **assistive** in nature and designed to expand your team’s capacity - not replace it.

### Getting Started

This feature is available on all plans, with a baseline number of credits included in each plan. Incremental usage credits are available to purchase based on your company's application volume.

To get started with AI-Assisted Application Review head over to the “Opt-in Features” section in your organization’s admin settings to enable the feature. See the full setup guide over at [Ashby University](https://ashbyhq.notion.site/617bc3a1c4e143e091c599342ced1b2c).  If you’re interested in trying out Ashby and the new AI-Assisted Application Review you can also [Book a demo](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo) to learn more.

Define criteria for your jobs and use AI to analyze matches across inbound applications.

Manage inbound application volume with AI-Assisted Application Review

Today, we’re releasing the ability to send Newsletters to your candidates directly from Ashby. This gives you an easy way to manage audiences and create Newsletters to nurture and engage your talent in Ashby. This feature is available to customers on the Enterprise plan.

<div style={{position: "relative", paddingBottom: "56.25%", height: 0}}><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/c7238758058e495d9b67669b89b915fb" frameBorder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowFullScreen style={{position: "absolute", top: 0, left: 0, width: "100%", height: "100%"}}></iframe></div>

Using Ashby to send your newsletters means you can easily manage your candidate audiences and track the effectiveness of your programs with powerful reporting.

> “With Ashby we have a newsletter sending capability that's easy to use, looks good, and integrates seamlessly with all of our other recruiting activities. Because it's sent through Ashby, it's also really easy to create audiences and track ROI.” -[Brady Stevenson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonbrady/), Director of Talent Acquisition, Virta

Newsletters in Ashby enable you to nurture your relationships with talent over time without introducing additional complexity attached to most newsletter tools. 

![newsletters overview in Ashby](/images/01-newsletters.png)

Read on to see how you can easily build your audiences and deploy a newsletter-sending strategy that impacts your talent pipeline. 

### Managing audiences

Managing newsletter nurturing strategies across disparate tools ends up creating extra admin overhead. Tracking unsubscribes, syncing contact lists, protecting candidate data, and properly tracking ROI – there’s a lot to think about.

Even if there is some functionality built into your existing stack, you often run into limitations that impact your nurture strategy.

> “We initially tried stitching together our previous ATS and sourcing tool, but this ended up creating more work because of the various syncing issues. Way too time-consuming and complicated.” - [Darcell Edwards](https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcell-edwards/), Talent Acquisition, Zapier

In Ashby, you can easily create dynamic and up-to-date newsletter audiences for all the candidates already in your CRM using our advanced filtering system.

![filters create your audience](/images/02-creating-audiences.png)

You can also use a combination of [sourcing forms](https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/product/sourcing-forms-feature) and [projects](https://ashbyhq.notion.site/3ed5d0be297f440db15fedd5da6a8a67) to create your talent pool of interested leads.

![sourcing forms signup](/images/03-sourcing-forms.png "Sourcing forms can populate your newsletter audience ")

Your newsletter audiences will always be up to date while giving you the ability to capture and filter on dimensions you like directly in Ashby.

### Creating and sending Newsletters

Having an easy-to-use newsletter tool to design emails often leads teams to evaluate dedicated newsletter solutions.

> “We considered third-party newsletter tools, but they were overly expensive and we didn’t have confidence in how they treat candidate data.” - [Darcell Edwards](https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcell-edwards/), Talent Acquisition, Zapier

That’s why we made sure to provide a simple editing experience that doesn’t require your team to be experts in email design. You also have the added benefit of responsibly treating candidate data with the same protection as you already do across all your other policies in Ashby.

![WYSIWYG editor](/images/04-creating-newsletters.png)

Access rich email components that you can drag-and-drop into your design. You don’t need to be an expert to create beautifully looking newsletters, and you have all the controls you need to stay "on brand."

![Verifying audience](/images/05-verifying-audience.png)

Once your newsletter has the design, content, and audience set, you can review and send it out to your audience.

### Tracking performance and ROI

Now that we’ve got our audiences and newsletters running through Ashby, tracking performance and ROI becomes drastically simpler.

> “When you engage with passive candidates, it can be hard to quantify if it’s worth the time. With Ashby, we can not only send newsletters, but we can also easily track the ROI—all in one tool,” - [Darcell Edwards](https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcell-edwards/), Talent Acquisition, Zapier.

See newsletter engagement statistics directly on the newsletter audience view. You'll also see the status of the send as a column in the audience table.

![engagement statistics](/images/06-statistics.png)

With this tracking in place, we can also start to surface insights further down the funnel by using the more advanced reporting capabilities in Ashby.

![funnel report](/images/07-advanced-reporting.png "Candidates that opened newsletters and their job consideration stage")

This gives you the ability to easily measure and track ROI to make strategic decisions about your newsletter programs.

### Getting started

Sending Newsletters through Ashby is available today for all Enterprise customers. You can get started by hovering over the “Sourcing” link in your top nav and clicking “Newsletters” from the dropdown.

![getting started](/images/08-getting-started.png)

To see a full setup guide, head over to the [Ashby Knowledge Base](https://ashbyhq.notion.site/bb815e6380fc4e0c88e6c2a63c57d8d6) for all the details. If you’re interested in trying out Ashby and the new Newsletters feature, you can also [book a demo](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo) to learn more.

Manage audiences, create newsletters, and track the ROI of your newsletter programs.

Create, manage, and send Newsletters directly from Ashby

Today, we’re releasing Hiring Manager Experience Surveys in Ashby. These are surveys sent to hiring managers once a hire has been made to solicit feedback on collaboration with the talent team and overall recruitment process. Available on Plus and Enterprise plans. 

<div style={{position: "relative", paddingBottom: "56.25%", height: 0}}><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/8f662c09b83f42498747fee18388cb32" frameBorder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowFullScreen style={{position: "absolute", top: 0, left: 0, width: "100%", height: "100%"}}></iframe></div>

Historically, teams might use Google Forms, live meetings, or other third-party tools. Managing this feedback loop in a separate place from where your recruiting activity happens ends up feeling like a burden rather than a well intended way to improve your process and collaboration. 

To run a meaningful feedback and improvement process, you need:

* the right automation and triggers for sending surveys to hiring managers
* accessible candidate, recruiter, and hiring manager data
* the ability to measure and report on hiring manager feedback

> "We are LOVING the new Hiring Manager Experience surveys. It's much cleaner than the old way we used to collect feedback. We send it to all hiring managers when a hire is made. It’s set up on Slack to send us a notification when a response comes through, and we have it saved on our dashboard so we can stay on top of the feedback." -Liz Wagner, Talent Operations & Programs, Vanta

Hiring Manager Experience Surveys in Ashby provide you with the tools to help you achieve better hiring outcomes and collaboration with these important stakeholders. Let’s take a look.

## Setting up Hiring Manager Experience Surveys

Get started by setting up your survey and rules for sending. Surveys are customizable and come with five default questions pinpointing key areas for a successful partnership.

![hiring manager experience survey questions](/images/1-hme-survey-questions.png)

These five prompts use a linear rating for collecting feedback. They include:

* My assigned recruiting team member(s) communicated in a clear and timely fashion throughout my recruiting experience.
* The assigned recruiter carried out a thorough intake process and provided guidance on the recruiting process and strategy for my role.
* The assigned recruiting team member(s) understood the role well, helped identify qualified candidates, and provided guidance throughout the recruiting process.
* The interview scheduling process was well-organized and made progress at a satisfactory pace.
* Based on your experience with members of the recruiting team, how would you rate your overall satisfaction?

These assessments make default reporting easy and help you identify trends over time. You can add additional questions or remove these defaults if needed. We recommend keeping the defaults to track trends in your reporting over time.

Similar to other surveys in Ashby, you can automate and filter when deciding how you want to deliver surveys to hiring managers.

![hiring manager experience surveys filtering and automation](/images/2-hme-filtering.jpeg)

You have access to fine-grained controls on how many reminders you send to complete feedback.

![hiring manager experience surveys limit notifications](/images/3-hme-expiry-notifications.jpeg)

We’ve also implemented smart controls for how often you ask hiring managers for feedback.

![hiring manager experience surveys batch notifications](/images/4-hme-cooldown.jpeg)

This helps ensure you’re not flooding hiring managers with feedback requests when they’re making several hires in a short period of time. 

When a survey request is sent (manually or through automation), hiring managers will receive a task and notification to complete feedback.

![hiring manager experience surveys task notification](/images/5-hme-notification.png)

This takes hiring managers to a screen where they can submit feedback. 

![hiring manager experience surveys submit feedback](/images/6-hme-submitting-feedback.png)

We provide out-of-the-box reporting and you can always build your own as needed.

![reporting on hiring manager experience surveys ](/images/7-hme-reporting.png)

We’ve made it easy to set up the right triggers for collecting and measuring this important feedback loop. These surveys are designed to strengthen the partnership between hiring managers and talent teams so you can better find and attract the best talent. 

To get started with Hiring Manager Experience Surveys, head over to the “[Employee Surveys](https://app.ashbyhq.com/admin/organizational-settings/employee-surveys/hiring-manager-experience)” page in the admin area and set up your survey and filters. If you’re interested in trying out Ashby and the new Hiring Manager Experience Surveys, you can also [book a demo](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo) to learn more.

Today, we’re releasing Hiring Manager Experience Surveys in Ashby. These are surveys sent to hiring managers once a hire has been made to solicit feedback on collaboration with the talent team and ...

Hiring Manager Experience Surveys

For interviewers using Google Calendar, we now support importing secondary calendars! When importing secondary calendars, events on those calendars will be respected during scheduling to include scheduling keywords, free/busy events, and private/public events. This is helpful when another calendar may need to be considered for an interviewer's availability (for example, an on-call pager duty calendar). 

To set import secondary calendars, head over to the [Google Workspace Settings](https://app.ashbyhq.com/settings/gsuite) page. Then, in the Secondary Calendars section, click on `+ Import` button and select the calendar you'd like to import. Once submitted, you can repeat the steps to import other calendars. 

![Zight Recording 2024-08-12 at 11.56.10 AM.gif](https://a-us.storyblok.com/f/1017310/1120X549/f2d802fa0a/030-7420e00b0d512c405aeda3d6c7cf7976436c4134.gif)

After importing, events on those secondary Google Calendars will now be considered during scheduling. Here's an example of a busy event created on a secondary calendar I've imported to Ashby.

![Screenshot 2024-08-12 at 11.59.25 AM.png](https://a-us.storyblok.com/f/1017310/1120X669/1425f87640/031-c95b513b5341465d9c17bca8253f5015de66bb4b.png)

Here's how that busy event from the secondary calendar shows in Ashby when scheduling the interviewer. Note that in this example, it's a soft conflict for the interviewer because it includes a scheduling keyword. 

![Screenshot 2024-08-12 at 12.03.25 PM.png](https://a-us.storyblok.com/f/1017310/1120X481/a7fd0a6f23/032-d21c186a8221a4f54336eff197e9c40660c03afa.png)

For interviewers using Google Calendar, we now support importing secondary calendars! When importing secondary calendars, events on those calendars will be respected during scheduling to include sc...

Secondary Google Calendars supported for scheduling

Debriefs are a key pillar for evaluating and deciding on the candidates you want to hire. They can also feel like a chore without the right workflow in place. In our [recent release of Debriefs](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7189283691276247040), we created a seamless experience for scheduling your debriefs, and now we’re taking it one step further—introducing Ashby’s latest AI-powered feature: Debrief summaries.

<div style={{position: "relative", paddingBottom: "56.25%", height: 0}}><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/218fc76c94ab4892a9a18ead346b4e09" frameBorder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowFullScreen style={{position: "absolute", top: 0, left: 0, width: "100%", height: "100%"}}></iframe></div>

Debrief summaries are automatically generated by aggregating feedback from prior interviews and provide a top-level summary to help drive the discussion for this important part of your interview process.

![Debrief summary](/images/ai-summary.png)

AI in Ashby means you have tools that understand and augment your recruiting process. Just like our other AI-powered features, you can regenerate the output and easily see the source of the generated text.

![](/images/regen-and-source.png)

By offering a seamless scheduling and recap experience for interviewers, you can lean on Ashby to help structure your debrief process to make confident hiring decisions.

To get started, make sure you’ve enabled access to the “AI Generated Interview Feedback Summary” under organizational settings.

![](/images/enable-access.png)

Now, when you visit the briefing page for your debriefs, you’ll see the automatically generated summary based on prior interview feedback.

![](/images/click-to-debrief.gif)

Debrief summaries are available today for all Ashby customers. If you’re interested in trying out Ashby and our latest AI-powered feature, you can [book a demo](https://www.ashbyhq.com/request-demo) today.

Automatically generate summaries for your debriefs based on submitted feedback.

AI-Powered Feedback Summaries for Debriefs

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Manage inbound application volume with AI-Assisted Application Review

Create, manage, and send Newsletters directly from Ashby

Hiring Manager Experience Surveys

Secondary Google Calendars supported for scheduling

AI-Powered Feedback Summaries for Debriefs

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