Benjamin Encz

1/many Today is a very exciting day for the entire @ashbyhq team - so I’m starting it off with an usually long post :) After years of working, mostly in quiet, with our first 500+ customers, we are launching publicly today!

🥳 New: Conditional approval steps now available in Ashby You can now trigger or skip steps in your Approvals based on criteria you define. When managing approval processes you may end up with approvals that are largely the same except for a few additional reviewers - Finance sign-off for out-of-band compensation, VP approval for senior-level openings, legal review for visa sponsorships. Conditional approval steps let you define when each step applies, so you can consolidate near-duplicate chains making approvals easier to maintain and update over time. What's new: ✅ Set approval steps to trigger based on filters ↔️ Filter against static values or other fields (e.g., offer salary vs. the opening's comp range) 👀 Visibility into which conditional steps will be triggered or skipped (e.g. offer approvals) ✍ Create custom display names for each step ("Finance Review", "VP Approval") 🏢 Works across Offer, Job, and Opening approvals This update builds upon our recent release of Offer and General Formula fields: lnkd.in/gXVf2HFe. By combining these two features you can build smart approval chains, using calculated fields, that are also easy to maintain. Conditional approval steps are available today for Plus and Enterprise customers!

📣 Today, we're launching two major features that unlock a lot of new use cases across the entire Ashby product - I've been very excited to get these in the hands of our customers. First, Formula Fields. Formula fields allow you to create entirely custom calculations between fields, directly within Ashby. Customers on the Enterprise plan can use Formula Fields on all objects and reports. Customers on the Plus plan can create Formula Fields on offers (which is the most common use case). The video below shows what we think will be a common example - calculating a compa ratio directly in Ashby. Formula fields can then be used within other Ashby features - for example, approvals. Second, Field Comparison Filters. Up until now, you could only compare field values to specific values (e.g., "if salary > 100k"). With this release, you can now compare field values to other field values, which unlocks use cases like "Offer base salary is within Opening's compensation range". The above are just basic examples; these capabilities unlock a lot more, and we're excited to see what you build. We have another new offer feature launching later this week that will make these capabilities even more useful. Very excited for these launches and looking forward to seeing what you build with it!

It's definitely a problem; but despite that Inbound remains a very strong channel. Below is the market benchmarks we pulled for Startups specifically (inbound still largest channel) - this holds true across other segments as well. We're focused on giving our customers the right tools to filter through inbound efficiently, which actually can turn this 'problem' into an opportunity.

@GergelyOrosz This was an issue even prior to mass AI adoption. Plenty of tools back in 2022 and 2023 shotgunned apps on standard platforms (Ashby, etc.).

The death of inbound applications is upon us: and yes, it’s in a big part because of AI making it dead simple to apply. And so inbound applications become noisy, with increasingly more of non-qualified people. And so companies rely on referrals and recruiters to source instead.

One of my favorite things about the the AI features we've launched in Ashby to date: They've made it possible for me to stay closely involved in hiring, even as we've grown significantly and I'm no longer speaking to all candidates directly (AI Notetaker, AI Feedback Summaries and AI Candidate Assistant have been particularly helpful). New features we're working on and starting to use internally take that to the next level. Very excited to put these out there soon! 👀

✨📱 We're continuing to invest in the mobile experience Ashby. We recently launched a series of changes that make the mobile candidate profile a lot more robust and also allow for full application review on mobile (including AI criteria evaluation, fraud signals, etc.). As always, a lot more to come on this front!

Agree, we started Ashby for exactly this reason. There was a *lot* more admin work back then that we’ve since *largely* automated / enhanced (scheduling, recurring reporting, inbound review, automated comms throughout the process, etc). But still tons left to do and much more effort going into it, now that the (surprisingly comprehensive) system of record is robust.

@benjaminencz @attio I mean it sounds pretty hard so I'd say it's about as hard as it sounds! I'm just watching our poor recruiters shuffle papers half the time rather than you know, recruiting — so even not solving it fully end to end would go a long way

Who’s making an AI-first ATS out there

@Abdullah14673 @thenanyu @attio I hear you - we’re working towards this (and on making setup easier for early stage teams).

@thenanyu @attio I just started setting up Ashby for our org now and can’t believe how many things there is to learn lol. We definitely need an Ashby slack agent

We’re working on a number of things on that list (eg Slack agent and custom agents). I get the aspirational ask of basically solving hiring end-to-end; but I tink that’s a lot harder than it sounds (equivalent to automating Enterprise sales end to end). But lots of bits and pieces we can and are improving and I think it will make a material difference over time. Thanks for sharing!

@benjaminencz @attio x.com/thenanyu/statu…

@af3 @ashbyhq 👋Hah - ultimately it's based on a street name in the Bay Area. I actually covered this in a decent amount of detail in our very first podcast episode, haha: ashbyhq.com/podcast/episod… And yes - no affiliation with you or any other folks named Ashby 😉

@benjaminencz can you satisfy my team’s curiosity about how you named @ashbyhq and explicitly disclaim that I bear no part in it

👋 We have added a good amount of AI capabilities already (imo AI-Assisted App Review, AI Notetaker and AI Candidate Assistant are among the most impactful right now). A few bigger more foundational AI capabilities we’ve been working on launching in next few months. Curious what you’re mostly missing / looking for? Followed so you can DM also.

@attio Don’t make me vibecode this on nights and weekends

@javbuitrago This is something we’re chipping away at. We have a good sense of the areas that can be complex for very early stage teams. But always appreciate a new perspective. Followed you, so you can DM any more details you may want to share. Appreciate the feedback!

A ton of early stage startups I know have the same problem. They need an ATS. They pick Ashby. Then they realize it's built for a stage they haven't reached yet. So what do they do? They open Notion and build half the process there. Ashby + Notion shouldn't be a standard startup recruiting stack. Ashby should build a different version of its product for startups. Something designed from the ground up for a team of 5 to 35. Founders would pay for that tomorrow.

@siddhantis We’re working on the foundation for this. Want to DM me - curious to learn more about the specific use cases you’re looking for.

Ashby feature request: expose an MCP server so customers can talk to an LLM about pipeline strength, candidate feedback, speed to offer, etc. I'm hiring for 20+ roles and this capability could replace multiple meetings at my company. Seems like a great opportunity for building something "your CTO will use" 🙂 Your support team told me that API keys cannot be scoped to specific roles, so I can't let an EM pull data without giving them access to all roles at the company. @benjaminencz is this on your roadmap? Happy to provide feedback if so!

📈 Happy 2026! I just sent out our December 2025 Ashby Investor update, putting the finishing touches on another amazing year (fun fact: this was our 82nd monthly investor update to date). We beat & raised virtually every metric, every quarter, and ended up achieving 120% of our annual plan. But I'm most excited about how we got there, as these inputs will be the driver for growth in the coming years. We continued to ship product at a very strong velocity, further upleveled how we serve customers, and invested a lot more in community (including Ashby One!). And probably most importantly, we remained very disciplined and diligent in hiring. We're going to cross 300 team members soon, and even at this scale, I continue to be impressed with the talent bar across the team. I want to say a big thanks to all of our customers and our amazing team that got us here 💜 There's plenty of hard work ahead - here's to an exciting 2026 🚀

I took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet) On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive. For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise? I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (x.com/aelluswamy/sta…) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet? Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.

A few years back, we published @ashbyhq 's operating principles externally. They are operationally focused and pretty detailed, and represent our alternative to company values. Sharing these has been excellent for recruiting. We've attracted a lot of candidates who were looking for companies that work like we do. For candidates already in process, we were able to share a detailed and accurate preview of what working at Ashby looks and feels like. A few years after we wrote the original operating principles, we started growing significantly and added many leaders to the business (both external and from internal promotions). This is a crucial turning point for any growing business, and we wanted to be very deliberate about the types of leaders we bring on and our expectations of them. This resulted in Ashby's 7 Leadership Principles. This can be considered a handbook of expectations for leaders at Ashby. We do a deep dive on these in our internal leadership training. Folks on our team were telling us that they were using these principles when explaining how leadership at Ashby works to candidates, so we once again decided to publish these for everyone to read: ashbyhq.com/blog/culture/a… Hope this is useful to many of you!

@evanjconrad 👋 Any particular feedback? We know UX can be a lot for earlier stage teams - something we’re chipping away at. If you’re open to a quick chat would love to hear in more detail.

is there something that's like ashby but good

You can now spot some @ashbyhq in the wild if you're in the Boston Area!

@jorilallo @ashbyhq A fix for this has gone live a bit ago. Let us know if you still see the issue!

@jorilallo @ashbyhq Thanks for flagging - we're looking into it!

@ashbyhq there seems to be a bug in the client as I'm getting prompted before closing any tab after submitting a comment

🔈 Today is launch day! The @ashbyhq Notetaker is available starting today. I've had the privilege of using it internally for a couple of months now, and it's been pretty incredible to have recordings and all the data that comes along with it directly in Ashby. When combining it with our AI Candidate Assistant, you can create some real magic 🪄 The first 500 conversations are on us - you can try the Notetaker for free starting today. We've made sure to price this competitively, and we've bundled this add-on with a significant increase in AI credits (which means you can use AI-Assisted App Review and Candidate Fraud features on all inbound candidates, without managing credits). A lot more updates to this product area are coming over the next few months.