Announcing Ashby's Series D with Benji Encz, CEO @ Ashby

Ashby’s $50M Series D marks a shift in how the company is thinking about product, customers, and the future of recruiting.

In this episode, CEO Benji Encz returns to share what led to Ashby’s latest milestone. He and Shannon talk about the strategic timing of the fundraise, the growing role of AI in recruiting, and how to balance tech with a human touch. They also unpack why quality of hire matters more than ever and how teams are linking recruiting data to long-term success. Benji reflects on lessons from building with patience—and why that mindset leads to stronger, more resilient teams.

Key Takeaways:

1. AI should solve real problems: The best tools improve workflows already in place.
2. Quality of hire is rising: Executives want to understand impact beyond time to fill.
3. Adaptability is strategy: Recruiting teams need to flex hiring models based on business needs.
4. Culture is compounding: Strong internal practices create better experiences for both customers and candidates.

Timestamps: 
(00:00) Introduction

(01:24) Ashby Raises $50M Series D to Power Next Chapter

(04:09) How AI Is Moving From Nice to Have to Business Imperative

(05:44) Using AI to Surface Talent You’d Normally Miss

(06:29) The Rise of Quality of Hire as a Board Level Priority

(08:33) Real Customer Wins With Quality of Hire Metrics

(10:05) Helping TA Teams Adapt Faster to Market Volatility

(12:37) How Ashby’s Hiring Excellence Framework Guides TA Focus

(13:18) Making Candidate Experience a Differentiator With AI

(15:56) Scaling Customer Success Without Losing the Human Touch

(18:18) Why Community Building Is a Strategic Bet at Ashby

(20:22) Long-Term Culture Design and Operating Principles in Action

(22:40) How Thoughtful Communication Shapes Ashby’s Internal Ops

(26:04) How AI Has Reshaped Hiring Excellence in the Last Two Years

(27:21) The Product Bet Benji Would Make Again Even If It Failed

Transcript

Benji Encz (00:00):

We have a operating principle that talks about focusing on long-term but moving with urgency. And these two things are actually work hand in hand, but they just basically mean we don't take shortcuts on things. So long-term focus doesn't mean that we're lazy, but really focused on what is the long-term implication of the decisions we're making or the work we're putting in today versus just focusing on next week. And so again, if you think about also our fundraising history, that's been another area where we've tried to be thoughtful about who we bring on, how much money to raise at each round and really set up the business for long-term success.

Shannon Ogborn (00:29):

Welcome to Offer Accepted the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am here today with our CEO Benji Entz. Yes, that is my big boss. He is back on the podcast with some exciting news. The first time I had Benji on offer accepted was over two years ago, back when we were just first getting this thing off the ground. A lot has changed since then, but I will pass it over to him with an update on our most recent news.

Benji Encz (01:24):

Awesome. I'm super excited to be back and it's a great occasion. Today we're announcing a $50 million series D investment into Ash bs. A exciting milestone for us and also for all of our customers. And what's really exciting to me is the momentum we had. We raised the last round just a little bit over a year ago. We've doubled customers to 2,600. We've grown revenue 135%, and we've been able to do that really efficiently with a burn multiple being below one in the last two quarters. And so yeah, I am really excited about all the work the team has put in to bring us here and excited to be back to talk about a little bit more today.

Shannon Ogborn (02:00):

Amazing. I would just love to hear out of curiosity, how did this round come together?

Benji Encz (02:05):

Yeah, so it's led by Mark McLaughlin at Alkon. He was actually an early investor in one of the prior rounds, and that's kind of how pretty much all of our round today have come together. We've had investors participate in a smaller capacity and get really excited about a business and double down. And it's really great for us as well because we bring on investors similar to hiring, really thoughtful about who we want to work with, and so getting a chance to get to know people over a period of time. Amazing. But yeah, he's been really impressive trajectory. He's generally a later stage investor, he and his fund, and so they've really waited for us to get two Ds revenue milestones where a later stage investor can invest. And yeah, they've been excited about all, especially the customer feedback. Maybe some people listening here have gotten calls from expert groups or investors directly tends to happen, but the feedback coming back has been really strong, so it got a lot of interest. And then lucky who led our P prior round and also was our seed master also participated with a large check and a bunch of other existing investors participated as well. But yeah, that's a quick summary.

Shannon Ogborn (03:02):

Amazing. Well, I think there's probably people wondering, especially in the economy and the state it is today, why raise now?

Benji Encz (03:11):

Yeah, that's a great question. Something I as CEO have just spend a good enough time thinking about that. The nice position we're in is that we had the vast majority from our CRC still left in a bank, so we had a lot of flexibility on timing, but really found there's a very exciting opportunity now to build, we'll talk about it a bit more about podcasts in a number of different areas in the business that we want to invest in. And so we really focused on can we get someone we like at the table on strong terms? And if so, then now is a great time to double down on investing in a business on top of its really efficient growth already.

Shannon Ogborn (03:42):

And I know that there's some shifts happening in talent and that kind of drives the urgency a little bit, especially investing in certain areas. One of the things that we've talked about is this shift to AI native workflows and that's really moving from a novelty to a necessity. Can you talk about the problem that TA is facing today in that and sort of how our funding is going to help move that forward?

Benji Encz (04:09):

Yeah, I think there are multiple components to that. I think at the high level, everyone is trying to do something with ai. There's kind of an ask from the broader business and we see that sometimes, but on a more pragmatic side, I think the technology and tools we can build are getting strong enough that it can actually materially change the way we do work. And so there's real pressure for teams to reinvent how they work, and there's pressure process as vendors to really invest into making AI useful and accessible to customers. And so we've already started doing that. A lot of our customers will know that, but things like AI assist that resume review, we've now reviewed millions and millions of resumes and I personally couldn't really go back to hiring without that. And I think there are a number of areas like that. Our candid assistant, which we announced at SB one, which makes way easier to get any kind of information from Ashby versus having to sift through all of that manually than our upcoming note taker and a bunch of other investments.

(04:57):

I think there are already all these key areas of the recruiting process that AI can drastically improve, but there's also a lot more to do. Agents are a big buzzword, but we are really focusing on moving from this task-based automation where today we're helping with individual tasks we're doing assisting these to also looking at more comprehensive automation of some of the more tedious parts of a recruiting workflow. And so there's a lot of exciting stuff to build, a lot of engineers to hire on our side. And so that's kind of one of the drivers sort around.

Shannon Ogborn (05:24):

Yeah, there's a lot of conversation about ai, but I think the implementation of thoughtful AI through ASH B, our customers are seeing so much success with it because it's actually at the bottom line fixing a problem that they already have, not kind of creating an existing problem out of nowhere, which I think is super important. But

Benji Encz (05:44):

Maybe to add one thing to that before we move on to the next topic, but I think the exciting thing for us, there's kind of different buckets. There's the one area where we're using AI to do things more efficiently than you're already doing today or making the product more accessible. But there are also ways where you can actually use AI to hire differently in ways that you just couldn't before. And so again, if you look at AI assisted app review as one example, you can look for so many tail end criteria. We can ask like 10, 15 criteria and have an LM tirelessly read every resume, which you just as recruiter couldn't do before. And so internally we were already seeing kind of talents coming up for these searches that we wouldn't have found otherwise. And so really excited about both doing things more efficiently but also finding some novel ways to deploy to make hiring more successful. But yeah, I know we have a tight schedule, so I'm happy to move on.

Shannon Ogborn (06:29):

Definitely. Well, the second bit here is we've heard a lot of conversation about quality of hire and tons of executives and boards are really trying to prioritize this quality of hire over more traditional metrics like time to hire, time to fill. Tell me more about the problem that's presented today and then how we've started working towards that.

Benji Encz (06:54):

Yeah, it's interesting on quality of hire is that when Abby and I did our original research on what to build in the space almost seven years ago at this point, it was already clear that is a north star metric. Ultimately no one is strangers make something faster that isn't working great. Everyone is trying to build excellent teams that no one had really deployed solutions on how to measure it. And so I'm excited that we launched this. I think it's a year and a half ago. I'm losing track of time, but it's been a while in market. It was one of our bigger bets and it's been really exciting to see our pragmatic approach to measuring quality of hire really working. So for a reminder that people may not be familiar with the solution, we've rolled out a survey solution that is very customizable and that's relatively straightforward, but it pings the hiring manager at a custom cadence that could be 30, 60, 90.

(07:38):

That's what we do internally for example, and then brings that data back into the recruiting system. So because we already have really advanced analytics and ASH V and now we have all these data points from recruiting process, but we also starting to capture these post higher data points, we can actually draw that connection and we're seeing some really exciting stuff come out of that. As I talked about, this was a topic six years ago. I think what has changed post 2020 ones environment is that this is now also again a driver that's coming from a broader business. There was a Deloitte survey recently that said that 70% of CFOs are asking for post-hire data, and it's just becoming a business priority now to make every higher account. And so in addition to this actually being the correct north symmetric, I think there's this environment now that makes it easier to actually invest here, the early solution in place. We're rolling out a lot more data in future, especially around our analytics capabilities. So yeah, excited for helping with this trend.

Shannon Ogborn (08:27):

Awesome. Were there any customers that have seen success from this?

Benji Encz (08:33):

Yeah, there are quite a few. We actually, I think at a point where we're posting this, we're about to release a bunch of content from SB one, but flux safety, they have both a case study. We also talked about it at the conference and probably one of the most exciting examples of a really robust quality of hire program. And then from Banta, we've also talked to them, they've used quality of hire dashboards in their forward looking planning as well to draw insights from that past data. But we're definitely starting to see exciting examples. I think it's a program that can take a lot of time to stand up internally. We definitely expected some lag. You need to coordinate across multiple teams and you need to get buy-in from a broader business, but we're starting to see some really exciting examples. And again, I think this macro change is driving more adoption there.

Shannon Ogborn (09:12):

And so what does this look like moving forward with the funding?

Benji Encz (09:17):

Yeah, I think it's just one of these key areas. If I think about the major bets, replacing AI is definitely one. And then looking beyond just the recruiting workflows again to figure out what is the quality of each hire, how do we improve that quality? How do we measure it better? How do we draw some conclusions from the post data and bring that back into recruiting process? These are all things that I've been excited about for many years. I know a lot of TA and people leaders have, and that's kind of one of the product areas we're going to continue investing in.

Shannon Ogborn (09:42):

Love it. Well, the third shift that we're really seeing here is that TA teams are seeing an increasing need to have adaptable frameworks to handle volatility because anyone who's worked in the talent space, especially in the last three or so years, know that things have taken many turns. And so how are we working with teams to help them be prepared for that?

Benji Encz (10:05):

Yeah, that's a great and also pretty broad question. A lot of stuff in there. I think it ranges from how people are planning headcount, which is becoming much more flexible. And if you think about some functionality, we have an ASH P today around our openings model and how people interact with that, tracking that data in real time and being able to report out and respond and make changes. That's kind one of the big drivers we're seeing where people are moving away from these annual head count plans to kind of more quarterly ones or sometimes even faster in that. Then we also think more broadly we are seeing a bigger investment in tools to be able to flex up and down kind of your hiring velocity. I think one of the issues we saw in 2122 was in response to needed to hire a lot. Recruiting teams were grown too fast in many cases and then needed to retract.

(10:46):

And so companies are a bit more careful there still expanding if there's continuous need to grow the team, but also really turning to technology to get more done with a smaller team and create more flexibility. And so we've really invested in making a product such that there can be more self-serve from hiring manager for teams where that makes sense. And then again, investing a lot in these AI applications to assist recruiting teams to be more efficient. The things that we are seeing customers need to up to, obviously it's inbound volume, we've talked about that a lot, but we now have about a 200% increase in inbound volume over the last few years or so. So that really just changes the way it's a threat and an opportunity I'd say to the inbound model. But we have also seen a lot of customers that leverage that correctly being able to hire a lot more from inbound and be more efficient as a result of that. And then I think the other examples we're seeing throughout the process again probably is like hybrid and self-serve model showing up in more and more customers. And we really like to enable our customers to set up Ashby, have an ops team in place that can define the guardrails, but then also let more of their team participate in parts of hiring process before maybe only the recruiting team would touch.

Shannon Ogborn (11:48):

So in terms of how this looks moving forward, any thoughts on how this will resonate in the product?

Benji Encz (11:56):

So I think I touched on quite a bit of the product pieces. A lot of it is about, again, how do you make the product accessible, easy to use for the broader team, so can help the recruiting team how to invest more in automation to reduce any kind of manual work. And then I think the last one on this broader topic of the TA team need be flexible and adjust their frameworks. We have over the last few years has been working on is hiring excellence framework and a lot of content going on with that. And we think that's going to be really helpful to navigate what are the couple pillars we are investing currently as a business because TA teams need to prioritize and we weren't go too deep into this framework, but it gives a little bit of an orientation on the different areas could it be investing in and how much to invest in each of them at each point in time, which we think will be important.

Shannon Ogborn (12:37):

Yes. And for anyone interested in reading more about the hiring excellence framework, we can put the link in the description so you can see that beautiful long form article on our blog. One other important consideration though, I mean not one only, there's so many, but another important consideration is candidate experience. We can't forget about improving that candidate experience. It's come up a lot with our customers on wanting to make sure despite this doing more with less, that they still are providing people with an experience that stands out to them. Can you talk more about how that resonates today and what it looks like moving forward?

Benji Encz (13:18):

Yeah, no, we generally agree that's going to be really critical, especially as the number of candidates. A lot of our customers attaching is increasing a lot with these larger top of funnels. A lot of these people are people you may want to reengage later and revisit. And so we've kind of focused on that a lot from the one end product and we think of all the differentiators you have in your recruiting process. Our product will help bring speed and efficiency to the process. But the kind of kind of experience a lot of that is still touched by your unique company and the way you approach hiring. There's some tactical things we're helping with. We make applications really easy, we make it really easy for people to book interviews and we often get feedback from customers pass through candidates that I just really enjoy the process of interviewing through customers at Ashby, which is a differentiator.

(14:00):

We also, again, this is an area where AI can actually help and improve the process as well. So we recently launched AI generated feedback summaries, so we now allow customers to send personalized rejection emails in just a couple seconds and it pulls all these details from the internal feedback but then packages them in a way that are actually valuable to the candidates. And we have seen both in-house from our team but then also from our customers and really exciting feedback there. And then as always, there's a measurement component. That's something we focus on early on as well is how do we allow you to really flexibly track candidate experience at every point of funnel and then report out on that. And so these are all things that remain really important. And I didn't touch on this as much in the kind of AI section, but I do think what is really exciting about the feature of recruiting with all the new technology that's coming to market is the ability to build these large town pools that you have different touchpoints with over time and then use all that data point to reengage them. And so if you have people that had a great experience with your brand, even though we're not hired, there's a really good chance you're going to want to hire them in the future. And so really working towards creating that amazing experience and making it easy for our customers to find cans again that you need to revisit down the line.

Shannon Ogborn (15:05):

Definitely. And I've heard from several customers about the AI generated feedback summaries for rejection, for personalized rejection that candidates are receiving it really well and they don't really, most of them don't care if it's coming from an AI summary, they just want the feedback because they want to be better. And I know that some people are even using it for candidates who move forward so that they have insight into what was maybe missing that they could think about ways to bring forward in their next interview. So definitely really powerful stuff there. Obviously we're growing and we've doubled our customers, which probably means there are implications on customer success and how we are serving customers. Can you talk a little bit about how we view customer success and what that looks like in this next phase?

Benji Encz (15:56):

Yeah, I've always, from day one when we start SB said that we view customer success as a direct extension of the product. It's kind of part of the experience we have as a customer. Obviously you interact with the tool day to day, but then if you have questions, you want some strategic guidance or you run into issues, you want to interact with someone from the business and that experience ties directly back to your overall experience with the company. And so it's been a key area of investment for us from day one and we're continuing to do that and I think we've been able to that really well as we've scaled, make sure that we grow the team, build things internally to make us and our customers more efficient. We've obviously grown a support team and we've actually reduced response times over the last year while maintaining quality.

(16:34):

But then we also rolled out in addition to that AI life support. So we have this way to get answers even faster if we have more simple questions. We're also really focused on customer education. As the product is growing, there are more and more people out there that want to become Ashby experts and kind of learn all the different ways they can utilize product, especially as it's evolving and changing. And so we've started building out a team around that and there will be a lot of new courses and content dropping out from that. And then we've also really invested in professional services for our app market and strategic customers. Some of these companies have five to 10 systems they're replacing or changing as part of the ASH B rollout, hundreds of internal stakeholders. And so we want to make sure we have the best team in place to support these large implementations and we've really seen results across the business in terms of our retention being absolutely best in class. Our investors have called it up multiple times and yeah, we're really excited to hear a lot of the stuff is also hard to measure the quality and just the care that our CS team puts in front of customers. And so that's something I and the leadership team are keeping a really close eye on because it's one of our differentiators is something I want to keep investing in.

Shannon Ogborn (17:38):

I think the cool thing with our customers multiple have said that we see Ashby as an extension to our team because they're real trusted advisor to our team and how we set this up and how we run our process. So it's an important thing to keep investing in and excited to see that. But another thing that we are investing in, and maybe this is my personal thing just because that's my part of my big part of my job is community. We have put a lot of investment into community where frankly a lot of companies in our space haven't quite invested in the past. So would love to hear your thoughts on how this is coming together.

Benji Encz (18:18):

Yeah, that's also again, one of the foundational pillars. I'd say from back when we started the company, there were a few different trends we were seeing in the market. One was ops becoming a thing in more and more companies and really being a driver behind the changes that make Ash V successful today as a product. Things like being data-driven, relying on tools and automation more than our past and maturing the TA function overall. And then in general, we've just seen a lot of shifts into TA teams and we kind of always thought we want to build a product to support all apps, but we also think we want to help uplevel our customers and the broader community to actually make use of all that product we're shipping. And so we always viewed these things as going hand in hand. It started with some really small things like our rack up Slack channel, which back then had probably 10, 15 people in it now.

(19:00):

I was grown to, I think it's seven, 800 or something last I checked. Then we just had our SB one conference, which is a great way to bring a number of people, 300 or so together in person. I wish it could have been bigger, but it was already quite big for the first time and while oversubscribed, so we're going to figure out how to grow that. And then I know you've played your role in the SB customer expert chapters that are now launching in different cities. And I think all these different formats are just a great way to bring customers and TA teams more broadly together. And I think there's so much change happening. Everyone's looking to learn from others and so excited to be able to contribute to that. And we also have a positive impact in the business. It's a huge driver for growth for us to see referrals from the community because of the experience they have with the product with CS and with our community efforts. But these things are really exciting and continue to be a core pillar and there's a lot more to come over the next few years.

Shannon Ogborn (19:44):

Definitely. Well, obviously I share a lot of excitement in this piece and every time we have an event, people are like, just thank you for letting us be together with our peers. We just haven't gotten that in the past. And just being together with someone who gets you I think is super valuable. But there's an internal piece of this too. So that's everything that's going on outside. So that's the product, that's community investment. And then there's also a factor of culture that has really set us up for success here. Talk to me a little bit about the intention of setting a culture that really scales.

Benji Encz (20:22):

Yeah, I think we had an advantage a little bit when starting a company for two reasons. So Beacon and I kind of were in this to build a generational company and one that I would say, if we're lucky enough, we can have fully retire with this being our last job. So we had this long-term view early on, and then we also picked a space that was like we didn't try to go after any hype wave where there wasn't a real clear why now or any urgency to get first product out. We were just going into a pretty well established space and trying to build some things substantially better. And so these two things have allowed us to really take a long-term view from day one. And so if you go to our website today, you'll find our operating principles, we share 'em with candidates. They're well alive and lived and they're very practical, but they've definitely evolved, but a lot of them were in place almost from day one.

(21:05):

And I think that has really helped as we've grown a company to see that these operating principles are lived and practice day to day. We also have put a ton of focus on our own internal hiring. And for me personally, it means hiring the leadership team. And we still have exactly the same leadership team in place that we had over time. Obviously we've added people, but we haven't had any attrition on this senior leadership team, which is pretty unusual for the scale we've gone through as a business. But I spent nine months hiring Harriet, your manager or your manager's manager at this fund. But the facilit leads marketing put a lot of effort into that initial leadership team, and that has, I'd say generally been true across the business. So operating Princip I empire, but then has also really strong focus on the hires we make and they're fit for the business. And then we've also tried, we've just crossed hundred people, so we've been so successful, but we've tried to keep the team relatively small and high leverage where we can, obviously there's a lot of cases where we want to grow a team and it's a good thing, but we also tried to have really clear ownership, smaller teams with more autonomy where possible. I think all these things have served us pretty well.

Shannon Ogborn (22:02):

Yeah, I constantly get comments about our marketing team specifically, mostly because that's just a space I'm in, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you guys did all of that with that many people on your team. And I think the reality is it actually has allowed us to run a project A to Z instead of people owning tiny bits of things, which is something I've experienced in the past. So I think the autonomy has come to life. And you're talking a little bit about the operating principles and in practice. You said it took you nine months to hire Harriet, our VP of marketing, which one of our values of being frustratingly patient with hiring. How else have the operating principles come to life in practice?

Benji Encz (22:40):

Yeah, I think there are a lot of in there that are really relevant, but are few that are very obvious. Instead, the frustrating patient of hiring every manager experiences that, and we make sure that as we onboard new managers, that they don't rush their first hires. I think that's a tendency that people have from past jobs. Like, Hey, there's landed here. I need to have an impact. I'll try to move some people quickly. And so we are really focused there. And that's kind of one touch point. I think the other one that people notice, just the dayday start at Ashby is the thoughtful communication piece because communication is just part of your day-to-day, right? You walk into our Slack instance and it's just quiet. You're like, oh, wow, I read all this stuff about how Ashby uses Slack, email meetings, all these things. And this one is actually very in your face kind of on the first day.

(23:18):

But the thoughtful communication one I think is really important for us still to this day because it's a foundational piece, right? Communication is part of every we day-to-day work. It's certainly evolved a bit. We have a bunch of teams now that are customer facing. They communicate more real time, so their slack usage is going to be a bit different and the broader company. But when we try to move projects forward, we try to make proposals, we do analysis. We still definitely live by this thoughtful communication mantra, if you will, of putting thought into proposals. You're putting forward, not jumping again on quick thoughts that you're going to share with broad team and distract everyone. And so I think that's allowed us to have this kind of quiet, focused, confident execution. That's just one example or I guess two examples in this case, but,

Shannon Ogborn (23:58):

And the thoughtful communication in that translation into documentation. I've never considered myself to be a great documenter, but after almost four years here, I'm getting there for sure.

Benji Encz (24:11):

And the other, I'll probably want to call out the almost lost over, but it's kind of a little bit inherent, but it's our long-term focus. We have a operating principle that talks about focusing a long term, but moving with urgency. And these two things are actually, they work hand in hand, but they just basically mean we don't take shortcuts on things. So long-term focus doesn't mean that we're lazy, but really focused on what is the long-term implication of the decisions we're making or the work we're putting in today versus just focusing on next week. And so again, if you think about also our fundraising history, that's been another area where we try to be thoughtful about who we bring on, how much money to raise at each round and really set up the business for long-term success versus the taking potentially shortcuts.

Shannon Ogborn (24:48):

It definitely allows us to be more proactive versus reactive, and then when all of the wild things come up in the market or trends, we have space to react to those while also sticking with our core long-term strategy and plan, which I think is great. Well, after all of this, now we have our series D. Do you have any advice to founders in terms of fundraising?

Benji Encz (25:13):

Yeah, I think I repeated that last time almost two years ago. I was on here, but I'm generally not a big fan of advice because it's so contextual. Sorry, we should don't broadcast it. But I think if you're building a business like ours where you're in a reasonably well established space, then I do think what we've done has generally worked pretty well, which is having a long-term focus, being careful high growth, but making it sure you're doing it the right way, driven by really strong customer referrals and strong product market fit. And then I've been cautious on spending and growing the team because these things can come to bite you sometimes if you get over your skis. But again, I shy away from general advice, but I think if you're trying to do something similar to us in a different space, then maybe that playbook works reasonably well.

Shannon Ogborn (25:54):

Amazing. Well, as I said at the top, you were last on the podcast two years ago. Has your perspective on hiring excellence changed in those last two years?

Benji Encz (26:04):

Yeah, it's a good question. I think the foundations are probably going to be true almost indefinitely. They talk about some really large pillars like candidate attraction as one, obviously getting people into the funnel and candidate evaluation and making sure you're measuring job fit. I think these pillars are the same if we think about teams implementing it. I think two years ago we were really focused on data as the big change, getting more companies to adopt using data in their day-to-day operating of their TA team and using that to inform decisions. I think it probably in a similar inflection point with AI today, again, there is a lot of strong adoption, but I do think that's kind of the next wave of change that TA teams need to adopt to and kind of start to weave that into more and more of their core workflows. But in the end, to accomplish the same output, it's the same core pillars that the way you get there is going to be different. And I think AI and broader automation is probably one of the biggest obvious changes last years, and it's gone really from, again, something people have watched and that may have an impact to something that not clearly is mature enough to really change and uplevel how you hire.

Shannon Ogborn (27:07):

Absolutely. Well, last question here. We are going to take a bit of a different angle on the hot take question. I would love to know, what is one product bet you'd make again, even if it had failed?

Benji Encz (27:21):

That's a great question. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to not learn from our failure and just repeat it again. That aside, I think the quality of hire functionality we shipped is probably one bet that we made that I would've been comfortable waiting in worst case, for a couple of years for adopt to speak up. I just think it's something that companies should care about and increasingly will. But it was something that barely any team was doing at the time when we launched it. So it was definitely a bigger bet, a bigger behavior change. Fortunately, it's starting to roll out to more and more customers. I would've happily backed the trend and waited if needed.

Shannon Ogborn (27:52):

Amazing. Well, there's some times where an industry has what they do and then what they want to do better with a tool. And then there's sometimes where a tool pushes the industry forward is encouraging people to look at something that they may not have previously thought about.

Benji Encz (28:09):

And I think in that case, it's also just makes something a lot easier. That was just hard to do before because if you don't have systems, then these operationally complex projects are just hard to run.

Shannon Ogborn (28:19):

Yes, we are coming up on our time. Where should people go to learn more about Ashby?

Benji Encz (28:25):

Yeah, Ashby hcu.com. I'm still trying to get ashby.com. I think I talked about it two years ago. We know the person, but they stopped responding to us because their last name. So ashby hcu.com for now. You can also

Shannon Ogborn (28:34):

Find we might be in worse trouble now that we phrase the series D.

Benji Encz (28:39):

Yes. But a person's not even negotiating, so we'll see. And then my personal LinkedIn and Dash B LinkedIn are probably a great place to go. And yeah, that's, we're going to see all the updates about the business and hopefully the numerous product updates coming in the next couple of months.

Shannon Ogborn (28:53):

Amazing. Well, really excited about this Series D announcement and what it means for both us as a company and how it will impact the talent community moving forward. Thank you so much for joining us.

Benji Encz (29:03):

Yeah, I'm excited to get back to work.

Shannon Ogborn (29:06):

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