Reporting & Analytics in Ashby

Key Takeaways

1. Reporting is not the same as improving. Most teams have access to their data but not a consistent, repeatable process for turning that data into action-driven outcomes.
2. Calculated fields turn raw data into something measurable and actionable — for example, defining a 24-hour feedback SLA as a yes/no calculated field lets you filter, report, and alert on it rather than manually checking timestamps.
3. Alert reports shift reporting from something you review to something that actively supports how your team operates — instead of going to check if feedback is late, you are notified when it's late, and so is the interviewer who needs to submit it.
4. Ashby has pre-built alert templates for common SLAs including feedback submission. All you have to do is customize and activate — the logic and alerting are already set up.
5. Scheduling visibility — interview volume by coordinator, RSVP declines, reschedule rates, lead times by stage group — lets you move from anecdotal complaints like 'scheduling is slow' to specific, actionable data about where and why delays are happening.
6. The most useful reporting isn't just showing what happened — it's helping you understand what to do next. The goal is to make your data do more of the work for you.
7. Ashby Academy offers Analytics 100–102 courses and monthly webinars. Plus and Enterprise customers can book a quarterly 45-minute session with the RecOps team to build custom reports and dashboards.

Transcript

Note: transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies.

Olivia Roberts

Thank you all for being here and standing and sitting on the floor — I really appreciate it. So good to see your faces. I'm one of our RecOps consultants at Ashby. Been here for about two years, was also a customer prior to my time on the team. My role right now allows me to work with customers and our internal team on the customer education team. Before we jump into reporting and analytics, which I'm super excited to talk to you about, I did want to share a few of our customer education resources. The first is our Ashby Academy, where you'll find fantastic courses on how to use Ashby, including Analytics 100 through 102, which I highly recommend. We also do monthly webinars, which are saved and recorded in Ashby Academy. And if you have not already met with me or a member of our team, it is available to our Plus and Enterprise customers to do a 45-minute session with RecOps — a quarterly session where you can deep dive into something that's important to your team. We can talk any strategies you're working on, do custom reporting and dashboard building, whatever makes the most sense to keep you getting to the next level.

Olivia Roberts

So with that, what we're here for: we're going to be talking about why reporting actually matters. And we're going to go through more than just the reports and dashboards — we'll look at how to make your data more useful and actionable using things like calculated fields, go into a live demo, and then look at how to make that data useful in a few practical areas: tracking SLAs, getting a better understanding of funnel velocity, and getting better visibility into scheduling. Ultimately my goal is for you to walk away with a few ideas on how not just to use reporting to look back, but how to put it to work in your process moving forward — helping you improve key metrics and ideally removing some of that manual effort you're having to do day to day.

Olivia Roberts

Recruiting runs on decisions, and reporting is how we're going to support those decisions. We're going to be looking at time to fill, funnel conversions, pipeline health — and that's all really important, but it's telling us what happened already. Day to day we actually need a little bit different: we need to know where something's slipping right now, who needs attention and what needs attention right now, and who owns that piece so that we can start taking action immediately. That's where reporting can become a lot more operational. One of the most common examples I talk through with customers is tracking feedback SLAs. Many teams have some version of an SLA around feedback — hopefully within the first 24 hours. But how that actually gets managed usually looks like checking reports or candidate profiles manually, doing a lot of follow-ups on Slack, or someone keeping track of it in a spreadsheet outside of Ashby. That can work until it doesn't. When things fall through the cracks or you realize there's an issue after it's already slowed your process down, you want to get ahead of that. That's where calculated fields become really powerful.

Olivia Roberts

At a high level, calculated fields are just logic that runs on top of your data and updates automatically as things change. They turn your data into something more usable and actionable. Instead of exporting data and calculating things manually, you can define exactly what you want to measure one time and then reuse it across reports, dashboards, and your workflows. In the case of feedback SLAs, you're not just looking at timestamps — you can actually define: was feedback submitted in 24 hours? That's a yes or no. And now that becomes something you can report on, filter on, and action on. Once you have that layer in place, you can start to do a lot more with it: track SLA adherence across your entire funnel, understand where delays are happening, and bring visibility to your process in a much more consistent way. But the piece that really changes on top of using this calculated field is layering in an alert. Instead of saying, let me go check if that feedback's late, you will be notified when that feedback is late — and so will the person who needs to go fill it out. That's the shift from reporting as something to review, to something that actively supports how your team operates.

Olivia Roberts

What I want to do now is show you what this looks like in practice. We're going to walk through building that calculated field together and tracking a 24-hour SLA as our example. So here on one of my many dashboards in my demo account, you'll see our feedback completion rate at the top right. I also have a feedback completion rate report on the left-hand side showing every person who's filled out feedback, how many interviews they've had, and how much feedback they've completed. But it doesn't help you get ahead of it. Ideally we'd want to move towards something like the report on the far right — looking at interview feedback SLA — which breaks down by hour how many people did it in three hours versus fifty-five hours. But it doesn't tell you if they did it within the SLA. That's the goal.

Olivia Roberts

To do that, we go into our admin and into our calculated fields. I know when we're talking, I typically will tell you you're going to build everything on job considerations, but this time you're using interviewer participations because we want to be focused on when that interview happened and the exact timeframe. We'll create a new one, title it our Interview Submission SLA. Buckets are what pops up next — you start with another and define the criteria you want. What we're going to focus on is within our 24-hour SLA period. We take the hours until feedback submission and create something more focused: less than or equal to 24 hours. Save that, and rename the others bucket to 'outside of our SLA' so it's clearer when you're looking at the report. Now we go back to our dashboard, and with this calculated field in place I can create a clean report that shows exactly within versus outside of our 24-hour SLA. I can break it down by department, by team, by a specific interviewer, look at it by different time ranges. Now it becomes something that I can measure, sit down with a leader and say, this is how often we're doing this within SLA, and start tracking improvement over time.

Olivia Roberts

While this number is great for us to have, the additional piece we'd also want is to not have to go track down every single person who didn't fill out their feedback form. That's where alert reports come into play. If you've checked out our report builder, you may have noticed we have an entire section of alert templates. We have a pre-made one that is perfect for this: our feedback submission SLA. It's a pre-designed report — the logic is already in there, you can customize it, and the alert is already set up. All you have to do is hit save and activate and it'll be up and running for you. The logic is looking at interviewer participation is completed, they have not completed their feedback, and it has been within the last seven days but not the last two days — because Ashby is already going to let them know for two days that they need to go fill out that feedback form. So this is our next level of making sure we stay on top of that feedback form being submitted. You can have it sent over email or Slack, sent immediately to the actual interviewer assigned, and have the recruiter or any other person on your team also made aware when feedback has not been submitted.

Olivia Roberts

Scheduling is another area where teams usually feel the pain before they start to see it clearly in their data. You might hear things like scheduling is really slowing us down, or coordinators are feeling a little overloaded, or candidates are rescheduling a lot. But it's often hard to quantify what's happening or where the issue actually is. This is where reporting can really help make that visible. You can start to look at things like how many interviews are being scheduled per coordinator, how scheduling volume is trending over time, by what stage groups you're scheduling within. You can look at RSVP rates, how many declines you're getting, how many reschedules. Instead of guessing where the problem is, you can actually see it clearly in your data. Once you have that visibility, it opens up really practical decisions: do we need to redistribute work amongst coordinators, do we maybe need additional tooling, are we at a point where we need new team members, are there patterns in reschedules we could get ahead of?

Olivia Roberts

In our scheduling insights section on the dashboard, the first two things I like to look at are volume and distribution. We have a really good count on the left-hand side of who's organizing all of the interviews week over week — so we can start to get a sense of who's owning a lot of that work and how we might re-coordinate or bring it to another coordinator. Then we can also look at interviews scheduled per week by stage group — where are we spending a lot of our time scheduling, and how is that trending over time? Once we know that, we can look at any friction points: RSVP declines and reschedules. This will give you a really good sense of what action items you can take right now. And we can look at time in process by department to start to get a better sense of where we're being impacted most when it comes to scheduling rather than making assumptions.

Olivia Roberts

Alright, three things I'd love for you to do today or this week. One: ask yourself, is this actually helping us make decisions? Take a step back and look at your reporting. Is it really helping you move forward and make good decisions, or is it just something you're checking occasionally? The most useful reporting isn't just showing what happened — it's helping you understand what to do next. Two: try to ditch at least one of your exports. If there's something your team is regularly pulling out of Ashby and tracking manually, think about how a calculated field could replace that. Even replacing one can save you and your team a lot of time. Three: find one SLA that would really matter to you or your team. It could be feedback turnaround time, it could be scheduling time. Make sure it's clearly defined, measurable, and ideally something you can track or even automate. Because at the end of the day, the goal isn't just to have better reporting — it's to make your data do more of the work for you. Thank you.