First Lead UX Designer

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Abhik, the Co-Founder at Ashby. Our UX and visual design are essential reasons our customers chose us over our competitors.  Our product's surface area and capability are growing, and we want to continue having first-class product design. It’s a big task, and we’re looking to you to lead it.

 

The Problem

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate throughout. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of tasks per day to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of the challenge our customers face. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last-minute adjustments as availability changes. They need to perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others. 🥵

 

Your Role

Ashby needs to be powerful but approachable to help talent teams identify, prioritize, and perform the tasks they need to accomplish. Our interfaces, for example, balance information density with parseability, quick access to features without being overwhelming, and automation with the ability to intervene when exceptions arise. You’ll lead the design of patterns, flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity visuals to accomplish this balancing act. For example, you’ll:

• Improve the flow of scheduling a candidate in Ashby so recruiting coordinators can easily set up powerful automation that reduces scheduling from hours to single-digit minutes (I use an alpha version myself every day)! The challenge is this flow spans several features from job setup to candidate profile.

• Define our headcount planning product's features, UX, and visual design. The product will move our customers’ headcount planning from a dizzying array of spreadsheets (with cell-level permissions for each hiring manager!) to a more expressive and streamlined process in Ashby that tightly integrates with other features.

• Define the UX and visual design patterns for viewing and setting up integrations so engineers can add new integrations without design consultation.

• Help engineers improve their design's information hierarchy and scannability for viewing candidates' assessments so recruiters can quickly parse information and pick out anomalies.

You’ll elevate the design of our product not just with hands-on design but by enabling the engineering team to be as autonomous as possible using our in-house design system and education and documentation on design patterns and principles. Product engineers will often own projects end-to-end, and you (and once me!) provide advice throughout the project on, for example, flow, information hierarchy, spacing, contrast, and copy. It doesn’t suffice to say what improvements to make; it’s paired with explaining the design principles and logic behind them.

This role has a significant amount of responsibility and scope, and we’re looking for someone with at least 4+ years of experience as a full-time designer. Understanding HTML/CSS and experience as a product manager is a plus!

We haven’t launched publicly, but we have many paying customers who love us, and we have great investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

 

Our Culture

Our culture is motivated by Benji’s (my co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!).

 

Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate

Our team consists of lifelong learners who are humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally (we filter for it in interviews). We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is sacred, and individual contributors have less than 2 hours of meetings per week (I wrote about it here).   

Increase Leverage, not Team Size

We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. We’ve done this through investment in:

• Great tooling. As our first designer, you’ll be at the forefront of defining this for design! In engineering, for example, our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 5x a day 💪🏾.

• Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) which we are constantly improving. Each usability improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video on it here).

 

Give Ownership & Autonomy

Benji and I did our best work as individual contributors when we had a deep understanding of the end-user and the business and ownership over the solution. Our culture reflects this experience: individual contributors, including engineers, own projects end-to-end, from speaking with users to writing product specs to UX design. These are skills that we often don’t get to practice, and, at Ashby, we provide mentorship to grow them and help from the team where you want it. You’ll be elevating design and our team's design skills at Ashby.

 

Put Effort into Diversity 

Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of designers from underrepresented groups.

Today, 39% of Ashby identifies as women or non-binary, 10% from underrepresented ethnic groups in tech. It’s not great, and we are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.

 

Interview Process

At Ashby, our team and interview process want to help you show your best self. We’ll dive into your portfolio and simulate working together by actually collaborating on problems similar to the ones we face in our day-to-day work.

I’ll be your main point of contact, prep you for interviews, and share internal documents and metrics. You’ll meet my co-founder and CEO plus 4 to 6 people in product and engineering (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask them questions). If we don’t give an offer, we’ll provide feedback!

 

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.

• 10-year exercise window for stock options. You shouldn’t feel pressure to purchase stock options if you leave Ashby —do it when you feel financially comfortable.

• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year. Expect “Vacation?” in our one-on-one agenda until you start taking it 😅.

• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. We plan to expand this to employees in other countries as situations arise.

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. Get what you need to be happy and productive!

• $100/month education budget with more expensive items (like conferences) covered with manager approval.

• If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

 

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, feel challenged, and do our best work. We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. I hope that excites you enough to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.