Learn how to accelerate candidate reviews by using AI to evaluate applicants based on custom criteria. This feature helps your team identify top talent faster by automating the initial resume screening process directly within Ashby.

AI-assisted application review is available on all Ashby plans.

Criteria that you add to the job defines what the AI assesses. You can define resume criteria that the AI looks for within a candidate's resume as well as whether the candidate answered specific application form questions.

To define your criteria, navigate to Jobs > Jobs and select a job. In the job settings, navigate to the AI Features tab and select Set up criteria.

In the Resume criteria section, you can add criteria in multiple ways: add criteria suggested by AI based on the job posting, add previously used criteria from other jobs, or add custom criteria that you create for this role specifically.

To start adding criteria select + Add criteria under the Resume criteria section.

Select Add from # suggestions for suggestions generated by AI based on your job posting. You can also reuse criteria from other roles you have permission to access by selecting Add previously used.

To add a suggestion, select Add in the Action column.

Selecting Add custom instead of the suggested or previously-used options allows you to create your own criteria. You'll need to define the following:

You can evaluate whether a candidate answered long-form application questions in the Application Form Criteria section.

Toggle the Did the Application answer the question? option for individual questions. These are added as criteria for the review process.

Once you have set up your criteria, it must be validated. Ashby checks your prompts on two dimensions:

To validate your criteria, select Validate. If all criteria pass validation, you'll see a pop-up indicating that. Hit Close and proceed to the next section on Saving criteria and evaluating candidates.

If the system identifies issues, select Review Criteria on the pop-up to view warnings.

The flagged criteria will be identified with a warning. Select Show details under any warning to review why the criterion was flagged.

We recommend to either update the criterion until it is no longer flagged, or remove the criterion all together before proceeding.

After validation is successful, select Save and Evaluate all active candidates to begin the initial evaluation. Depending on the number of candidates, this can take a few seconds to a few minutes.

You'll see a loading screen with the total number of candidates being evaluated and a progress status bar.

If you are updating existing criteria, select Save and re-evaluate all active Job Considerations once you've made your updates.

Ashby's AI assesses candidate resumes against each specific criterion and returns an evaluation status. The status may indicate the candidate meets, does not meet, or the AI was undecided on the criterion. Evaluation results can be seen on the candidate profile, as well as in the Application Review stage of the candidate pipeline for the role.

View full evaluations in the Feedback tab of a candidate profile.

Click on any criterion to see the reasoning for a status of meets, does not meet, or undecided. Select the expand all icon to see reasoning for all criteria at once.

Navigate to the specific job, select the Candidate Pipeline tab on the left, and click on the Application Review stage. Here, there is a column for evaluation results that provides a summary about how the candidate scored. Hover over the results row to see more details.

You can filter candidates by their evaluation status within your pipeline stages:

You can configure a message to display to candidates who may be impacted by automated AI review processes by following the steps below.

Candidates see a Learn More link under the Submit Application button. Selecting this link is optional. Candidates can use it to read the notice, opt out of automated processing, or check whether they have already opted out, but they do not need to select it for their scores to be visible. You can view what this page looks like by selecting View in the top right corner when setting up the message.

In your candidate pipeline, you can filter to see all candidates who have opted out of AI processing by following the below steps.

AI-Assisted Application Review is priced per credit. One credit equals one evaluation of a single candidate (job consideration), supporting up to 50 criteria per evaluation.



Additional credits can be purchased in blocks. For more information, see our guide on AI CreditsAI Credits.

Yes. If you edit a prompt or change criteria, select the Save and Re-Evaluate all active Job Considerations option to refresh evaluations.

Yes. Select the three dots in the top-right corner of an evaluation to flag it as incorrect or misleading.

Yes. Select Add Column on the job's application review page and search for the Evaluations column for a summary of how each candidate scored against your AI criteria. To see a numeric percentage of criteria met, search for AI Job Criteria Met Percentage — sort by this column to rank candidates from best fit (highest percentage) to least fit (lowest).

You must either have Elevated Access - Admin or Elevated Access - Admin Private for the specific role, or be an Organization Admin.

Yes, if the information is listed on the candidate's Ashby profile, the AI considers it.

There is no proactive alert sent to customers when a candidate opts out, but you can configure alerts to be sent using Ashby's reporting capabilities and the AI Opt-Out field. See Alerts for more information.

Additionally, the opt-out status is surfaced in-product: when reviewing an application, you'll see that the job criteria evaluation was skipped, along with the reason for the skip. You can also filter to view candidates who have opted out. See AI opt-out filters above for more info.

No. The Average Score (also referred to as the Application Review Average Score) reflects the ratings given by human reviewers during the application review process and is calculated independently from AI criteria evaluations. If Average Score appears empty, no reviewer has manually scored that application yet. To measure AI-based candidate fit, use the AI Job Criteria Met Percentage column, which shows the proportion of AI criteria met for each candidate.