Ashby Agents
Ashby Agents can assist with taking actions on candidates and answering questions you may have about your pipeline, all in one place.
Prerequisites and permissions:
Agents provide information based on the user's permissions. Each user can only get information on jobs and candidates they already have access to.
Elevated access users and Organization Admins can create and use personal agents. Only Organization Admins can create and edit shared agents. Limited access users do not have access to the AI agent options.
Ashby Agents are available on all plans:
Foundations | Legacy Plus | Plus | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
See our Ashby Agents Use Case Library for specific prompts and use cases.
Ashby Assistant versus custom agents
The Ashby Assistant and custom agents are both AI agents.
The Ashby Assistant is the default agent that opens when you click Ashby AI. This agent has no custom instructions and works best for ad hoc, one-off tasks.
Custom agents can be created by users in your Ashby account. You and other users create custom natural language instructions for your custom agent to follow. These are best for repeatable workflows in your organization.
Enabling Ashby Assistant and custom agents
If you have Auto-enable new features toggled on for your organization, you can skip the steps below.
To enable Ashby Assistant and custom agents:
- Navigate to Admin > Organization Setup > Opt-in Features.
- If you have not yet opted in to AI Features, toggle on Enable AI Features. You will be prompted to read and agree to Ashby's AI terms before any AI features can be enabled.
- Toggle on Custom Agents.
Accessing the Ashby Assistant
You can access AI agents via the top navigation bar in your Ashby account. Click Ashby AI to the left of your user avatar to get started.
What can Ashby Agents and the Assistant do?
Data sources they can read
The Ashby Assistant and custom agents can read and pull information to answer questions on the following areas of Ashby:
- Candidates
- Interview plans
- Jobs
- Applications
- Interviews
- Feedback forms
- Interview transcripts
- Upcoming interviews
- Openings
Available Tools
The Ashby Assistant and custom agents can take the following actions on your behalf. You have final confirmation before any action is taken:
Finding people and records
Search records by name: Resolves a name to a record. Supports candidates, jobs, applications, and email templates. This is the starting point for most questions, such as "find the candidate Jordan Lee" or "pull up the Senior Designer job."
Filter records: Finds records matching specific criteria, and can return a total count instead of a list. Supports candidates, applications, jobs, job postings, openings, scheduled interviews, and offers. For example: "how many candidates are in the interview stage for the Sales role" or "show me applications that involve me."
Describe object fields: A behind-the-scenes helper that discovers which fields to filter on for a given record type before calling filter_records. You do not invoke this directly, but it is what lets filtering work reliably across all supported record types.
Get record details: Pulls the full details of records you have already located. Supports jobs, job postings, applications, email templates, openings, scheduled interviews, and offers.
Get candidate: Pulls information from a candidate's profile: resume, interview feedback, emails, texts, notes, interview transcripts, referrals, follow-ups, form submissions, and more. Use this for questions like "summarize this candidate's background" or "did this candidate mention anything about relocation?"
List Applications: Lists applications with optional filters, including across multiple jobs at once. Each result shows its own source and who it's credited to.
List Available Job Postings: Lists your company's postings currently live on job boards, with visibility flags and posting URLs.Finding people and records
Get Referral History: Lists people you've referred, with candidate names, jobs, dates, and current stage. Covers form referrals by default, or referral-link performance on request.
Interviews and feedback
Get upcoming interviews: Lists your upcoming interviews with candidate names, job titles, times, and links. Ask "what interviews do I have this week?"
Get interview details: Pulls a detailed prep briefing for a specific interview: candidate background, resume summary, the panel, and the hiring team. Use this right before an interview.
Get interview plan: Shows the stages a candidate moves through for a given job or application.
Get submitted feedback: Pulls up scorecard feedback you personally submitted for a candidate or interview. This only shows your own feedback, not other interviewers'.
Edit Submitted Feedback: Reopens a scorecard you've already submitted, pre-filled with your prior answers, so you can revise and resave it.
Fill Form: Opens a form for you to complete and submit: interview feedback, a referral, or a quality-of-hire survey.
Pipeline and your to-do list
Get job pipeline: Shows how many candidates are at each stage of a job's pipeline, and can compare multiple jobs at once. Ask "how is the pipeline looking for the Engineering roles?"
Get pending tasks: Lists your pending tasks in Ashby: scorecards you owe, approvals waiting on you, follow-ups, candidate reviews, and survey requests. Ask "what do I need to do today?"
Making changes
Create candidate: Creates a new candidate with name and contact details.
Add note to candidate: Drafts a note on a candidate's profile for you to confirm before saving. Can also reply to an existing note.
Change application stage: Moves a candidate's job consideration to a different stage in the interview process for that job. You can also use this to archive a job consideration by moving it to the Archived stage and providing an archive reason.
When you archive an application this way:
- Include an archive reason when you move the application to the Archived stage.
- You cannot set archive notes or archive reason custom fields.
- Upcoming scheduled interviews aren’t canceled. Interview requests that haven’t been scheduled yet are closed.
- Automatic activities on the Archived stage run the same way they do in the app. For example, the candidate still gets any automated archive email.
- Pending feedback requests follow your organization’s setting for archived applications.
- You cannot change an archive reason with the tool.
Consider candidate for a job: Adds a candidate to a job by creating a new application at the first stage of that job's interview process.
Email Candidate: Drafts an email to a candidate for you to review, edit, and send.
Configuring custom agents
Create Custom Agent: Creates a new custom agent from a name, description, and instructions.
Update Custom Agent: Edits an existing custom agent's name, description, and/or instructions.
Asking the Ashby Assistant a question
The Ashby Assistant and agents generate responses, summaries, and recommendations based on the information available to them (see Data sources above). AI-generated content may be inaccurate and should be reviewed before use.
- On the AI Agent page, type your question or instructions in the Ask the Assistant... field.
- Once you've entered your question, click the arrow button to submit your request.
- The Ashby Assistant takes a moment to think, then responds. If any action is to be taken (for example, adding a candidate), you are asked to approve the action before it is taken.
- In the example below, click Create Candidate to confirm the action the Ashby Assistant should take.
- If the suggested action isn't correct, click Reject. The agent does not take the proposed action and you can provide further instruction.
- Once an action has been taken, click the arrows to the right of each action to view the details. For example, in a Considered for Job action, you can see the job title and candidate name listed in the dropdown with further details.
- Once all actions are complete, you are prompted for any further requests.
- To start a new conversation, click + New Chat.
Custom agents
You can create your own agents, either personal or shared across the organization, to help with repeatable actions. These agents can also be tagged into questions with the Ashby Assistant.
The agent setup options and settings are in the bottom-left corner of the AI agent page:
- My Agents: Click this to view your personal agents and set up new personal agents.
- Shared Agents: Click this to view your organization's agents and set up new shared agents.
Creating a custom agent
To create a new agent, navigate to the My Agents or Shared Agents page, then click + Add X Agent.
From here, a wizard guides you through the steps. You have two options here:
Generate a custom agent from a plain language description
- Describe what your agent should do in plain language in the What should your agent do? field.
Need help with constructing prompts? The AI Prompting Toolkit playbook in Ashby Academy walks through a simple three-step framework — define the outcome, design the output, and test and iterate — with examples you can adapt for your needs.
- Click Generate Draft. Ashby then generates a name, description, and instructions for your agent.
- Review the generated content and make any edits to the name, description, or instructions. Click Continue to confirm.
- Determine the trigger and delivery settings. Then click Create Agent. See Triggers and delivery settingsTriggers and delivery settings below for more information.
Ashby Assistant can also help you create or update agents. More on this in Available Tools.
Build a custom agent manually
- Click Build Manually in the Describe your agent step.
- Add the agent information in the Review step:
- Add a name and description to your agent for reference.
- Add instructions for the agent in natural language. The agent uses these every time it's triggered.
- Determine the triggers and delivery. See Triggers and delivery settingsTriggers and delivery settings below for more information..
- Click Create Agent to confirm your settings and create your agent.
Triggers and delivery settings
When configuring a custom agent, you can either set the trigger to be:
- An at-mention directly in a conversation with the Ashby Assistant.
- A recurring schedule with a set cadence and time.
Agents with the Schedule trigger can only take read actions and will always execute with the author's permissions.
If you select Schedule as your trigger, you then need to determine the cadence and where the output is delivered.
- You can set the cadence to daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, or choose a custom frequency. You can set the day or date to send the output for weekly, quarterly, monthly, and custom options. You can set the time and timezone for all cadence options.
- You can deliver output via Slack and/or email. Add Slack users or channels in the Add Slack user or channel field using the dropdown and search options. You can type an email into the Email field and click + Add to add email recipients.
Recipients cannot reply to scheduled agent output directly in Slack or email. Users need to click the Continue in Ashby button in their email or the link in their Slack message to be taken to the Ashby Assistant to continue the conversation.
Using a custom agent with the Ashby Assistant
When asking a question or providing instructions to the Ashby Assistant, at-mention your agent using the name you specified during the creation process. Once the appropriate agent has been selected from the list, it displays above your prompt.
Alternatively, click Use Agent to view the full list of agents and add one to your prompt.
Only one agent can be added to a request at a time.
Editing a custom agent
To edit a custom agent:
- Click the My Agents or Shared Agents tab.
- Click on the agent in question.
- Amend the Description and Instructions fields as needed.
- Click Save to confirm your changes.
Disabling an active agent
To disable an agent:
- Click the My Agents or Shared Agents tab.
- Click on the agent in question.
- Click Disable.
You can re-enable disabled agents by selecting the agent in your My Agents or Shared Agents list and clicking Enable in the panel showing the agent details.
Converting personal agents to shared agents
Only Organization Admins can convert a personal agent to a shared agent.
If an agent is configured under My Agents and you'd like to share it, click on the agent, then click More and Convert to Shared Agent.
It is not currently possible to convert a shared agent back to a personal agent.
Copy an agent
You can create a copy of a personal or a shared agent. To create a copy of an agent:
- Click the My Agents or Shared Agents tab.
- Click on the agent in question.
- Click More, then Copy Agent.
Shared scheduled agents
Sharing a scheduled agent lets other users access it, but doesn't change the permissions it runs with. It always runs with the author's permissions. This means a shared agent can send information available to its author to the configured Slack channel or email recipients.
To protect that access:
- Scheduled agents are read-only; they do not take actions in Ashby.
- The agent author can send follow-up messages in the in-app conversation. Follow-ups can use write tools, which are not available during the initial scheduled run.
- Slack and email delivery are one-way. Recipients cannot reply to the agent from those destinations.
- For agents configured to deliver output to Slack or email, the link to open the conversation in Ashby only works for the author. Other users cannot view the conversation in the app or send follow-up messages.
- Only the author can edit an active scheduled agent.
- Only the author can change its instructions, schedule, or delivery destinations.
- Only the author can use Run Now or re-enable the agent.
- Only the author can view the contents of previous agent runs. Other users with access to the agent can see the list of previous runs in the Runs tab, but cannot open a run to see its contents.
- An Organization Admin can disable another user's active shared scheduled agent, but cannot edit or restart it.
Asking agents questions via Slack
If you use the Slack integration, you can ask agents questions and request actions directly from the Ashby Apps channel. For more on this, check out Using Ashby Agents in SlackUsing Ashby Agents in Slack.
Reviewing previous conversations with Ashby Assistant
When you have Ashby Assistant open, previous conversations will be listed under Recents on the left-hand side of the screen. Use the magnifying glass icon to search for specific conversations as needed.
FAQs
Can I run an agent with a schedule trigger outside of the schedule window?
Yes. Navigate to the created agent, then click Run Now to run the agent immediately. You then see the agent running with a status. This option is only available if the agent is enabled.
