Do Not Contact Company Lists
This feature allows your organization to define a list of companies from which your recruiting team prefers not to source or reach out to candidates. Organizations use this feature to support internal hiring guidelines, such as when managing sensitive partnerships, client relationships, or active M&A scenarios.
This feature is designed solely to support unilateral, internal recruiting policies. It is not intended to implement any agreement with other employers to limit hiring or recruiting. Customers control and manage all list entries and are responsible for ensuring that their use complies with applicable laws and company policies.
Do Not Contact company lists are available on the Legacy Plus, Plus and Enterprise plans:
Foundations | Legacy Plus | Plus | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Configuring a Recruiting Exclusion List
To configure Do Not Contact rules from scratch:
- Navigate to Admin > Sourcing > Do Not Contact Rules
- Click + Add New Rule
- Select a company from the list provided (all companies across existing candidate profiles will be pulled into this list)
- Confirm the rule name and configure the following rule information:
- Internal notes (optional)
- Expiry date (optional)
- Block Outbound Sequences: Enable this if you would like to prevent users from enrolling this candidate in an outbound sequence.
- Employee scope. The following employee scope options are available for matching against this rule:
- Current employees only
- All employees (employed at the specified company at any time)
- All employees (employees employed within a specified limited time period)
- Click + Add to add any additional variations on the company name to the rule.
Importing a Do Not Contact List
If you have multiple rules you’d like to configure, you can import a CSV of rules. To import a Do Not Contact rule list:
- Navigate to Admin > Sourcing > Do Not Contact Rules
- Click Import CSV and select your CSV file to upload from your computer
The following fields can be included in the CSV file. Please note that the name and name variant is required for creating the rule.
Header name | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
Rule Name | The rule display name. Rows with the same rule name are grouped under the same rule. | Portfolio Companies |
Company Name | Employer/Company names to match against. | Acme Inc |
Notes | Optional notes to display the reason for the rule or other important information internally. | These are companies within our portfolio. Employees from these companies should not be sourced or contacted about our roles. |
Employment Scope | Controls which employment history entry is considered for this rule. Use ‘current_only’ to match only current employer, or ‘all’ to match all employment history. | all |
Scope Months | Number of months to look back on when employment scope is set as ‘all’. Leave empty to check all employment history without a time limit. | 3 |
Expires At | Expiry date in YYYY-MM-DD format. | 2025-04-22 |
Blocks Email Sending | If enabled, produces an campaign limiting error that blocks sending. If not enabled, only a warning will show and campaign emails will not be blocked. | Yes |
You can use this template to ensure your data is formatted correctly before uploading.
How does the Do Not Contact messaging show in Ashby?
If a candidate matches a configured Do Not Contact rule, a Do Not Contact red tag will show in the top-right of the candidate’s profile, to the left of the Follow-up, Email, Archive and other action buttons. You can hover over the tag to view the rule that is being applied to this particular candidate.
If you opt to email the candidate and sequence sending has been blocked by your configured rule, then when a user tries to send a sequence to the candidate, they will see an error referring to the configured rule.
If sequence sending has not been blocked as part of your rule configuration, then the email will be sent to the candidate.
If viewing the candidate in the Chrome Extension, you’ll also see a banner displayed during your sourcing workflow. Note that a candidate must be added or exist in Ashby to trigger the red banner warning.
