If you are using multiple different interview plans, you can use this feature to bucket your interview stages across plans into a common set of stages for reporting.

Grouped interview plans are one of the most powerful ways to bring consistency, clarity, and scalability to your hiring process. When used well, they create a standard backbone for interviews across teams and improve data quality, reduce manual work, enable better forecasting, and help teams to deliver a more predictable candidate experience.

If you are using multiple different interview plans, you can set up a grouped interview plan to bucket your interview stages into a common set of stages for reporting.

A strong Grouped Interview Plan helps with creating the following:

Because the grouped interview plan defines your company's reporting structure, stability at this layer is essential. Grouped interview plans are built for long-term consistency, not continuous adjustment.

The grouped interview plan also plays a critical role in how you configure conditions across Ashby. Features like Candidate Experience Surveys, Alerts, and other automated workflows rely on stage groups fields to trigger consistently at the right moment in the process. Without a grouped interview plan, you would need to align conditions across multiple stage names, creating unnecessary complexity and increasing the chances of misconfiguration. With a grouped interview plan, these triggers become seamless and reliable.

The Grouped Interview Plan sits at the top of a hierarchy that other pieces map into:

To add stages to your grouped interview plan:

To delete a stage from your grouped interview plan, click the trash can icon to the right of the stage in question.

If the stage you're trying to delete is mapped to your interview plans, Ashby gives you two options: remove the grouped stage group mapping from those interview plan stages, or select a different grouped stage to map your interview plan stage to.

Once your grouped plan is configured, you can map the stages within each of your interview plans to the corresponding stages in your grouped plan.

To map stages:

You can also get an overview of how stages are mapped to your grouped interview plan by heading to Admin > Data Management > Grouped Interview Plans and navigating to the Stage mapping tab. A warning in yellow at the top of the page tells you how many stages across how many interview plans aren't mapped. Click Review stages to view and map the stages accordingly.

When creating a report relating to your interview pipeline, you see the Group Stages? checkbox option.

Checking this box uses your grouped interview plan stages, bucketing your individual interview plans and showing a streamlined version of the report.

If you are using the report builder, this option is in the Visualization section.

Most Grouped Interview Plans work best with three to six active stage groups. These stage groups should represent the major milestones you want to measure consistently across roles. Essentially, if you need to report on passthrough or performance for a step in the process, it likely deserves its own stage group in your grouped interview plan. The grouped interview plan should only include high-level milestones. Do not include hold stages or administrative steps. Those belong in interview plans and can still be reported on by stage name if needed.

First, confirm that all of your interview plan stages are mapped to the grouped interview plan. Any interview plan (shared or custom) that isn't mapped appears as "unspecified" in reporting because Ashby doesn't know which stage group those stages belong to. You can review and update this in Admin > Interview Plans (available to Organizational Admins or Elevated Users with permission to edit Interview Plans).

Make sure each plan is mapped to the correct stage groups in the grouped interview plan so all reporting can roll up cleanly. If the Stage Group says "Unmapped," map it to the appropriate Grouped Interview Stage.