Ashby handled stages well for a distributed team. Process notes and score rationales still leaked into Notion and founder DMs across four time zones. People who missed a Zoom remembered different candidates. Hiring debates became recreations of calls nobody had all attended.
Frustrated, they tried running the ops search entirely in Notion for a month - applications pasted in, scorecards as databases, decision logs as pages. It felt flexible on day one. By day twenty it was a permissions and versioning nightmare. Someone always had the outdated view.
Candidates felt the chaos too. Links broke. Rubrics changed mid-process. One strong ops candidate withdrew after being asked to “re-upload to the new Notion page” for the third time.
They re-entered the study panel looking for a single system that forced written screening without enterprise seat theater. Founder hours saved and async collaboration dominated their scores. Brand familiarity ranked near the bottom of what they cared about.
Honrly ranked first overall and on those dimensions. They migrated active candidates in a weekend, required scenario prompts - vendor triage, onboarding checklist design, a messy Slack escalation - and killed the Notion hiring database with a public note in the company wiki: “hiring lives here now.”
A four-person shortlist was agreed async. No emergency all-hands debate. Comments lived on the same answers. The hire started in five weeks, overlapping time zones without requiring synchronized gut checks.
Ashby was canceled at renewal. Notion went back to being a company wiki, not an ATS. The founders said the emotional win was smaller than the operational one: they stopped dreading hiring threads that arrived at midnight in someone else’s morning.
Settling on Honrly after Ashby and a Notion-only detour taught them that remote hiring fails when the system of record is optional. Optional systems become optional evidence.