Benjamin Encz

Benjamin Encz, known as Benji, is co-founder and chief executive of Ashby, a recruiting platform that combines an applicant tracking system, interview scheduling, sourcing, a candidate CRM, and analytics. A software engineer by training, he is known for building Ashby with a three-person team for about 18 months before it had a paying customer.

From Germany to PlanGrid

He grew up in Germany, where as a schoolboy he sold “recorded cassette tapes in school, copied from CDs,” he said on The Product Market Fit Show. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to join a small startup and later created ReSwift, an open-source Swift library modeled on Redux that gives iPhone apps a single, predictable place to keep their state.

At the end of 2015 he joined PlanGrid, a construction software company, as an iOS engineer. Once he moved into engineering management, he said, “80, 90 % of my time was spent on hiring,” and he rose to director of engineering. In a 2018 interview with Managers Club he said he was “convinced there are better ways than today’s widely accepted best practices for almost all key activities, such as hiring, writing code, implementing software development processes.”

A hundred talent teams

In 2018 he left PlanGrid to start Ashby with Abhik Pramanik. The two interviewed more than 100 recruiting teams, and reporting “literally came up like 90 out of a hundred,” he said. Nearly all of those teams had switched applicant tracking systems in the previous three years, which told him buyers were willing to move.

Ashby kept its team at three people after raising a seed round. “We could spend time recruiting or we could spend time building,” he said. He also skipped the usual stripped-down first release. “I don’t think an MVP makes a ton of sense if you are replacing an existing system one to one.” The first paying customer signed in 2020.

Hiring as coordination

On Ashby’s Offer Accepted podcast he put the problem this way: “The interesting thing about recruiting is that it is a more complex coordination problem than almost any other problem in the business.” In the 2018 Managers Club interview he also called himself “a big fan of the ‘writing is thinking’ idea.”