Using MeritFirst means fewer wasted interviews, more qualified candidates getting a real shot, and a lean team that can own recruiting without hiring more recruiters, while running its own assessment and interview stages in-house.
The Problem
Ascend's hiring process kept getting longer without getting better
Before MeritFirst, Ascend worked with recruiting agency partners to source and screen candidates. The bottleneck was internal: as Ascend refined what it was looking for, its own interview process grew to as many as six rounds, which cost the team and candidates valuable time.
Even with a screened shortlist, it took around two weeks of internal rounds before they had enough evidence to know who was worth moving forward with.
The Solution
Ascend gets proof of ability before hiring starts eating hours
With MeritFirst, Ascend gets skill signal immediately. Applicants receive a role-specific assessment upfront, before profile review or early screening calls.
Nishit builds and customizes assessments around each role, defines how candidates are scored, and reviews MeritFirst insights to help him understand who to advance and where to further dig in.
Repeated screening questions that used to eat up time now happen inside MeritFirst assessments. By the time Nishit gets on a call, he already has the basic answers and evidence he needs. He can skip the repetitive screening, dig deeper on what matters most, and get more out of every stage.
Conversations that remain can be used to go deeper because the basic screening is already done.
The Results
Opening the funnel to everyone changed who got through
Ascend can now make confident hiring decisions without spending weeks getting there. The company runs two interviews for most roles, compared with four to six before MeritFirst. Getting to a shortlist ready for interviews used to take around two weeks and now takes two or three days.
Before: A two-person people team spent hours across repeated internal screening rounds and manual evaluation.
Now: The same team can evaluate candidates consistently upfront, go deeper faster, focus on the strongest applicants, and own recruiting in-house.
The new process also surfaces candidates Ascend might previously have screened out based on background alone. Nishit found that some candidates with less obvious experience performed better in the assessment than others who had already done the job.
“I'm all for not looking at how many years you've worked or what you've done in the past, and purely judging somebody based on skill. We wouldn't be able to do that effectively if we didn't have the MeritFirst platform.”
Without MeritFirst, Nishit says Ascend would be back to screening candidates on profile and background first. Qualified people may never make it far enough to prove what they can do.
Ascend now runs its assessment and interview stages in-house without building a bigger recruiting team. What once took weeks and up to six interview rounds now gets a two-person team to strong candidates in 2–3 days.
Higher quality candidates, in the seat faster, with fewer hours required means Ascend can drive better outcomes for their members earlier than before and focus on the next objective to tackle.