The Scenario
You finished 30 phone screens this week. For each one, you wrote notes in your tracker — an Excel workbook with the application ID in column A and the target interview stage in column B. Now it is 4 PM Friday and you need those 30 applications moved to "Technical Interview" in Ashby before the weekend so interviewers can see their queues on Monday morning.
The bad version:
- Open Ashby, search for the first application ID, find the candidate record, click the stage dropdown, select "Technical Interview," save.
- Go back to the workbook. Copy the next application ID. Search for it in Ashby. Realize you searched in the wrong field. Try again.
- By application 12 you mis-click and advance a candidate two stages instead of one. You will not notice until someone messages you asking why their candidate is suddenly in Offer.
30 applications at two minutes each is an hour of work that introduces errors at scale.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your tracker and talks to Ashby directly. You describe the operation once.
Read the StageAdvances table — column A is the application ID, column B is the target stage ID. Move each application to the specified stage in Ashby and write 'Moved' or error into column C.
SheetXAI iterates through all 30 rows, calls the Ashby stage-advance endpoint for each application, and writes "Moved" or the error text into column C.
What You Get
- Column C shows "Moved" for every successfully advanced application.
- Rows that fail — wrong stage ID, application already past that stage — show the error.
- All 30 stage advances happen without touching the Ashby UI.
- The workbook becomes your audit log.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Stage IDs in column B are stage names, not IDs
For each row in the StageAdvances table, look up the Ashby interview stage whose name matches column B, then move the application in column A to that stage. Write "Moved" or error into column C.
Some applications should advance and some should be archived
For each row in the StageAdvances table, check column C. If column C says "Advance", move the Ashby application in column A to the stage in column B. If column C says "Archive", archive the application instead. Write the result into column D.
The table has duplicate application IDs from a data entry error
Check column A in the StageAdvances table for duplicate application IDs. Mark the second occurrence of any duplicate "Duplicate — skipped" in column C. For all unique rows, move the application to the stage in column B and write "Moved" into column C.
Validate applications are in the expected current stage before advancing
For each row in the StageAdvances table, fetch the current stage of the Ashby application in column A. If the current stage matches column C, advance the application to the stage in column B. If it does not match, write "Stage mismatch — current: [stage name]" into column D and skip.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook tracking phone screen outcomes or interview decisions, then ask it to push all the stage advances into Ashby in one pass. See also the spoke on exporting interview feedback for debrief, or return to the Ashby overview.