The Scenario
The referral program went live three weeks ago. Employees submitted candidates through a form — name, email, the job they're applying for, and the referring employee's email. Thirty submissions came in. Your HR coordinator exported the form responses into an Excel workbook. None of those referrals are in Ashby yet.
The referring employees are starting to ask what happened to their submissions.
The bad version:
- Open Ashby, navigate to the job in column C of row 1, click "Add Referral," fill in the candidate's name and email, enter the referrer's email, save.
- Go back to the workbook. Row 2.
- By submission 10, you realize the form collected emails in lowercase but Ashby's deduplication is case-sensitive, so two candidates you entered from a previous batch are getting created again as duplicates.
30 referrals at four minutes each is two hours. And you still have to clean up the duplicates afterward.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the referral workbook and submits each one to Ashby through a built-in integration — with deduplication logic baked into the prompt if you need it.
Read the Referrals table and submit one Ashby referral per row. Use 'CandidateEmail', 'CandidateName', 'JobID', and 'ReferrerEmail'. Write the resulting application ID into 'ApplicationID'.
SheetXAI submits one referral per row, in order, and writes the resulting application ID — or error — into ApplicationID.
What You Get
- ApplicationID fills with Ashby application IDs for every successfully submitted referral.
- Rows that fail — duplicate email for that job, invalid job ID, unrecognized referrer — show the exact error.
- Referrer credit is set from ReferrerEmail, not guessed.
- The referring employees' submissions are in Ashby the same day.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some candidate emails already exist in Ashby from previous batches
Before submitting referrals from the Referrals table, check whether a candidate with each CandidateEmail already exists in Ashby. If they do, write "Candidate exists — referral proceeding" in ApplicationID and still create the referral. If Ashby returns a duplicate application error, write "Duplicate application" instead.
JobID column contains job titles, not IDs
For each row in the Referrals table, look up the Ashby job whose title matches JobID and use its ID to create the referral. CandidateEmail, CandidateName, and ReferrerEmail columns are used as-is. Write the application ID or error into ApplicationID.
The form collected first and last name in separate columns instead of email
For each row in the Referrals table, first check whether an Ashby candidate exists with the email in CandidateEmail. If not, create the candidate using FirstName and LastName. Then create a referral linking that candidate to the job in JobID, crediting ReferrerEmail. Write the application ID into ApplicationID.
Deduplicate emails, normalize to lowercase, and submit all in one pass
Normalize all emails in CandidateEmail and ReferrerEmail to lowercase in the Referrals table. Flag any duplicate CandidateEmail as "Duplicate — skipped" in ApplicationID. For unique rows, create one Ashby referral per row and write the application ID into ApplicationID.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with referral form responses, then ask it to submit all of them into Ashby in one pass. See also the spoke on bulk creating applications, or return to the Ashby overview.