A company is as good as the people who work there. That’s why companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year looking for top talent. I know this first hand from my time at AppDynamics and Adobe; both companies spent an enormous amount of time and money finding, engaging and closing top candidates. Despite this, I was struck by our inability to comprehensively track recruiting activities and ROI on time or dollars spent.
That’s why I’m excited to announce that we led the Series B investment in Gem, an amazing three-year-old company revolutionizing how talent teams source, engage and optimize their recruiting activities across multiple channels. And why I’m thrilled to be joining the Board.
Gem is a software platform for modern recruiting that sits between LinkedIn and Workday, and leverages a data-driven approach commonly seen in marketing and sales. Their Talent Candidate Relationship Management (Talent CRM) platform transforms the way talent acquisition teams source, nurture, track, and manage passive talent. Gem can be used by an individual recruiter who can start to see the benefit in minutes. It doesn’t change the core tools and platforms recruiters use today, but rather, it integrates with LinkedIn, email, and customers’ Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
Recruiters use Gem to eliminate the most manual part of their jobs – data entry and engagement emails – and lets them focus on the things that make the biggest difference. Recruiters using Gem source 5x faster and double their response rates.
Talent Leadership use Gem to get detailed full-funnel analytics so they can better plan for, and achieve, their hiring objectives. With pipeline analytics, teams can measure time-to-hire for a particular role in a specific geography, or understand how many candidates they need in every stage of the funnel in order to meet their hiring goals.
Gem is also committed to helping companies build diverse teams, which continues to be top of mind among innovative organizations. Gem’s Diversity Analytics tracks gender, race, and ethnicity stats within their platform, alerting recruiters and talent leaders to where there may be bias in the hiring process and where they need to optimize their funnels to ensure underrepresented talent is passing through to offer stages.
Gem has seen remarkable adoption of its platform and has a vibrant community of users at more than 300 organizations including Slack, DoorDash, Coinbase, Peloton, and Pure Storage. Their users are incredible advocates. Gem was described to me as a “must have platform” and the “lifeblood of our outreach and community.” And Gem is one of the few products that sourcers and recruiters say “don’t you dare take it away.” As a result we’ve seen accounts consistently expand their usage over time. This is all a testament to the product, and the void it fills with recruiting tools.
As former Dropbox and Facebook employees, co-founders Steve Bartel (CEO) and Nick Bushak (CTO) have strong technical backgrounds. In just over three years, they’ve built the company from the ground up, recruiting top engineering talent from places like Uber, Amazon and Facebook along the way. I continue to be impressed by their incredible pace of innovation and ability to experiment.
As Gem enters their next phase of their journey, I am thrilled to partner with the team on their journey to transform the way recruiting is done.
