Great people make great companies, and the ability to recruit and hire has never been more critical to organizations. In today’s hypercompetitive job market, it’s no surprise that modern recruiting teams are increasingly taking a page from sales and marketing teams and running outbound campaigns to reach and attract top, diverse talent proactively.
Sapphire has invested in many companies like Outreach, Highspot, Clari, 6Sense and LeanData that turbocharge sales and marketing teams. We’ve also backed many startups in the HR space including CultureAmp, BetterUp and Degreed. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Gem, which allows modern recruiting teams to reach candidates at scale, much like how sales and marketing teams engage with prospective customers.
By tightly integrating with applicant tracking systems (ATS), Gem enables recruiting teams to be more productive by facilitating the contact, follow-up and nurturing of potential candidates through automated sequences. With Gem, recruiters can reach broader and more diverse candidate pools, achieve higher conversion rates and hire candidates faster via automation. Gem also gives visibility into pipeline analytics so that recruiters and leaders can assess what’s working in the hiring process by department, role, and over a dozen other views. This includes the ability to track diversity automatically.
A core “System of Engagement” for recruiting teams
Survey data suggests that, on average, a recruiter needs to reach out to 79 candidates per job opening. Recruiters need to build a large pipeline of candidates at the top of the funnel, knowing that only a few will convert to new hires. While salespeople have access to numerous tools to automate their outbound prospecting, recruiters haven’t had the same luxury–until Gem.
Using Gem, recruiters can increase their capacity to manage an extensive pipeline of candidates, a process previously done manually. In addition, Gem boosts recruiter performance by increasing their conversion rates through best practices and performance analytics.
Our market research made it clear that Gem is rapidly becoming the de facto system of engagement for recruiting teams. We believe this will enable Gem to earn its place as a need-to-have tool in the HR tech stack alongside the ATS, which serves as the system of record for recruiting and LinkedIn–the most popular candidate database.
Best-in-class product with delighted customers
Gem isn’t the first solution of this kind to come onto the scene. There have been other attempts at automating outbound sourcing of candidates, but none we’ve seen has been as easy to use and is as effective as Gem in delivering increased recruiter capacity and productivity.
We heard this repeatedly from all of Gem’s customers, including one who commented, “We have made a tremendous amount of hires with the set-it-and-forget-it feature of Gem. It is a huge value and timesaver.” We spoke with several repeat customers who brought Gem to new companies tasked with scaling outbound recruiting efforts. A two-time customer of Gem put it best, “This is the go-to product for me when building out a strategic sourcing capability. I would not be able to effectively go after talent without Gem.”
Elegant, and integrating seamlessly into existing workflows, Gem is loved by many of its customers today. But perhaps even more exciting is the rapid pace of product innovation–Gem plans to support additional channels for candidate outreach, build richer collaborative features for recruiters and hiring managers, and expand into inbound sourcing workflows.
Co-founders who push the envelope on talent acquisition software
At their core, co-founders Steven Bartel (CEO) and Nick Bushak (CTO) are problem solvers and builders. Having met in college at MIT, they developed their technical chops at Dropbox (Steve) and Facebook (Nick) before getting together in 2017 to build Gem.
Despite not coming from recruiting backgrounds, the duo was intimately aware of the pain points around talent acquisition as hiring managers. Cathy has known both Steve and Nick well before the launch of Gem, having the privilege of watching them build Gem from a company of two founders to now nearly 200 employees from scratch. All with a dedication to hiring exceptional individuals as teammates and a relentless focus on execution.
As engineers with a natural proclivity towards first principles thinking, it has been remarkable to watch the co-founders innovate beyond conventional thinking around talent acquisition and push the boundaries of what software can do for recruiters. We are thrilled to support and partner with Steve and Nick, and the entire Gem team as they build the ultimate platform for modern recruiting.
P.S. If you’re a recruiter interested in learning more about Gem, you can find more information here. Gem is also hiring!
