Gem gathers data from tools that recruitment teams use on a day-to-day basis, such as LinkedIn InMail, ATS, and email, and combines it into a single talent management hub that automates candidate sourcing and engagement while providing detailed insights to support and optimize your recruiting strategy.
Ratings
Ease of Use
Best For
Key Differentiator
Price
Free Trial
PROS
- Gem helps you discover qualified candidates across multiple channels, send personalized messages, visualize your recruitment pipeline, and stay on top of crucial hiring metrics
- Gem's integration with LinkedIn and various ATS means that all candidate data is stored in a centralized location. Users find this feature extremely useful.
- According to users, one of Gem's finest features is the ability to create automated drip campaigns to engage with both active and passive candidates
CONS
- Some users have experienced slow load times and lags while using the application
- In rare cases, the contact information, such as the email address or phone number of a sourced candidate, might be wrong
- While Gem currently integrates with LinkedIn, it does not provide the option to automate messages via LinkedIn InMail
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Used by over 1200 teams, Gem is a talent engagement platform that helps you with talent sourcing, outreach and recruitment pipeline management.
Best-suited for large enterprises and staffing firms, Gem gathers data from various recruitment tools and sources like ATS, LinkedIn, past applications, and email to create a single source of truth called a candidate relationship management (CRM) hub. The CRM hub has a record of every candidate interaction as well as up-to-date information about them, including career developments and recent milestones.
Gem's talent sourcing and outreach tool help recruitment teams connect with active and passive talent and engage them through multi-stage email sequences. For instance, through this feature, you can automate interview reminders and schedule follow-ups with candidates currently in the pipeline. On the other hand, passive candidates can be engaged through curated content and interesting updates about your organization sent to them weekly or bi-weekly.
Customers especially like Gem's pipeline management feature that provides a visual snapshot of your entire recruitment pipeline. You can sort candidates based on which stage of the hiring process they're currently in, move them further along based on interviews and assignments, or send them a rejection email using a pre-existing template.
The reporting dashboard, called Talent Compass, provides valuable insights into the performance of your recruitment team, pipeline health, diversity hiring efforts, and email engagement rate. You can also use the stats to project the number of hires you expect to make in the coming weeks and months and tweak your recruitment strategy to meet your hiring goals.
I have used Gem as a sourcing tool to contact candidates. Gem allows you to create automated email cadences and allows you to reach out to candidates through various stages until a response is met. In the recruitment world, it can be difficult to set follow ups manually and Gem allows just that.
- Ability to fetch email addresses of prospects
- Ability to automate an email sequence
- Reporting of open emails and response rates
I’ve used Gem for over a year. Company had purchased Gem as another sourcing tool to reach out to both active and passive candidates in the market. The key benefit is the ability to email candidates and receive email access that otherwise would be difficult to find. There is also an automation component where you can bulk email a plethora of candidates at once which can be effective in high growth environments.
- Sometimes emails are not effective ways to reach candidates
- Does not have a cadence feature for LinkedIn messages. Only emails
- Would be nice to integrate with more ATS systems
It’s the first tool that I’ve personally used that can fetch email addresses of passive candidates
- Understand what their current sourcing strategy is and how effective it is today
- Understand that Gem is a sourcing method via email cadences. Sometimes emails are not as effective for candidates.
It hasn’t grown too much on me given that I have only used it for email sourcing and email cadences
High growth environments either small or enterprise companies.
This tool would not be good for employees outside of sales and recruitment. Only suitable for roles that require heavy sourcing or outreach.
The Recruiting Team used Gem daily to source. Our RecOps team used it to observe reports and pull key data points out for presentations. This was especially important when there were board meetings or quarterly presentations to the company. It also synced really nicely with our ATS (Greenhouse) which made it a great tool.
- Sourcing functionality is top-notch and helped increase the diversity of the candidate pool
- Reporting functionality helped bridge gaps in reporting that Greenhouse couldn't provide
- Gem's CSM team was a pleasure to work with.
My previous company used Gem because it provided a combination of sourcing and analytic functionality for the recruiting funnel. This was needed in order to report on goals and metrics that the Recruiting team needed to hit as well as improve DEIB initiatives. Gem did a great job of solving for helping us make data-driven decisions. Additionally, our Customer Success Manager helped us design reports and leverage Gem to its fullest capacity.
- Originality - It seemed like Gem would release similar features to their competitors in response to what the competitors were doing. This meant that the functionality wasn't always fully baked.
- Ease of use - The analytics aspects of the platform required a longer than anticipated ramp time to fully understand.
- System integration - When the integrations broke because of updates, it could take a bit of time to get back online.
Gem definitely innovates very quickly based on what they see. Because of this, some features can feel half-baked relative to their competitors (on the analytics side TalentWall, on the sourcing side, SeekOut). Generally, it is nice that Gem consolidated the specialty of those tools into one platform but SeekOut/TalentWall are more straightforward to use while requiring a lower ramp time to use.
I would consider the following bullets:
- Ease of Use
- Integration capability
- Purpose (does sourcing or analytics carry more weight?)
- Maintenance (which team is going to own this tool so that they have a strong partnership with the CSM team)
Gem is incredibly fast to build new functionality to meet changes that the users need. That ability to listen to their customers and users is fantastic.
Users: Sourcers, Recruiters, RecOps Team, Hiring Managers
It all depends on how each team is leveraging the tool. If it is primarily for sourcing, then it is incredibly nifty for Sourcers/Recruiters/Hiring Managers to build projects together and do paired sourcing.
Users: Interviewers, Non-recruiting members
Because they are not part of the recruiting process from a hands-on perspective, it can be a waste of a user seat to give them access.
We use Gem daily for our sourcing and when replying to candidate responses. The responses will go to the connected email and allow our coordinators to access candidate data and move toward the next steps easily. We also use the reporting features to inform clients of the effectiveness of outreach. The data we are able to see allows us to better our email campaigns as well.
- I enjoy the data collection/reporting features.
- I enjoy the Chrome extension which automatically triggers when an email communication or linkedin email for example belongs to a sourced candidate we've sent outreach to.
- I also enjoy the simple and clean layout of the software.
We wanted a more robust solution for talent searching/sourcing and outreach. I have used the tool for 5 months since we switched from Teamable. Gem allows us to automate candidate nurturing campaigns. It also allows us to easily view candidate data such as Linkedin profiles, contact info, etc in one place. Another great use for us has been the tracking data/analytics where we can view when candidates have opened messages, the links they clicked, how many times they viewed it, and more which helps us better our email campaigns.
- The price is high compared to others.
- Although the Chrome extension is useful the pop-ups can be disruptive.
- The sensitivity of the AI- at times will mark non-interested replies as interested and vice versa which throws off our stats.
Compared to others such as Teamable or Loxo, I would say Gem is much more intuitive when it comes to its integrations and design.
The size of your company and pricing-this may not be suitable for smaller organizations due to the cost. Also, the reporting/analytical data you can capture is extremely useful but not necessary for all recruiting agencies.
I have not used it long enough to say.
High Volume Recruiting
A small business/startup
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- Talent CRM: Gem's Candidate Relationship Management platform gathers candidate data across recruiting systems, LinkedIn InMails, and emails and stores it in a centralized location.
- Automated Outreach: Send multi-stage sequences via email to active and passive candidates, in turn, boosting candidate engagement.
- Pipeline Management: Get a bird's-eye view of your entire recruiting pipeline, sync it with your ATS, add notes to individual profiles, move candidates to the next stage, or send them a rejection email with a ready-to-use template.
- Talent Compass: Gather data and analytics across Gem and your ATS to evaluate your hiring efficiency, team performance, and projections for the future.
Gem integrates with over 20+ third-party applications, including Greenhouse, Workday, LinkedIn, Indeed and more. We recommend contacting their sales team to learn about the custom integrations they offer.
The cost of Gem's services is based on the size of your recruitment team, the number of hires, and other factors like custom ATS integrations. You can reach out to their sales team for a quote.
Gem is best suited for large enterprises and staffing agencies that need to hire more employees in a short time period.
To get started with Gem, you can visit their website and click the 'Get Started For Free’ button on the homepage. This will take you to a page where you can enter your business email and sign up for a free trial. You can also go through the 'Getting Started With Gem' guide available in their help center for information on how to set up your account, integrate it with your ATS, and more.
Gem has a help center accessible 24/7 for self-serve. They also provide developer documentation and frequent product updates, so you're always in the know. Apart from this, they conduct events and webinars to help you connect with your peers from the TA community. Should you need further help, you can contact their support team.
The co-founders of Gem, Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak, were working as engineering managers at Dropbox and Facebook when their companies decided to scale at speed. However, finding the best talent, a.k.a the 'gems', wasn't easy, given that the best people were already taken. And that's when they realized that tracking and managing relationships with passive candidates is crucial. And with no existing system that effectively did this, they set out to build one of their own. That's when Gem was born.
Since then, Gem has grown leaps and bounds, with funding from investors like Greylock, ICONIQ, and Accel. It is now a Unicorn and one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses with a $1.2B valuation.
Company HQ
San Francisco, California, United States
Number of Employees
150+
Year Founded
2017
Amount Raised
Gem has raised $148M in funding over 4 rounds. Their latest was a Series C round in September 2021.
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