5 common objections to investing in Gem, answered

Almost every industry is in the middle of an economic reckoning right now. It seems like each week comes with a new wave of layoffs from a Fortune 500 company. Executives from businesses large and small are making a big deal of their efforts to increase their companies’ financial responsibility. And the rest of us are trying to figure out the best way to shepherd our teams toward success with fewer resources.

Recruiting and talent ops departments have been hit especially hard by budget cuts, as hiring is one of the first things to go during an economic slowdown. That means investing in a new hiring tool will be a tough sell. But we also know that getting started with our talent CRM will help your team provide more value to the company—even if you’re not doing much hiring.

Our solutions consultants have talked to many professionals in your position who have a few big questions they need to answer about how Gem can benefit their company before they’ll get anything close to buy-in. Here are the five most common hurdles to getting a green light to invest in Gem—and the answers you can give your executive team to prove the purchase is worth it.

1. We don’t have the time or resources to invest in a new hiring tool right now

If you’re expecting your experience with Gem to mirror the timeline and resource-intensity of other hiring tools, we have good news. Neither Gem’s initial setup needs nor its long-term maintenance require companies to onboard a specialist or consultant. 

We’ve done our part to make Gem work out of the box, so implementation is a breeze. First, the setup timeline is a fraction of the time you’d spend configuring an ATS: most of our teams are fully ramped up within four weeks.

Secondly, there are no complicated systems you have to configure before getting started. Our integrations use pre-built business logic so it’s easy for you to connect Gem to your ATS, sourcing tools, and more—without the typical setup time that comes with legacy CRMs. Just tell our team about your tech stack and goals, and we’ll connect everything—so you can start nurturing candidates as soon as possible.

Buildout and maintenance are simple, too. Once you’ve created your first dashboard or sequence in Gem, you can clone your work to build on it. Scaling is easy when you don’t have to start from scratch every time. You won’t need a professional dedicated to maintaining the system, either. Our team ships regular updates and is here to help troubleshoot should the need arise.

2. We already have an ATS. How is Gem any different?

Applicant tracking systems excel at one thing: managing applicant processes. Gem covers a wider range of processes and a larger part of the hiring funnel—including every touchpoint before the candidate’s application.

The limitation of an ATS is apparent in its name. These tools are excellent for tracking people who have already applied to your postings. However, teams that hire for niche or highly-skilled roles tend to rely on sourcing and outreach to passive candidates. There’s not a single ATS on the market that supports pre-application communications or tracking candidates who aren’t linked to a specific role or opening.

Even after a candidate applies and your ATS comes into play, Gem still has value to add. Our ATS integrations mean you can import higher-quality candidate data into your ATS without spending time on manual data entry. Your recruiters will have access to candidate information that’s always up-to-date—and they’ll have more time to leverage that data thanks to Gem’s automation capabilities.

With Gem, you can also export your ATS data and combine it with pre-application data for a more holistic view of your hiring funnel. For instance, you’ll be able to see where your best candidates are coming from so you can make smarter decisions on how to best spend your hiring budget. Features like this make Gem a must-have for companies that want to take a data-driven approach to recruiting.

Relationship management is also a huge differentiator for recruiters working in competitive markets or looking to fill competitive roles. A talent CRM like Gem can help you make the right impression on top talent and woo them to your company.

3. Our recruiters hardly even use the tools we have

Selling a team on a new piece of tech is always an uphill battle. Employees already have their favorite tools and workflows, and they don’t want to disrupt them just because leadership decides to invest in a new piece of software.

Gem provides value without requiring people to change their work habits. Our talent CRM has an 80% adoption rate (the average CRM adoption rate is 26%) because it sits on top of the websites and tools hiring teams already use, like LinkedIn, your ATS, and your email client. That means your best recruiters won’t have to shoehorn a new piece of tech into tried-and-true workflows; Gem integrates easily into your tech stack and starts building on your existing hiring infrastructure.

Once recruiters have access to Gem, they can benefit immediately from its robust automation capabilities. We built Gem to make recruiters’ lives easier. It can plug into each employee’s workflow and take over the repetitive administrative tasks that get in the way of deep work. If you need proof of its effectiveness, look to the professionals who have given us a G2 rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 (most of our competitors hover around 4 stars out of 5).

Source: g2.com

4. Our team doesn’t need any more sources for talent

Because Gem works with sourcing databases ranging from LinkedIn to Indeed to Stack Overflow, we get why people might think it’s another external database of talent. But our goal isn’t to replace the sources you already know work for your company—it’s to improve your team’s effectiveness in leveraging them.

Gem can sit on top of any sourcing site and has native integrations with over 20 sites to make data capture even easier. Gem improves the sourcing process by automating the busywork and providing support as you start your outreach and track candidate engagement.

5. We already have data analytics in our system

Between your ATS and other tools, you likely gather quite a bit of data about your hiring process already. There are two reasons to add Gem to your tech stack for this functionality. First, you’ll get new data your ATS doesn’t have access to. And second, Gem democratizes access to that data, so talent team members can see the analytics they need without taking time from your internal reporting resources to get the data.

Stacking Gem with your ATS gives you full-funnel hiring data, which is extremely helpful when you’re looking to optimize your recruiting process. For example, many companies have set big goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring. Gem gives you a better way to track those efforts.

Currently, most companies base their hiring DEI analyses on EEOC data, despite only 40-60% of applicants self-identifying on EEOC application questionnaires. This approach also limits your data pool to people who chose to apply—which means you don’t have visibility into factors that may cause marginalized candidates to self-select out of your process. You can’t make a good decision when you only have 50% of the data, and you can’t fix unconscious bias when you can’t see where it’s snuck into your hiring process. Gem helps you track your DEI efforts starting from the sourcing stage rather than the application stage, so you can pinpoint every factor affecting application and hiring rates. 

Another highlight of Gem’s data-heavy approach is our hiring dashboards. You can see benchmarks for common metrics like time to hire and offer-accept rate—both for your company and your industry. Having this information at your fingertips helps you set realistic goals for your team and track your progress. You can also see how you measure up to competitors and tailor your hiring process accordingly.

The most important thing about this data is that it’s easy for everyone to access. You won’t have to employ a specialist to dig into your systems and pull the numbers for you every time you want to make an informed decision. Gem’s self-serve approach to data returns time to your company’s data team and makes internal decisions faster because you can find what you need, when you need it.

We’re here to make hiring better

Every product decision we make at Gem is based around the question, “What do hiring professionals need?” And we know you need tools that are as easy to use as they claim to be, and that save you more time than they take to set up.

Sure, it doesn’t sound fancy when we tell people Gem works “out of the box” and it’s a “click-and-play” system. But fancy is often a synonym for frustrating.

When you invest in Gem, you get a system that picks up where your other hiring tools leave off, filling the gaps with automations and centralizing your efforts and data. You’ll be prioritizing an efficient and data-driven hiring process now and into the future. 

See for yourself why hiring teams love Gem. Request your free demo today.