Gem’s Diversity Recruiting Insights Wins a Top HR Product of 2021 Award

We’re both honored and excited to announce that Gem’s Diversity Recruiting Insights solution won a Top HR Product of 2021 Award from Human Resource Executive® and HR Tech. The Top HR Products contest is an annual award given out for the most innovative new tools and solutions on the market that support businesses in meeting their wide-ranging, ever-evolving HR needs. It’s a merging of the two most longstanding, most prestigious awards and recognitions in the HR technology industry: “Top HR Products of the Year,” selected by the editors of Human Resource Executive®, and “Awesome New Technologies for HR,” recognized at the HR Technology Conference. Recruiting and HR leaders often turn to these industry-leading efforts to discover the-best-of-the-best in the rapidly-growing HR tech marketplace, and to identify the most viable tools for their organizations. 

According to Human Resource Executive®, submissions are judged “on their innovation in the HR tech space, with particular attention to how the tools are breaking new ground, how much value they add to the HR function, how intuitive they are for users, and whether they deliver what they promise.” Does the solution solve a problem in a new and innovative way? Is it something the market hasn’t seen before? Are users delighted when they see it? Judges relied on a combination of staff selections and reviews, as well as comments from third-party HR analysts and experts, to narrow the entries received down to 13 winners. Diversity Recruiting Insights was selected out of 110 entries this year.

Gem’s Diversity Recruiting Insights is a part of the Talent Compass module, the first solution to give companies complete visibility into the success of their diversity recruiting strategies across the entire hiring funnel—from first outreach to hire. Most organizations have very little visibility into the diversity of their hiring funnels, since they typically have to wait for candidates to self-identify through EEOC data, which occurs after a candidate has applied or is hired. But waiting until candidates are in process is prohibitive, since the best diversity initiatives begin at the very top of the funnel—before prospects even apply. Channels like inbound and referrals are inherently less diverse; so if teams aren’t actively sourcing diverse talent pools, they won’t see a diverse pipeline—and ultimately, a diverse team. 

Gem is the only product that allows recruiting teams to see if they’re driving enough top-of-funnel outreach to underrepresented groups to build healthy pipelines. We then track how those candidates move through the funnel once they decide they’re interested and enter the hiring process. While other solutions focus on helping organizations find diverse talent without a way to subsequently track how those candidates progress through the pipeline, Gem gives full visibility into funnel effectiveness, so teams can pivot and adjust mid-process to achieve their diversity goals. Is email outreach inadvertently alienating underrepresented groups, and how can sourcers rework their messaging to be more inclusive? Where are systemic biases showing up—by role, recruiter, or hiring manager—as some candidate segments get stuck at certain stages of the funnel? Based on your team’s historical data, how many candidates will you need at every stage of the funnel to make one underrepresented hire? Why didn’t the team hit its diversity hiring goals in a given quarter or year? Gem’s metrics answer these questions, and more. Specifically, Diversity Recruiting Insights:

• Helps companies gain a clear understanding of their pipeline by automatically categorizing gender and race/ethnicity for prospects and candidates with 75-95% accuracy. Gem only shows aggregate analytics and never displays categories at the individual level to avoid introducing bias into the hiring process.

• Provides insights on top-of-funnel outreach to underrepresented groups, ensuring the organization is taking a proactive approach to engaging diverse talent from the very beginning of the process.

• Uncovers bottlenecks in different steps of the hiring process—whether it be the application stage, phone screen, interview, or offer—so teams understand where underrepresented talent is progressing through the funnel at slower rates or dropping out of process altogether. Companies use this data to adjust their strategies accordingly.
  

This approach allows customers to understand how likely they are to achieve their diversity goals, identify areas to optimize and de-bias, know where to deploy additional support to build more diverse pipelines, and shift strategy in real-time to help attract and hire more diverse talent. 

Companies like Twillio and Unity are leveraging Gem’s Diversity Recruiting Insights solution to proactively manage their diversity efforts, using data to guide their approach:

The Top HR Products winners and solutions will be showcased at the HR Technology Conference at the end of September—and we’ll be at HR Tech; so stop by for a demo if you’re there! If you can't make the conference, and if you’re curious about how Diversity Recruiting Insights can help your team, you can read more about it here, or schedule a demo here.