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Gem has made Fortune’s 2021 Best Small & Medium Workplaces list

Ian van Dijk

Ian van Dijk

Technical Sourcer

Posted on

August 10, 2021

We’re proud to announce that Gem has earned a spot in Fortune’s 2021 Best Small & Medium Workplaces list—our second year in a row making this prestigious list. Since Great Place to Work® and Fortune named Gem a Best Workplace the first time around in 2020, we’ve also landed on Fortune’s list of Best Workplaces in the Bay Area, Y Combinator’s list of top companies, and the Breakout List of top startups to join.

It’s been a wild year, full of tough challenges as well as incredible progress for Gem as a company. After starting off last year’s Q2 in a climate of layoffs and hiring freezes (tough luck for a recruiting tech company!), we’ve more-than-doubled our customer base and nearly tripled our annual recurring revenue this year, as well as quadrupled our bookings this last quarter. We’ve also doubled the size of our team, acquired Resource’s business, and begun an exciting partnership with the Resource team’s next venture, Guide, to further help our customers create a world-class experience for their candidates.

Needless to say, it’s an exciting time to be a Gem, and this latest recognition from Great Place to Work goes to show that our rapid growth hasn’t shaken our foundations: we’re still a people-first culture with a strong commitment to our values of Diversity, Velocity, Customer-Centricity, and Transparency, who love helping our customers grow alongside us.

In GPtW’s confidential survey of more than 280,000 current employees at small and medium businesses—which evaluated trust in leadership, fairness in decision-making, levels of mutual respect and camaraderie among teams, and people’s ability to reach their full human potential at their companies—Gem shined. 99% of employees said that Gem is a great place to work—a full 40 percentage points higher than the average U.S. company. Rankings in the 2021 Best Small & Medium Workplaces list are based on employee feedback and take inclusivity into account as well. Companies are rewarded for including all employees, no matter who they are or what they do for the organization. Gem ranked #92 in the “Medium-Sized Workplace” category. Thanks to the rapid growth we saw last year, this is our first year in this category; and we’re honored to be recognized among organizations who’ve been around longer than we have, and that we look to as models for how to continue to put our people before anything else.

In concrete terms, we’ve done a lot on the People side to create the environment of trust, respect, fairness, and flourishing that won us this ranking. For example, one of the biggest challenges in creating a culture where everyone can thrive is ensuring there is adequate diversity in a company’s leadership bench, where underrepresented groups are typically represented even less. So we launched a Leadership Nurture program where we ask members of our leadership team to have three coffee chats with underrepresented professionals each quarter, with the aim of diversifying their own professional networks and laying the groundwork for future hiring. This program has already led to an increase in URM representation on our leadership team.

We’ve invested heavily in internal development, too. We piloted Shine, a mentorship program aimed at ensuring everyone at Gem has equal access to internal promotion, launched feedback trainings for the entire company to encourage a strong feedback culture at Gem, and implemented an equitable compensation program to make sure every role and employee is evaluated fairly. We also developed our performance management to increase transparency about how promotions happen at Gem and to help employees understand how they can grow in their careers.

To keep work and life in balance, Wednesdays from 1-5 are “no internal meeting” afternoons at Gem, and we take a Friday off every month that there isn’t a natural holiday. We continually monitor and adjust our meeting cadence to stave off video conference fatigue while most of us are still remote, and we’re making thoughtful decisions about our planned return to the office in 2022, based on feedback from regular employee surveys. Those who are excited to work together in person again now have the option to come into the office on Market Street — we’re dog-friendly!

If you want to learn more about Great Place to Work rankings, visit GreatPlaceToWork.com. If you want to grow your career at a fast-moving, people-first company, we would love to chat with you. Our careers page is full of open roles and details about what it’s like to be a Gem. If you like what you see, reach out!

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