How Gem embeds AI across every stage of recruiting

At this year's Talent Summit, Sarah Koo, Head of Product at Gem, showcased how AI-first recruiting technology addresses the biggest challenges facing TA teams today. Her keynote deep-dived into the practical applications of AI across the entire recruiting workflow, and the results speak for themselves.

App Review: Solving the application overload crisis

Sarah opened with a stark reality check: recruiting teams are drowning in applications.

The numbers are staggering. Some of Gem's customers receive over 250,000 applications per month, which would take over 2,000 hours to review manually. For one customer's role, a third of the 6,000 applications came from candidates already rejected for the same position.

Gem's AI-powered application review solves this by:

• Automatically ranking candidates based on hiring criteria and natural language prompts.

• Generating transparent summaries that highlight key qualifications and explain ranking decisions.

• Flagging top candidate matches in seconds so teams can move quickly on the best talent.

Rediscovery: Your future hires are already in your database.

Sarah revealed a powerful but underutilized recruiting insight: you've met most future hires. Gem's benchmark data shows that 30-50% of hires come from candidates already in a company's CRM or ATS — and for enterprise companies, that figure jumps to 50-70%.

Gem's AI Rediscovery feature unveils this hidden talent pool by:

• Scanning your entire ATS and CRM databases to identify past candidates who now match current roles.

• Providing complete context about previous interactions, including when they last applied, why they were rejected, interview feedback, and who was last in contact.

• Enabling recruiters to build qualified candidate shortlists with just a few clicks.

Sourcing: Beyond keyword matching

Traditional sourcing relies heavily on basic keyword matching and manual filtering. Sarah demonstrated how Gem's upgraded AI Sourcing capabilities go much deeper, capturing nuanced data points that matter for finding the right candidates. The best part is that you don’t have to rely on just Boolean filters. Gem’s AI interface allows you to describe your ideal candidate in your own words using natural language prompts.

Gem identifies candidates based on sophisticated criteria like:

• Funding stage and company size experience.

• Consumer versus enterprise B2B product background.

• Career progression patterns (promotions versus job hopping).

• Specialized expertise (marketplace engineers, iOS specialists, former founders).

• Company culture fit (high-growth startups versus large tech companies).

Most importantly, Gem does the "relationship homework" before outreach to prevent embarrassing duplicate contacts. The system simultaneously searches across inbound applicants, ATS databases, CRM records, and new public profiles, demonstrating the power of integrated AI solutions.

Outreach: Drive 30-40% higher response rates

Gem's AI-powered messaging has always been a standout feature, but recent updates make it even more powerful. The system now considers past communications with candidates to create hyper-personalized outreach that feels genuinely human.

The results are impressive: customers using Gem AI for outreach see response rates increase by 30-40%.

Scheduling: No more logistics nightmares

Interview coordination remains one of recruiting's most significant pain points, but Gem's intelligent scheduling handles the complexity automatically. Whether managing complex onsite panels, superdays, or simple self-scheduling links, the AI coordinates across time zones, balances interviewer loads, manages training and shadowing requirements, and handles reminders and rescheduling.

Customers are now scheduling 2-3 times more interviews using half the coordination effort, with faster time-to-schedule and less back-and-forth.

Scorecard summaries: AI-powered interview insights

After interviews end, Gem AI eliminates the manual work of reviewing feedback one-by-one. The system automatically summarizes scorecard feedback across multiple interviews, highlights key strengths and themes, and provides transparent citations back to specific interviewer comments.

This ensures hiring teams enter debriefs fully prepared and focused on the most important discussion points.

What's coming next?

Sarah concluded with an exciting preview of upcoming features that will further integrate AI throughout the platform:

• Talent Insights for labor market research and informed recruiting decisions.

• Expanded talent pools with profiles from niche sources like Google Scholar and GitHub.

• Hyper-personalized outreach using more contextual signals and conversation history.

• Candidate and hiring manager surveys with customizable dashboards for process improvement.

• Powerful automation engine with set-and-forget workflows triggered by dozens of attributes.

• An expanded ATS ecosystem with additional integrations beyond current partnerships.

The bigger picture:

Sarah reinforced Gem's core philosophy: AI should handle the manual, time-consuming tasks so recruiters can focus on what they do best — building human relationships and making strategic hiring decisions.

As recruiting teams face increasing pressure to do more with less, AI-first all-in-one recruiting platforms like Gem prove that the right technology doesn't replace human expertise, but amplifies it. The key is having AI built into the platform's foundation rather than bolted on as an afterthought, ensuring all systems work together with complete candidate context.

For recruiting leaders looking to stay competitive in today's challenging talent market, Sarah's insights offer a roadmap for leveraging AI to drive measurable improvements in efficiency, candidate experience, and hiring outcomes.

This blog post recaps Sarah Koo’s keynote at Talent Summit 2025. Stay tuned for more content from the event!