Solution Brief

The business case for Gem: why your talent acquisition team needs more than LinkedIn

If your business has a talent acquisition team—even if that “team” is a single in-house recruiter—it’s spending the vast majority of its sourcing time on LinkedIn. And for good reason: LinkedIn is the largest professional network, with 660M+ members and counting. Your team likely uses LinkedIn Recruiter (or Recruiter Lite), and they can send prospective candidates messages from that platform. So why does your team think they need anything more?

It’s a fair question. Here’s a typical workflow for a sourcer/recruiter who needs to fill a role:

  • Search LinkedIn to find qualified prospects

  • Message them through InMail or email (if you somehow have their contact info)

  • Open up a Google Doc, notepad, etc. to copy/paste that templatized outreach

  • Set calendar reminders to check in on prospects who don’t respond

  • Manually record everyone you reached out to in a spreadsheet so you remember which people you reached out to for which roles

Aside from this workflow being tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone, it also overlooks several important data points:

Email > InMail

90% of talent prefers to be contacted by email rather than InMail. This means that sourcers who reach out via InMail aren’t keeping prospects’ preferences (and the overall candidate experience) in mind. What’s more, 40% of tech talent has InMail notifications turned off—meaning that they won’t see those messages unless they proactively go check LinkedIn.

Your First Message is Statistically Unlikely to Succeed

While a single email only sees a 15% reply rate, a 4-email sequence sees a 35% reply rate. Yet InMail follow-ups are manual and can’t be tracked without a spreadsheet, meaning recruiters are much less likely to remember to follow up after that first attempt. Gem’s automated email follow-ups, on the other hand, make you more than twice as likely to get to an initial phone screen… and because recruiters can set-it-and-forget-it, there’s no pressure for them to remember to send that second, third, or fourth email. Say goodbye, spreadsheets.

“Our response rate drastically increased once our Sourcers started using Gem. The automated follow-up feature doubled our conversion rate from initial reach out to phone screen.”

Mike Moriarty | Dropbox

Mike Moriarty

Global Head of Engineering Staffing

Dropbox | Customer Logo

Automation Allows You to Source 4x Faster

Streamlining your team’s workflows through Gem reduces swiveling across disparate systems. Talent teams source 4 times faster thanks to automated email finding and 1-click uploads of prospect information to your ATS—not to mention those automated follow-ups. Gem makes prospect organization and outreach effortless.

“By automating painful manual processes, Gem has boosted our team’s productivity by 12x. We’re sourcing faster and more efficiently than we ever thought possible. Our team can now focus on what’s most important—providing stellar candidate experiences.”

Chinsin Sim | Robinhood

Chinsin Sim

Senior Technical Recruiter

Robinhood | Customer Logo

And for organizations who want best-in-class talent acquisition teams, Gem offers:

Recruiting Metrics

Gem’s sourcing analytics let you track your team’s top-of-funnel hiring efforts, measure productivity, manage performance, and even track how male vs. female prospects are engaging with your outreach. Content stats allow for cross-team visibility into what kinds of links are being shared in outreach messages, and which content solicits the most engagement (clicks and replies). Because individual recruiters have visibility into the entire team’s messaging, they can learn from each other, and uncover best practices.

“I can see that our most recent hire went from our second email to our website to a blog post; he responded to us 6 minutes later. Thanks to Gem, I know how he became familiar with us, and what content ultimately prompted him to engage with us.”

Shannon Zwicker | Cockroach Labs

Shannon Zwicker

Manager of Recruiting Operations

Cockroach Labs | Customer Logo

Team and Hiring Manager Collaboration

Gem allows sourcers, recruiters, and hiring managers to collaborate on a set of resumes quickly and easily, greasing the wheels for intake sessions and subsequent ongoing calibration. Our Rules of Engagement feature helps sourcers avoid duplicate outreach (thus preserving talent brand) by giving at-a-glance information about prospect ownership alongside a complete history of prospect communications and activity in a consolidated feed. And with our send-on-behalf-of (SOBO) email capabilities, hiring managers can choose to become part of the conversation by lending their names and voices to outreach, which typically increases response rates.

“The most exciting thing about Gem to me is the night and day change in my Hiring Managers’ activity. It has become so easy for them to send customized messages and sequences, and I’ve never before seen such a willingness to be strategic partners alongside our recruiters.”

Thomas Carriero

Chief Product Development Officer

Segment | Customer Logo

To learn more about how Gem can help your team, contact us here.

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