Executive hiring with Gem

Executive recruitment has traditionally been outsourced to specialized firms: companies hired search firms for their VP-level and C-suite roles because those firms had deep talent pipelines that could surface qualified and interested candidates more quickly than in-house recruiting teams could. Executive recruiting was also an intermittent need, so outsourcing was a more cost-effective solution. But the talent landscape and recruitment technology have both changed significantly in recent years.

In an era of career transience (especially among Millennials), companies need to hire executives more frequently, making outsourcing a less compelling option from a financial perspective. And with modern recruiting solutions, in-house recruiting teams can now build and nurture candidate pipelines while crafting much more thoughtful and high-quality candidate experiences, creating those deep pools that were once only available to talent firms.

In-house executive recruitment isn’t just possible now; it’s favorable. After all, you don’t just reduce outsourcing costs by using an internal team. You also increase quality of hire, because your internal team is better positioned to share your company’s culture and values than an outsourced firm is—ultimately advancing your talent brand. In-house executive search teams can also partner much more closely with key stakeholders—other C-suite members—when it comes to calibration and designing the right interviews to obtain meaningful signal. At Gem, we believe it benefits companies to own the executive search process end-to-end. We also recognize that executive hiring demands a more high-touch, bespoke, and personalized approach—as well as some confidentiality. We’ve designed a few key features with that in mind:

Confidential Projects and Sequences

Executive searches aren’t typically announced as open roles to fill, and we understand the need to keep outreach covert. Confidential Projects ensure that only the user who creates the project—and anyone they’ve explicitly shared the project with—has access to view or edit it. Analytics for confidential projects are also kept hidden from view across Gem, except to those who have access to the project. Other users who land on the prospect’s Gem profile will not be able to see that the person is in a confidential project or engaging in confidential conversations with someone on your executive recruiting team.

Send-on-Behalf-of (SOBO)

Executive recruiting is a high-touch game that requires a high level of presence. SOBO lets recruiters send-on-behalf-of another executive in the company so that recruiters, hiring managers, and execs collaborate on outreach. With Gem, you can even send-on-behalf-of multiple teammates in the same sequence. Stage 1 might come from the recruiter; stage 2 from your Director of Engineering; stage 3 from your CTO, and stage 4 from your CEO. Now you’ve got a very high-touch engagement strategy from multiple people, who might even reference a conversation they had about this person in those messages to make it feel extra personal.

Hiring Manager Review Flow

Recruiters can submit executive candidates for review directly from their Gem Project. Reviewers (likely C-levels, or whomever the hiring manager is) will receive an email notification with a link to review each of the prospects’ resumes in a flipbook-style format—without having to install the Gem extension or go through the normal onboarding flow.

Due Dates, Notes, and @mentions

Hiring managers and reviewers can also leave notes and @mention teammates alongside any profile in Gem—including in the resume review flow—fostering a strong, collaborative hiring process that ensures you’re considering the right candidates.

Automatic Sequence Personalization and Custom Tokens

Gem allows you to automatically personalize any messaging with our standard Sequence tokens, but we understand that executive searches require even more personalized outreach than evergreen roles do. With that in mind, we’ve added additional custom tokens that allow recruiters to achieve a higher level of personalization at various points in their outreach, so that their messaging resonates with executive talent and their personal experiences.

Nurture

Gem’s Nurture feature allows recruiters to craft a message or a nurture sequence and schedule it to go out well past the initial outreach sequence, whether at a specific date and time (“July 17th at 7:35 AM”), or at a relative later time period (“in 6 months”).

It can take 12 to 20 touchpoints to influence an executive’s career decision. By the time your initial outreach sequence in Gem ends, you’ve only had around 4 touchpoints with talent; so if recruiters don’t have a solution to pick up the thread for that 5th, 6th, and 7th touchpoint, they’re starting from scratch every time. Gem has built-in talent re-engagement features that allow sourcers and recruiters to nurture candidates beyond the initial outreach sequence by searching their candidate database for candidates they’ve previously sequenced, and re-engaging with specific talent pools (in this case, execs). We’ve also recently added a feature that allows recruiters to easily set up a re-engagement sequence to go out in the future as soon as the initial outreach sequence ends.

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