Greenhouse and Gem create powerful sourcing solution
4 mins, 21 secs read time
A Q&A with Gem CEO, Steve Bartel
Today is an exciting day in the world of talent and HR. First, we announced our integration with Gem, an all-in-one recruiting platform that provides a single source of truth for Talent teams. This enhanced integration makes it easier for users to manage their workflows in the Greenhouse Recruiting CRM tools and more accurately represents talent pools in realtime. Communication with potential candidates is an essential part of the sourcing process and Gem’s email capabilities truly elevate the Greenhouse Recruiting CRM.
It’s also day two of Greenhouse OPEN 2019, where Gem will give a detailed talk on the shifting landscape of talent acquisition. This session will share insightful ideas for making your emails with passive candidates more likely to resonate and encourage responses.
In preparation for today’s session, I sat down with Gem’s CEO Steve Bartel to learn more about what this integration means for customers and what makes Gem a valuable asset to the Greenhouse ecosystem.
Jillian: You’ve been in the HR industry for a while now. What’s your take on the recruiting industry?
Steve: The landscape of Talent Acquisition is shifting. As posting jobs and waiting for inbound applications becomes less and less effective, capturing the attention of passive Talent has become a key strategy for Talent Acquisition teams. This means more companies invest in sourcing from an early stage and make bigger investments as they scale. Gem and Greenhouse are at the forefront of this change, and our partnership allows our mutual customers to source faster and build relationships with Talent.
Jillian: You’ve put a lot of your focus on building a strong integration with Greenhouse. What was so compelling about integrating with Greenhouse back in 2017? And why have you continued to put efforts behind this integration?
Steve: Initially, we were excited to integrate with Greenhouse because they had the best partner ecosystem and APIs. After building our initial integration, we quickly realized that many of the top teams we were talking to already used Greenhouse. We now share more than 150 mutual customers across industries like tech, healthcare and finance, so continuing to invest in a best-in-class integration has been an easy decision.
Jillian: What motivated Gem to integrate with Greenhouse Recruiting CRM?
Steve: Integrating with Greenhouse CRM was a natural extension of our integration with Greenhouse ATS. It’s crucial to know whether a candidate or prospect is already in your ATS or CRM before reaching out. And uploading to a job or prospect pool in one click saves so much time.
Jillian: Now that Gem has an enhanced integration with Greenhouse Recruiting CRM, how does the combination of these two solutions create more value for our mutual customers?
Steve: The integration with Greenhouse saves recruiters time. By automating the manual, tedious work that goes into sourcing, recruiters are 5 times faster! And our integration with Greenhouse is a huge piece of that. This has always been the case for Greenhouse Recruiting, so now we’re able to deliver this same value to customers that use Greenhouse CRM.
Jillian: Email automation is growing in popularity. How should recruiting teams think about measuring the success of their communication efforts?
Steve: Email automation is growing in popularity because it works. It turns out that more than half of your positive responses come from the second, third and fourth round of follow-up. This doubles the conversion rate from recruiter phone screen.
And, because your reach-outs are all tracked, teams can measure the success of their communication efforts. For example, tracking opens, clicks and replies is crucial to understanding what’s working and what’s not. Tracking your volume of outreach for a role helps answer important questions, like how many waves of outreach does it take to make one offer.
Finally, managers have visibility into how many messages each recruiter is sending giving them the ability to set specific goals and track recruiter performance.
Jillian: What are some of the reasons a team would invest in a robust solution through Greenhouse versus a stand-alone email marketing product?
Steve: Most email automation products are designed for sales or marketing, so they integrate with Salesforce. Gem is designed for recruiters, so naturally our Greenhouse integration is a big win. Not only does it save time, but it also helps keep the data in your ATS/CRM clean.
There are other benefits to using a solution designed for recruiters – finding personal email addresses, personalizing your outreach, sending on behalf of a hiring manager… the list goes on.
Jillian: What are you most excited about when you think about the future of the Greenhouse and Gem partnership?
Steve: We’re always looking for ways to deepen our partnership by making our Greenhouse integration even more seamless. One of the future areas I’m personally excited about is analytics. Every Talent leader and recruiting ops specialist we talk to wants to become more data-driven, but it’s been difficult because a lot of what happens at the top of the funnel has never been tracked. Now that we’re able to capture everything, Greenhouse and Gem have a big opportunity to help recruiting teams track goals, forecast, and understand the return on investment for their different recruiting efforts.