The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
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- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 137: Navigating the future of tech: Layoffs, consolidation, and Al impact with Steven Bartel, Co-founder and CEO of Gem
The rapidly changing landscape of the tech industry presents a variety of challenges. In the latest episode of The Breakthrough Hiring Show, James Mackey hosted Steven Bartel, Co-founder and CEO of Gem, to discuss these dynamic trends. With a rich background in the tech sector and a keen eye on its future, Steve offered invaluable insights into layoffs, consolidation, and the transformative role of AI in recruitment.
0:33 Steve Bartel's background
1:48 Tech industry consolidation and the rise of all-in-one recruiting platforms
11:52 Leveraging AI in recruiting, pricing strategies, and product roadmap for Gem
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. Today, we are joined by Steve Bartell. Steve, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to have you. So before we jump into the topics, could you share your background with everyone?
Speaker 2:So I'm Steve. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Gem, and at Gem we're building an all-in-one recruiting platform. So think sourcing automation plus recruitment, crm plus recruitment, marketing and events plus analytics and, coming very soon, an applicant tracking system all in one. And our company is a growth stage tech company. We're a series C, we've got about $150 million in funding from Excel, greylock, iconic, sapphire, meritech, and we work with a pretty broad range of customers just over a thousand paying customers, split roughly a third between SMB, mid-market and enterprise. A lot of tech companies. Typically each year we work with more than half of the tech companies at IPO, but also some large enterprises, companies like Cisco, unitedhealth Group, american Axel, tesla and even Google.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's a quite a wide range of customers. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it keeps it interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So one of the first topics we outlined is to talk about what's happening right now in the tech industry. We're still seeing a lot of layoffs, unfortunately. So we're seeing consolidation right. We're seeing particularly on recruiting technology which, quite honestly, I don't feel like necessarily tonic position had quite as robust of a tech stack as maybe our peers and revenue teams, sales and marketing, but we were seeing.
Speaker 1:What I really loved about the last growth market is I felt like we were seeing more sophistication and tonic position that we hadn't seen before. I felt like revenue teams earlier, five to 10 years earlier, were getting a lot more sophisticated in terms of data optimization through data and reporting in these types of things, and I felt tonic position as a specialization was lagging and there's a few front runners, including Jim that was, I think, leading the charge in terms of making tonic position more data driven and giving that level of accessibility to companies. So I was really excited to see that. And then now we're looking at, okay, this crazy market that we've had in the past 12 to 18 months somewhere in there. So I want to get your thoughts on what you're seeing in terms of tech consolidation, feedback from customers, other conversations you might be having with CEOs. What do you see out there right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's 100% spot on. I think that the biggest trend that I'm seeing in the industry, especially within tech now we can talk about other industries too, but within tech, the biggest trend that I'm seeing is a shift towards consolidation, and it's being driven by a few things. One is just budgets are tighter across the board, and that's largely driven by the economy. And then the second thing is hiring goals are simply a lot lower. Some companies still have hiring freezes, most at least, have reduced hiring. And when you combine those two things budgets tighter, oftentimes driven by the CFO going department by department and saying, hey, how can we save more? Combined with reduced hiring goals, means that the A teams are looking to consolidate, and I think one of the biggest factors there is reducing costs.
Speaker 2:But I do think there also is this upside of recruiting. Teams are excited about the idea of a single platform that can do everything. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could use a great ATS with a great CRM and have that be all in one platform? Now I think the problem is oftentimes, when companies are looking to consolidate, they have to make a choice between using the best of read products and between a vendor that has more shallow functionality across all the areas. So with Jam, what we're trying to do is eliminate that choice, so that customers get the best of both worlds. We've already built out best of breed sourcing, automation, recruitment, analytics, crm, and now, very soon, we're bringing to market an ATS and our goal is to make that best of breed as well. So the companies don't have to choose. They don't have to choose between an all in one platform that might be shallower across the board versus a best of breed product like Jam.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would be really cool. I'm excited to see how that goes and I would actually love to play around with the applicant tracking system functionality and see how it works. I actually recently did a live demo with Gem just to familiarize myself with the current features and what you're doing. I really love the reporting and analytics piece. Yep, of course, like the automated cadences and multi-touch, multi-channel approach to sourcing, is really important. It brings a lot of consistency and efficiency gains to recruiting teams, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:However, I think what I was most drawn to, specifically for me and maybe it's because of my point of impact running an RPO company was just the visibility into data I thought was really cool. You have these different features or products that are essentially like rolling up into, like a dashboard or reporting function where you can get visibility to the entire pipeline and everything related to recruiting. So it's not only is it all this different functionality, but I think one thing that your team has done very well is really being able to show everything clearly through the reporting functionality, which is, again, I think, it's best in class from what I've seen. So, yeah, I'm pumped to see the applicant tracking system and you've got in everything else, like every other kind of feature set or solution that you've built out, has been best in class so far, so I'm sure the applicant tracking system is going to be pretty damn cool too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate that and yeah, that's one of the unique things about jam is definitely the analytics piece, and our goal there is to turn acquisition into a strategic partner to the rest of the business. Right, and whether that's you know, you, james as a more of an RPO where you can be a strategic partner to your clients, or whether that's a VP of talent acquisition or the different head of tech recruiting had a business recruiting and how they show up with their cross functional partners. I think the really cool thing about now having the ATS piece is, to your point, if you're leveraging jam for sourcing, if you're leveraging it for talent marketing and events Soon, if you're leveraging it for referrals, if you're leveraging it for your underlying CRM, for all of your top of funnel passive nurture, and then you're also leveraging it for your ATS, all of that data will now flow into one platform and then you'll be able to get those really deep insights in an unparalleled way to what existed before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and from what I could tell, the insight scale it's for larger organizations to, and the customization terms of workflows and pulling from different departments and different like layers to individual roles, scaling out to the department level location it seems like you can pretty much filter a ton of different ways, which I really like. So it's this could work for an earlier stage startup or a category leading company or an enterprise business. So I think that's really cool too. It's like a scale solution and that's actually something that historically, when I'm evaluating recruiting tech, one of the issues that I've seen with more so these holistic, all in one solutions is that there sometimes can be a limitation in terms of their scalability, right.
Speaker 1:So I've seen, for instance, like applicant tracking systems that try to do all these other things, but they might work for sub 50 employee companies, but then when they're for companies that are scaling, it's like things start to break down and there isn't enough customization, potentially integrations, the just different things that will make sense for scale organizations.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting is like the how you built the product because you already have all the like, reporting, analytics and everything that works for scale companies and large businesses. But I'm assuming that's like the challenge right, or like the hard problem to solve it's to bring enough functionality to the applicant tracking system, where people don't feel like, okay, we can go with a company that only does this or work with Jim, like I'm assuming, like that takes up a lot of headspace making sure that it has and a lot of functionality just to making sure it has all that functionality right 100%, and that's actually the biggest thing we're focused on with the new applicant tracking system is making sure it's built for scale, because when I talked to some of our enterprise customers and we talk about the applicant tracking system especially our customers that are public companies that's the one thing that they think about is, hey, will the scale with my business?
Speaker 2:And so what we're doing is we're building it at scale from the beginning by taking a lot of our learnings and insights from partnering with some of the largest enterprises in the world, but also it's built on top of gems really scalable back end Right.
Speaker 2:We have hundreds of millions of records that already flow through gem and we know what it takes to scale in terms of applicant tracking systems. And that's one of the areas where we think we can uniquely do it better than the rest, because we have the benefit of partnering with really large enterprises like United Health Group, like Google, like American Axle and Synta and Celestica and so many of these large enterprise companies, and so we know what these companies need as they scale from startup to growth, to public company to truly large enterprise company. One of the things we're doing there actually that I'm really excited about is we're kicking off an enterprise design partner council, and it's going to be some of GEM's largest customers advising us on our multi-quarter and soon multi-year roadmap for ATS, to make sure that we're looking around corners and building it for scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, and so my follow-up question is going to be, as you roll out the applicant tracking system actually, I'd love to know the timeline on that, and are you going to immediately roll out to enterprise, or do you think you're going to start with maybe a smaller customer segment and then work your way up in terms of releasing it or starting to sell it? I'm curious to hear about your strategy there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and you hit it on the head. It's the latter. And naturally we're going to start with our smaller customers because their needs are most simple. And then, as we battle-tested with those customers, we are constantly talking to the companies that are one to three stages of growth ahead of them A, so that we can make sure that we're building the ATS for that smaller cohort of customers from day one, in a way where it's already going to scale with them. But B, because two months later, that's when we're going to onboard the next tranche of customers that are slightly larger, and by some point in November we'll have most of GEM's small startups on our ATS and then we'll very quickly move it up market from there.
Speaker 1:And is there any? Of course, from an efficiency game perspective, having everything all at one is a huge value proposition to get folks to move from their current applicant tracking system to GEM. Is there anything like incentive, program-wise or anything that you'd want to share with folks, because I know some people are probably thinking, yeah, this would be really cool to consider, but we already have an active contract in place with X company, so do we really want to take the time and then we're already paying for this other thing? Any kind of thoughts that you could share with people tuning in?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. So, first off, our ATS is going to be very competitively priced, and we can do that because it's part of a much larger bundle. So what that means is we can actually afford to price it very competitively and pass on a lot of those savings to our customers in a time when they need it most. And so another thing we're seeing is a lot of applicant tracking system vendors are taking advantage of the fact that ATS is so sticky and jacking up prices 50% or even double. You're in this tough environment and, yeah, I think that's putting a lot of our customers in a really tough spot, and so what we're usually able to do from early conversations is come in and offer our ATS at 2-3X cheaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah compared to what's on the market, which is pretty incredible, and we're even willing to be super flexible and potentially buy out the remainder of certain ATS contracts just to get folks on boarded sooner.
Speaker 1:That's a really interesting strategy too. What's cool about what you're doing is you're right, it's like part of an overall package. So from a pricing standpoint, maybe it gives you a little bit more leverage because you can come in at a lower price point, because there's additional functionality and feature sets that you're also offering that hopefully would be part of a larger contract or whatever. That's a pretty cool advantage that I think you have over a fair amount of recruiting tech providers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And we can do that because we're driving a lot more value across the breadth of GEM's products, to the point where, if somebody goes with GEM for all of these best of re-products, they can actually save money while getting the best product for their team.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice. I know it's hard to do it, but I also wanted to talk to you about AI. There's a lot of AI startups that are getting a lot of funding right now. I think companies are still figuring out to some extent how they can really leverage it effectively and how to implement features and whatnot that are going to drive revenue growth and these types of things. So we're hearing a lot of buzz, some companies leveraging more effectively than others. I would love to get your thoughts on, specifically, the opportunities for leveraging AI within recruiting, and I would love to get your thoughts on where you think recruiting talent acquisition is heading over the next five years when it comes to implementing AI solutions, and then maybe we can get more dialed into specifically what GEM's doing. But if we could start more so high level on what you think and how you think AI is going to impact talent acquisition over the next five, 10 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. The first thing is there have been massive advancements in AI over the last few years, and what that's leading to is a huge wave of disruption across pretty much every industry. Every single industry is going to be disrupted in some way or another by AI, whether that's legal discovery documents to recruiting tech, and I think that there's a few things that are happening. One is there have been some real and massive advancements on the generative AI side, with companies like OpenAI and ChatGPT3, then 3.5, then 4, and each of these new iterations of ChatGPT have gotten so much better. And that's done two things One, it's gotten a lot of companies to adopt that technology and weave AI through their products. But two, it's actually put this massive spotlight on AI in every single industry and across the world, and the fact that you or I or my grandma can go onto ChatGPT and talk to it at home means that suddenly everybody in the world has access to this new technology and can see just how disruptive it is. And so what that's doing is it's also leading to a ton more demand for AI products across every enterprise company, but also companies like large and small. And so it's this really interesting time now, where both the technology has gotten really good, but also everybody realizes it, and that's making every single vendor pay a lot of attention.
Speaker 2:Now, where do we think this stuff is going in the next three to five years? I think AI is going to be threaded through a lot of different things. I think that AI, in my mind, it's not at the point where it's going to start replacing jobs. It's not going to replace entire humans, and if anyone's played around with ChatGPT, you'll know that, while it's really good, maybe five percent of the time it just makes something up. So it's still really important to have the right safeguards in AI, and in my mind, what that means is you absolutely still have humans in the loop across a lot of these different applications of AI, and we can then think of AI as a way to speed up humans, as a way to drive more efficiencies, as opposed to replacing them. That's where I really see this stuff going over the next three to five years.
Speaker 1:I love it, and so let's dive more in specifically to Jim right. When you think about Jim product roadmap, how you're currently leveraging it, how you want to leverage AI in the future, is there any more insight you could share there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I think, with that approach of trying to speed up recruiters, speed up recruiting teams rather than try to replace them, and making sure that there's humans in the loop, we're running it through a bunch of different parts of our products, but the goal being that recruiters still have full control of those decisions and what the AI ultimately does, and ideally, they have full visibility into why the AI is doing the thing they are right, as opposed to it being a black box, and especially when it relates to making hiring decisions, where there's so much risk for things like bias creeping in. So, with all that in mind, one of the first things we did right at the start of all this is we built AI into the messaging and draft creation. So now it's really easy to get started with a gem sequence, which are those multi stage email text, linkedin message campaigns where Jim AI can essentially help draft those for recruiters, saving them a bunch of time, at least giving them a starting point where they can then tweak it or personalize it to their role. On top of that, we've also started to thread it into personalization as it relates to those drafts for the specific folks that you're reaching out to. So Jim will feed in their background their resume, and the AI will write a personalization blurb that you can plug in as a token into your sequence. And now, because those workflows are embedded as you're sourcing someone, that gives the recruiter the full control and visibility to review that message in real time as they're looking at the background to make sure that it's accurate and the right thing to reach out with.
Speaker 2:So those are a few examples and with both of those things, the idea is to speed recruiters up but still give them the full control and visibility into what's happening.
Speaker 2:We've also started to embed AI into inbound application review and candidate rediscovery, the idea being that if you're a company that has a ton of applications which actually many companies have in this environment, now that the market has shifted, it can be really hard to shift through all of those applicants and find the ones that are the most relevant for at your job. Now, to start, one of the cool ways that we've done that that still gives recruiters full control is we allow them to paste in the job description and Gem will use AI to recommend all of the keywords and bullions that go into the search on top of your inbound applicants, and so that actually gives full visibility and control into the recruiter until AI is just constructing the search. And now the recruiter can even tweak it. They can add a new keyword that can drop one that isn't as relevant, in that spirit of things not being a black box.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. It's really exciting to see. When I was doing the demo of Gem the other day, I saw some of the AI draft functionality for the outreach cadences and particularly one of the advantages of Gem two is like setting up for three to four step campaigns, if you will, for cadences for candidate outreach. It's not like you just have to write one message. So that's where it's to me it becomes even like more valuable, because it's okay, I got to come up with four different ideas here, right, Four different, and then it's what. You could, of course, test it, look at conversion rates and then tweak right Based on what messages work best. So, yeah, I think that's a pretty straightforward way for recruiters to just save time and working on several roles and you just don't need just. It doesn't make sense to start from scratch, usually Unless for sure that something's going to work, but it just gives you fresh ideas, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's proven that if you follow up two to four times, you'll actually double your response rate. It's quite remarkable, but what that means is a lot of times people are sending just these canned follow ups for stage two, three and four. It's like something like short and sweet and not personalized. I think one of the advantages of AI and one of the opportunities is you know what if each of those emails could be highly personalized to that person's background and maybe interjecting a new piece of information that the previous message didn't?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's because it's not just like this random draft, like a chat GPT. It's actually pulling from date on a candidate. So, yep, a personalized way to accelerate, versus just like some random kind of template that isn't personalized. So, yeah, that's really cool. And, look, I would like love to keep going and talking here. We're coming up on time today. Steve, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with everyone. This is incredibly valuable and just real quick. Like to announce the partnership that secure vision and Jim have made on the breakthrough hiring show. Steve's going to be coming on once a quarter, so make sure to tune in every quarter to hear what Steve has to say about town acquisition, state of the tech industry, state of recruiting tech and all the cool stuff he's doing over at Jim. So anyway, steve, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great to be here and looking forward to seeing you next time.
Speaker 1:For sure Better and for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Take care.
