The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 154: Strategies for the new age of tech hiring with Steve Bartel, Founder & CEO of Gem
In this episode, host James Mackey, CEO of SecureVision RPO, and Steve Bartel, Founder & CEO of Gem, uncover the latest trends and strategies reshaping tech recruitment. Steven also shares insights on Gem's acquisition of InterviewPlanner, highlighting its role in building an all-in-one hiring platform.
0:00 Roles in high demand in the tech industry
8:01 Effective recruitment strategies for hard-to-fill roles
18:25 Integrated interview scheduling
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Today we got some pretty cool topics to discuss, including we're going to go through the roles that are most in demand in the tech industry, talk a little bit about recruiting for engineers and machine learning talent. We're going to go into a recent acquisition that the team over at Jim has made Steve's going to tell us all about that and we're going to talk about some other things as well in terms of how to engage and recruit talent. So it's going to be a good mix of topics today and, steve, I think where we could probably start is going through roles that are really in demand. Like I had mentioned before, we hit record that we're seeing a fair amount of demand for more, so technical talent, engineers, machine learning talent and I was doing some searches on open jobs just on LinkedIn in the tech industry and I was typing in different job titles to see the amount of open jobs. So, like for internet software companies, I saw, I think, the stat I saw just within that, and, of course, there are SaaS tech companies that aren't categorized on their LinkedIn page as internet. So there's probably a lot more, but I saw 10,000 plus open jobs for machine learning job postings and then for account executives, I only saw a thousand and for SDRs I saw a thousand. So it's basically a 10 to one or five to one between revenue roles and technical roles at this point in time.
Speaker 1:One of our biggest RPO contracts that we're working on right now is helping a growth stage SaaS company hire machine learning talent, and it's really the only. Those types of roles are really the only ones where it's like a very competitive market, like we have product roles at other companies, revenue roles at other, and closing or hiring is pretty straightforward right now. It's they're not getting multiple other offers at the same time. So we have our pick between a ton of candidates and as long as you make a competitive offer, they're essentially going to accept. I don't think we've had an offer declined on revenue roles or product roles in the past quarter, but machine learning is. If we get to an offer, they have four other offers. So I guess we wanted to talk a little bit about that and hiring engineers and maybe go through some data around that. Where do you think we should start there? I'm just curious, based on data and what you're seeing at Jim, if you have any really helpful insights there related to hiring engineering talent right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. First off, I think that matches my intuition entirely when you look at what's happened to open roles. First of all, open roles are down across the industry, except for maybe in a few select spots. But the places where they're down the most is on the revenue side, the sales side, compared to before when companies had more of this. Grow at all costs mentality back before the tech downturn. Grow at all costs mentality back before the tech downturn. And so, yeah, revenue roles are definitely down a lot year over year.
Speaker 2:And then also HR and recruiting roles are pretty hard to come by. So, relatively speaking, I'd say those two job families are the lowest compared to where they have been, say, two years ago. But there's some roles that have held up pretty well and others that are, I think, in even more high demand than ever, the ones that I've heard about and that just also match my intuition. First off, I think exec recruiting is alive and well, so every company needs leaders, and leaders turn over and CROs, VPs, avenge, cmos, those types of roles like companies are still trying to hire for, replace and find great execs. And then, as you called out, technical roles are remaining in pretty high demand but specifically like any talent related to AI, given what's happening in the industry. So I think what you shared, what you're seeing, really matches up what I'm seeing and my intuition as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. It's just a lot of our other customers that aren't hiring ML talent really don't seem to be hiring much at all. They're keeping their head down pretty low. Yeah, we've seen some revenue talent. We're working with one customer. This is an earlier stage company and they're hiring somebody in product as well as in UX, and we got flooded with 800 applications within I don't know several days and it's weird because we're turning down really good candidates and when they're asking for feedback, it's just look, you're really good at what you do. It was a positive experience. It's just that the market's flooded with so many candidates that we were essentially able to find the exact profile, essentially, of what we're looking for. We'd love to keep in touch with the future. There's just so many people right now. It's just wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the interesting thing is because there are fewer open roles and there's more candidates on the market and there's a lot of qualified candidates on the market. Actually, the biggest challenge for many of these roles the ones that aren't as hard to fill right now is just how do I get through all my inbound? We've seen, I think, something like a 40%, maybe even higher, increase in inbound like year over year and it was already increased last year compared to the years prior. And really cool GEM stat, I think 20% of our customers have 1,000 plus inbound applicants per role, which is pretty wild and you just think about the sheer amount of inbound that you have to get through. That's a lot of inbound and hopefully a lot of qualified people applying to these product roles and also to these revenue roles and open recruiting headcount and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, For sure. But getting back to ML and engineering talent, I was having a conversation earlier today with our probably our best technical ML recruiter here at Secure Vision. She shared some pretty interesting insights with me, but basically I asked questions around how she goes about sourcing and engaging talent where she's finding them and, as you can probably imagine, she was finding a lot of the talent on LinkedIn. But a lot of these candidates are getting a ton of outbound recruiters reaching them via outbound and she is sending LinkedIn and mails, but she's also leveraging Jim to send emails as well and she's essentially it's a combination of those things. She is sending follow-ups, but she's trying to be thoughtful. She's not spamming them with too many messages.
Speaker 1:We actually didn't get into exactly how many follow-ups she's doing. I'm sure there's a bit of a diminishing returns aspect, but also I think you have some stats on like how many follow-ups are actually ideal for getting the best results. I guess like we could start there, like in terms of multi-channel and the amount of follow-ups for engineering talent specifically, do you have any insights there on what companies and recruiters should be doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a bunch. This is our bread and butter because we got our start with sourcing and, of course, gem's platform's a lot broader than that now, but we're experts on the sourcing side and the best practices to reach hard to fill talent and roles. Yeah, on the sourcing side, especially for things like ML engineers. Of course it applies to like leadership roles, any hard to fill role.
Speaker 2:First off, actually, for engineering talent especially, a lot of engineering talent, including ML engineers, have their email notifications off. They're savvy to know that they can actually change that setting in their LinkedIn settings. Most of us don't even know that it's an option, but yeah, they've turned that off because, historically, the last 10 plus years they've just been inundated with emails and a lot of technical talent feels like it's a noisy channel for them and for a long time it's been a lot better and more effective to reach technical talent, especially like ML talent, over email. But I think the omni-channel approach is even better. But something like I think close to half of, I think, technical talent, especially for these hard to fill roles, might even just have their email notifications off, which is a lot higher than like most other roles, and there's certain roles where you couldn't even turn your notifications off like revenue roles, recruiting roles because you need those to be able to do your job right. So that's the first thing. Taking an omni-channel approach is really effective. So it's actually cool to hear that your recruiter is maybe sending an email, but also sending a few emails and follow-ups, because then she's got a much higher chance of reaching people in their preferred inbox, whether that's LinkedIn or email.
Speaker 2:In terms of follow-ups, our data has shown for a long time that you get about half of the positive responses from emails two through four that you send. So if you're only sending one message, you're leaving about half of the positive replies on the table right. So it's really important to follow up. Historically, there might've been a question as to is that worth it? Because following up takes a lot of time and energy. You have to remember to do it, you have to set calendar reminders, all that good stuff. But now with tools like Jam and other email automation, like sourcing automation tools, it's almost a no-brainer, because you can tee up a four-stage email sequence with three automated follow-ups on the exact days and time a week that you want with no extra effort, and so you're no longer leaving those 50% of the positive replies on the table.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And for engineering talent specifically, do you have I don't know if it's just aggregate statistics across several roles, or do you guys have the stats on for engineering talent? How many follow-ups is ideal?
Speaker 2:You still want to send four messages total in that initial outreach. It's, I think, the same across most roles the stat that I shared about 50% of your positive replies being left on the table if you're not sending those follow-ups. That's the average across all roles. I don't have the exact specific stats for EngTalent in terms of, like, how many people respond to messages two through four, but it's important. I think. That's where the balance, though, comes in, because as you send more and more follow-ups, as you can imagine, you start to get diminishing returns. Because, as you send more and more follow-ups, as you can imagine, you start to get diminishing returns, and our data showed and I forget exactly what the data is because it's been a while since I've looked at it but when you send message 5, 6, 7, 8, which some people do in that initial outreach, it's just not really worth it. You get a little bit of a boost, but it really falls off after message 4. And at that point you have to start worrying about am I hurting my talent brand?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you probably at that point. Also, if you're not, the other aspect I would say is, if you're not getting follow-ups, at that point maybe look at your messaging again. Yeah, I was asking. So I was asking my lead tech recruiter, like, how do you go about messaging? And it was actually pretty straightforward and simple. She just said she was sending pretty short messages but she would really focus on what she was relevant about their background and speaking to the projects that they would be working on. So she wouldn't necessarily just say high-level stuff like hey, I'm working with a growth stage SaaS company that's building out their ML team, for instance. She might say something like that, but it was more of hey, I, really I noticed that you have this experience in distributed systems on this and that, and we're, we're. I'm working at a company right now who's also in the growth stage, similar size and scale, who needs ML engineers to work on X, y, z project.
Speaker 1:Cool, because she was just saying that a lot of tech recruiters that are just reading requirements in terms of technologies.
Speaker 1:They don't really understand how to communicate with machine learning engineers or just technical talent in general in terms of speaking to specific projects that they're likely working on, even if they don't have it completely written out Understanding the industry, the type of company they're working for, the types of projects they're probably working on, context cues on their profiles, and then, speaking to that experience, along with how it aligns with the, when you're able to basically articulate the projects that they're working on, not just the technologies but the types of projects and the types of projects they would be doing with your company, then that's really how you maximize the response rate, because otherwise they're going to think this person doesn't really understand my background or the type of work that I do. Just because they understand a technology I work with doesn't really mean they understand, like, my role within the company and how I make an impact in these types of things. Pretty straightforward, but I thought it was pretty helpful as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think, in terms of the outreach itself for really hard to fill roles like hyper personalization starts to make a lot more sense. Even personalization in general can be really effective. Now, I'm not talking about hey name at company Saw, you've been working on title right, like that kind of stuff gets you a tiny boost. But it's not like the same as like a recruiter actually sitting down looking at someone's profile and, like you said, like mapping that to why they'd be excited to work on these very specific initiatives or projects. But even using AI to personalize, we find that customers that use gem AI in their draft creation get something like a 40% boost on their response rate, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:That's insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker 2:Maybe the last best practice I would offer up in terms of folks that are looking to break through the noise and reach hard to fill talent, is sending on behalf of a hiring manager can be super effective when you think about it.
Speaker 2:For a machine learning engineer, somebody that's in really high demand like, who would they rather hear from? Would they rather hear from a recruiter or maybe the hiring manager on the team that they'd be joining, or, better yet, like the VP of engineering, right? And so we find that sending on behalf of a hiring manager or an exec I've seen this can increase response rates by one and a half X to up to three X, depending on the type of role that you're hiring for, how hard to fill it is and how much it would resonate to hear from an executive on the team or a hiring manager. Now I think the key is you want to make sure that those folks are actually invested in the hiring process and especially your hiring managers, that they would be excited to hop on a pre-sale call with really stellar candidates. I think it can feel a little bit bad to be bait and switched in terms of getting reached out to by an exec but then having them pass you right back to the recruiter. That can still be effective. Both approaches can work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, that's a really good point, and I guess that's probably only possible through not only possible through Jim, but I've actually done that sometimes on LinkedIn as well, where I'll have recruiters send messages through my profile Totally, which I don't know if that's a best practice people should follow. I don't know if I could get. I could see myself getting flagged by LinkedIn for doing that. Hey, we saw a recruiter logging in from a different city or from LATAM or whatever. We saw that IP address and they could shut down my account or something. So maybe that's not. It hasn't happened.
Speaker 1:I've been doing it off and on for almost six months at this point.
Speaker 2:So nope, people do it all the time and actually it's.
Speaker 2:We've done this at Gem and, yeah, we've never run into any troubles with sharing logins for LinkedIn, especially when you want to be sending on behalf of somebody.
Speaker 2:But I think it gets a lot easier if you can automate the process. All these things whether it's sending follow-ups, personalization, stobo, as we call it, send on behalf of a hiring manager or an exec omni-channel approach and all of these things are certainly possible without GEM and regardless of whether you're using GEM or not, you should definitely try them out, measure them, see the impact for yourself. But they get a whole lot easier with Gem because we automate the whole thing and put it on autopilot. Actually, james, I didn't know if you know this, but even for folks that are collaborating with in-house teams, you can even set up a cross domain. Your recruiter could be using your account and then you could get an alias from one of your clients that says it basically looks like the hiring manager or it looks like the VP. They could off that with your gem account and then you could now be sending on behalf of that email address for your client.
Speaker 1:Oh nice, yeah, that's pretty cool. That's awesome. I'll definitely I'll have to check that out. I don't know, I'll talk to my tech recruiter to see exactly how we're doing it now, but yeah for sure. And I also I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the recent acquisition that your team made. If you could do, you want to give us an overview of the type of solutions. I don't know if you can name the company or whatever details you feel like you want to share, but yeah, I guess, just like why your team made the acquisition, what, but yeah, I guess, just like why your team made the acquisition, what the technology does and why you felt, based maybe on, like customer conversations or whatnot, it made sense to make this acquisition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. We actually announced the acquisition a few weeks ago, so I'm really excited to share more, get the word out. So JEM acquired a company called Interview Planner and we're really excited to welcome them to the team. Interview Planner does automated interview loop scheduling, so similar to good time modern loop prelude.
Speaker 2:Of course, like we continue to have partnerships with all of those folks because our philosophy is that it's really important for customers to be able to choose whatever solution is best for their needs. With that said, we're really excited to be able to offer interview scheduling native within the GEM platform now, and so we're actually for any ATS customer of GEM, we're including that as part of the applicant tracking system package all in one. But one of the really cool things about Interview Planner is not only is it going to be fully integrated with Jam ATS, but it also integrates with Greenhouse and Lever and, very soon, workday and later this year, a lot of the enterprise applicant tracking systems, and so, whether you use Jam ATS or a different ATS, you can still leverage the full power of interview planner, and that's just one of our core ethos when it comes to building gem is all of our products work whether you use a gem ATS or an ATS of your choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and so this makes sense because I think also part of your strategy too is be able to offer like a full suite of products, like all in one to an extent, or to be able to provide all the functionality to your customers, so there isn't a need to necessarily go to other providers or vendors. That's essentially the direction that you're going in, right To some extent. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got our start by building like just the best of breed sourcing, crm analytics, but over the last few years we've really broadened our mandate and now we're trying to build the best all in one hiring platforms. That spans sourcing, crm, full funnel analytics, recently applicant tracking system, talent marketing, recruitment events, career site which we just announced interview planner and interview scheduling as of a few weeks ago, and in just a month or two we're now going to have AI sourcing bots as well as part of that all-in-one bundles Truly the most comprehensive all-in-one recruiting platform for pretty much any company out there. But the great thing about how all this works is you can use every single one of those products, whether you use Jam ATS or a different ATS, so it's very bespoke in terms of being able to plug in any ATS you want into that bundle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's smart, makes a lot of sense and, yeah, you're able to provide functionality that other firms can, and then hopefully they'll end up moving to your ATS as well, doing everything through you guys.
Speaker 2:Totally. The way I like to think about it and talk about it is certainly you can use any ATS you want. Everything will work slightly better together if you use all gem products. It's like how, with Apple, you can mix and match right, you can have your AirPods, but they're going to work slightly better if you're using an Apple computer and an iPhone, just like the seamlessness between the Bluetooth and the connectivity is going to work a tiny bit better than mix and matching with a different device.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure that makes a lot of sense. Also, just like from the data perspective reporting and data, I would assume. Like that, when you integrate all these different systems, it's probably like nobody wants to log into. Like multiple dashboards across multiple systems.
Speaker 2:It's probably like nobody wants to log into like multiple dashboards across multiple systems.
Speaker 2:I don't like to.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 2:I think, like the big reasons why you'd want to use an all in one platform and why these things would be better together. First is like you get a truly single source of truth because everything's fully integrated. Every single talent, relationship and touch point is going to sync back to the ATS and the CRM in a way where, when you're trying to integrate a bunch of different tools in the stack, you're bound to lose some data or for that integration to not be 100% reliable, and so you get that single source of truth. That's important for a few reasons, one of which is better data, because then you can have a single place to report on all that data. You can see how all of the things at the top of the funnel whether it's sourcing your CRM efforts, your talent marketing, your events how all of that is connected to and driving actual results with your hiring funnel. And then the other thing that a lot of our customers are excited about is having one place to configure all of their admin functionality, their user groups, their permissioning, their compliance requirements.
Speaker 1:I didn't even think about that, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's huge because you don't want to set up different data retention policies across eight different tools and have them be out of sync for GDPR. But yeah, user groups like configuring all that once, like all of your user permissions in one place. User groups like configuring all that once, like all of your user permissions in one place. And then, for folks that are interested in AI solutions and like AI sourcing, for example, which I'd say is a lot of people right now, it's really important to have that single source of truth where you have full context about every talent, relationship and every touch point, cause you don't want your AI sourcing bots spamming the market without any knowledge of who's who and who's talked to your company recently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good point. Actually, I hadn't thought about that one. But yeah, you'd want there to be a consistency and you'd want to not if you're going to be using AI to not basically spam people over and over again or through multiple tools or anything like that. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's really cool. I'm excited to see how you guys continue to change Evolve. We use as an RPO. We're actually using GEM. Right now. We haven't made the transition to the ATS, but I think we'd actually like to do that as well, so we should maybe talk about that some other time. I'm curious. I'd like to get started on that. But yeah, we're definitely using I. I gotta talk and figure out, make sure we're using the ai functionality as much as possible, but when the bots go live, definitely let me know and we can give it that that a shot, and then maybe we could talk about that functionality as well and just talk about, like, how it's working and what types of roles it's working with, and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:That'd be really interesting yeah, sounds like a great future conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Hey, Steve, thank you so much for joining again today and for everybody tuning in. We're going to be doing this once a quarter, so make sure to tune in. But yeah, Steve, this is always super helpful, so I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 2:Likewise.
Speaker 1:Thanks.
Speaker 2:James.
Speaker 1:Awesome, thank you.
