Bay Area-based software startup Gem is on a mission to transform the world of recruiting through data and analytics. Yet, like many startups, it grapples with its own human capital challenges, like recruiting in-demand candidates for technical functions and making its workforce feel appreciated and engaged. We spoke with Nathalie Grandy, Technical Recruiting Manager at Gem, to learn how Gem uses Goody to improve its recruiting processes and boost employee morale.
At a glance
The company: Gem, a 300-person recruiting software startup
The challenges:
- Recruiting highly sought-after technical candidates
- Equitably celebrating employees’ personal milestones
The solution:
- Sending thoughtful, well-timed gifts at each stage of the hiring process
- Scheduled gifts for employee birthdays and anniversaries
The results:
✅ Best-in-class, 90% candidate satisfaction score
✅ Employee gifting program expanded to Engineering, Design, and Product orgs
How Gem uses Goody to lift recruiting outcomes and employee morale
Tell me about your role at Gem.
We’re a five-year-old company focusing on recruiting software. What we aim to do is create automation and consistency in the recruiting process, because a lot of recruiting tools are very archaic and there's no streamlined way to pull data and insights. It's really about empowering recruiters with data.
We’re about 300 people, but when I joined two and a half years ago, we were only 60 employees. We’re centralized between the Bay Area (where a majority of teams sit) and New York.
I lead our product and design recruiting team. So any hires for Research, Product, Designers, Creative Directors, etc. At one point I was managing all EPD (Engineering/Product/Design) recruiting – leading a team of 13 recruiters. And that even encompassed finding early talent via university recruiting. Fortunately, I now have a counterpart who focuses on engineering hiring.
Wow, those sound like tough roles to fill!
It’s really challenging. I’ve worked at Airbnb and Dropbox, where recruiting was much easier, because you get an influx of candidates applying. Whereas we really have to sell candidates on the culture of the company.
How do you deal with such a competitive market for talent?
One thing we’ve always really focused on is candidate experience. Because our industry, recruiting software, hasn’t historically been seen as super sexy or innovative. So we’ve had to find ways to attract highly desirable candidates who might be considering careers in crypto or AI.
That’s why we’ve leaned into something we could control, which is candidate experience, which for us, in part, meant baking in little gifts throughout the hiring process.
What did that look like prior to Goody?
We were using like five or six different platforms for sending gifts. There was no way of knowing whether candidates even got their gifts unless we explicitly asked or the candidates sent us an update proactively. Then sometimes gifts would get lost. It felt so hard to create those magical moments that we use to differentiate ourselves as a company.
"A recruiter from another team came to me and put time on my calendar, and asked, 'You guys are obviously doing something right with candidate experience. I want to learn more. What are the steps that we could implement or mimic?'"
How have you used Goody in your recruiting efforts?
We use Goody to send gifts throughout the candidate experience, like sending candidates swag before their on-site interview (usually a notebook or mug). We have a Custom Store built on Goody, so candidates can choose which swag item they want to get. Then we send gift cards for lunch, like DoorDash or UberEats, as they get deeper in the interview process.
Then, when they get an offer, we send a nicer, more curated gift, like a really nice Champagne bottle or a curated food kit – we always send it the same day as the offer. Then, when they accept or if we feel like we need an additional little touchpoint to close an important hire, we’ll add on a fourth gift.
Our interns are also a really important pipeline for talent, so we use gifts for them as well. For example, many of our interns are oddly into pickleball, and so when we had one receive a full-time offer, we sent them a pickleball set. It’s always great to choose gifts that show you listened and care – and often they can make people laugh as well.
What kind of impact has Goody had on Gem’s candidate experience?
My team, focused on more technical recruiting, is solely using Goody, and we did take a look at results from candidate experience surveys that we send via our ATS.
We consistently score above 90% for every single parameter in terms of candidate experience – we actually saw quite a bit of a discrepancy versus teams that weren’t using Goody. And it’s not like engineers are simply easy to please!
In fact, a recruiter from another team came to me and put time on my calendar, and asked, “You guys are obviously doing something right with candidate experience. I want to learn more. What are the steps that we could implement or mimic?”
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Outside of recruiting, how does Gem use Goody to improve employee engagement?
We’ve started using Goody to automatically send birthday and work anniversary gifts for our People, Product, Design and Engineering teams. We feel it’s really important for our employees to feel acknowledged and loved on their birthdays and anniversaries. But some managers are really good at remembering, others not as much. So before Goody, it wasn’t an equitable experience.
Plus, not all employees want to be the center of attention on their birthdays. Goody lets us recognize them consistently, but in a way that’s also personal and 1:1.
For employees’ birthdays and anniversaries, our go-to gift is a Milk Bar birthday cake.
What has feedback been like internally?
We’ve been using Goody for about six months now? And I have not heard a single piece of negative feedback, either from the gift recipients or from the teams that are sending gifts. It grew very, very quickly internally once we started using it on EPD recruiting, then it quickly spread to business recruiting, and then subsequently all these other teams have started using it, even our account executives.
Our EAs here love the admin experience of sending a gift, how easy it is. They love that they can schedule gifts in advance, and that they get calendar visibility of upcoming birthdays and see how many gifts they need to prepare for.
As for the recruiting team, they love that everything is centralized in one place. We can track everything, from the pre-on-site gifts to our post-offer gifts. Our Chief Recruiting Officer has become a huge fan.
To be honest, my favorite thing is reading all those thank you notes from gift recipients. Just reading those messages from candidates and employees, feeling their surprise and delight, it just kind of reminds us why we do what we do. Even our candidates have noted how magical that moment is when they get a personalized card – and that they can swap gifts, so they’re not just collecting stuff they don’t want.
Last question...What's your favorite brand to gift on Goody?
I personally love sending Levain Bakery cookies. I got those sent to me. Oh my gosh, they changed my life. I've started sending them to my friends even.
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