About Gem
An AI-first recruiting CRM that lives on top of LinkedIn, Gmail and your ATS.
Gem was founded in 2017 in San Francisco by Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak, who had been engineering managers at Dropbox and Facebook and were tracking top candidates in spreadsheets they called 'Gems'. The product they built turned that workflow into dedicated software for outbound recruiting: a CRM for talent relationships, a sourcing layer on top of LinkedIn and a few dozen other public profile sites, automated email sequences, and a sync into the ATS so the work done outside the system of record still ends up inside it. The platform is used by more than 1,200 talent acquisition teams across startup, growth-stage and enterprise tenants.
The product is built around projects, the talent pools that hold candidates for an open or future role, and sequences, the multi-step email outreach that nurtures sourced candidates until they reply or opt out. A Chrome extension on LinkedIn and other sourcing sites lets recruiters add a candidate to a project in one click, find their work email, and start a sequence on behalf of the recruiter or hiring manager. Gem has since added an AI Sourcer that proposes matched candidates from a described ideal profile, an AI-first ATS layer, scheduling and full-funnel analytics. The API and ATS sync expose projects, candidates, sequences, sequence steps, replies, interviews, scorecards and the stage transitions that ride into the underlying ATS, which is exactly what a warehouse needs to reconstruct sourcing throughput, sequence performance and the funnel that follows.