Overview
Status and SLA (service level agreement) indicators in Gem show how long a candidate has been in an interview stage, and whether any action is needed. By knowing a candidate’s status within a stage and how long they’ve been in it, you can prioritize candidates that need scheduling, feedback, or decisions. This article covers how statuses and SLAs work in Gem, and how to customize SLA targets and notifications.
This article is aimed at users in organizations which use Gem ATS. If your organization does not use Gem ATS, please refer instead to Talent Pipeline: Status and SLA indicators.
Requirements
- Your organization must use Gem ATS.
- You must be an Admin user in Gem to edit SLA targets and notifications.
- To use Slack notifications for SLA notifications, you must connect Slack to Gem in Profile settings. Refer to Gem Integrations: Slack for more details.
Understand statuses in Gem
Gem provides a series of statuses relating to various aspects of the interview process, including scheduling, assessments, offers, and hiring decisions.
Candidates’ statuses display in various places, including:
- The Candidates page
- Candidates’ records
- The Talent pipeline tab of a job
You’ll notice in the screenshot above that the statuses display with a variety of colors. Some statuses also have specific SLAs, whereby they will change color based on how long a candidate has been in a particular status.
Here’s how to interpret the different colors:
- Green: The default colour when a status is first applied.
- Yellow: Denotes a warning after a preset amount of time has elapsed.
- Red: The SLA target has been missed after a preset amount of time has elapsed.
- Grey: Either the SLA has been completed, or there is no SLA.
You can customize the amount of time elapsed until statuses change to yellow or red for each SLA. Refer to the Customize SLA targets section below for more details.
Statuses with SLAs
The statuses shown in the table below all have corresponding SLAs:
Status | Description |
Assessment needs review | An assessment has been completed by the candidate, and is awaiting review by a member of the hiring team. |
Assessment needs sending | The candidate has been moved to an assessment stage, but an assessment has not yet been sent. |
Needs feedback | One or more scheduled interviews are complete, but not all scorecards have been filled out.
Or a non-schedulable interview (i.e. App Review) does not have a scorecard/feedback. |
Needs decision | All scorecards/feedback have been received for completed interviews. |
Needs offer creation | The candidate was moved into the Offer stage but the offer has not been created yet. |
Needs offer approval | An offer has been created but one or more approvers haven't yet signed it off. |
Offer needs to be sent | An offer has been created but has not been sent to the candidate yet. |
Needs scheduling | A candidate has been moved into a stage for which either Self schedule or Schedule has been set as the scheduling default, but no interviews have been scheduled yet. Once any interviews in the stage are complete, this status will not appear again. |
Offer sent | An offer has been created and sent to the candidate but is awaiting a resolution. |
Status SLAs are purely based on time spent in the status. Events such as emails being sent/received or other candidate-related activity will not impact SLAs.
Statuses without SLAs
The following statuses do not require an SLA, or are outside of your control, so no SLA will be applied.
Status | Description |
Interviewing | The candidate is actively in an interview.
Or one or more interviews in a stage has been completed, but there are still some scheduled. |
Scheduled | At least one interview has been scheduled in a stage. |
Offer accepted | The candidate has accepted an offer. |
Rejected | The candidate has been rejected (no distinction between rejected by them or you). |
Understand SLA notifications in Gem
SLA notifications help teams stay on top of SLAs in their recruiting process. When a given application exceeds an SLA, information can be emailed to the recruiter assigned to the job, or posted to Slack (see Gem Integrations: Slack), to help get it back under control.
Note that multiple candidates can appear in a single notification to streamline communications, as notifications are grouped by job/status (e.g. all candidates who applied to the ‘Marketing Manager’ role and are in the status ‘Needs decision’).
The following notification settings apply by default:
Method | Description |
Email | Notifications are enabled for all SLAs by default, excluding Needs Feedback and Needs scheduling statuses.
Application Review stage notifications are also disabled, to increase focus on later stage candidates. |
Slack | Notifications are disabled by default for all SLAs. |
Notifications are sent according to the SLA targets, as per the Customize SLA notifications section below. If your team is receiving too many notifications, we encourage team admins to adjust SLAs to a more manageable level.
Customize SLA targets
Since organizations often have different expectations on candidate response times, you can customize the timings for warnings and missed SLAs (in hours) to reflect your organization’s own guidelines.
You must be a Gem admin to edit SLA targets.
There are two ways to customize your SLA targets in Gem:
- Navigate to the Candidates page, select the SLA dropdown and then select the Manage SLAs option.
- Navigate to the Talent pipeline tab for any job, select the Filter by Status dropdown, scroll to the bottom of the list and select Manage SLAs.
Whichever option you use, selecting Manage SLAs opens the Manage SLAs pop-up. The following steps cover how to use this pop-up to customize the timeframes for your SLAs.
- The default tab on the Manage SLAs pop-up is labeled Targets - here you can activate or deactivate individual SLAs, and adjust the timeframes for the warning and missed SLA settings.
- Each SLA defaults to ON, but you can toggle any status to OFF to deactivate it.
- Set the times (in hours) for SLA warnings:
- The Show warning after column represents how much time must pass - without a status change - before an application turns yellow.
- The SLA missed after column represents how much time must pass (without a status change) before an application turns red (this includes the time when the status is yellow).
- For example, based on the screenshot above an application with the status Needs scheduling will be green for the first 24 hours with no changes, turn yellow for the next 12 hours, then become red at the 36 hour mark.
- Select the Save button to confirm your changes. Anything you change here will apply to all jobs.
If you want a particular status to go straight from green to red, set the Show warning after time to the same as the SLA missed after time.
Customize SLA notifications
There are two types of SLA notifications in Gem:
- Team-level SLA notifications: The default SLA notifications which apply to all jobs across your organization, unless specific Job-level SLAs are set for individual jobs.
- Job-level SLA notifications: Create custom SLA notification settings which only apply to a specific job.
Note that job-level SLA notifications are only available for Gem ATS users. If your organization uses a different ATS, only team-level SLA notifications are available.
Edit team-level SLA notifications
Team-level SLA notifications apply across all jobs, except for any jobs where you subsequently set per-job notifications.
There are two ways to customize your team-level SLA notifications in Gem:
- Navigate to the Candidates page, select the SLA dropdown and then select the Manage SLAs option.
- Select your account at the bottom of the main sidebar, then the Admin settings option in the dropdown. Select the Notifications tab in Admin settings, then under the Talent Pipeline SLAs section select the Notifications header.
Both options take you to a Notifications table, which shows toggles for Emails and Slack against each notification, as well as a For select milestones dropdown.
Follow these steps to customize individual team-level notifications:
- Enable or disable each notification by toggling the ON/OFF switches for Emails and Slack.
- Change which interview stage(s) a notification should apply to, by selecting the relevant check box(es) from the For select stages dropdown. This applies to both Emails and Slack for that notification.
- Select the Save & close button to confirm your changes. The updated SLA notifications now apply to all jobs, except for any with custom per-job notifications.
Edit per-job SLA notifications
You can edit per-job SLA notifications from the Talent pipeline tab of a job. Any changes you make to SLA notifications here will override the team-level SLA notifications for that particular job.
- Select the job you want to adjust SLA notifications for.
- From the Talent Pipeline tab, select the Filter by Status dropdown, scroll to the bottom of the list and select Manage SLAs.
- On the Manage SLAs pop-up, select the Notifications tab to see the list of notification options.
Note the banner at the top of the pop-up which confirms that “This job uses your team’s notification settings. Saving changes here will override those defaults for this job only.”
- Enable or disable each notification by toggling the ON/OFF switches for Emails and Slack.
- Change which interview stage(s) a notification should apply to, by selecting the relevant check box(es) from the For select stages dropdown. This applies to both Emails and Slack.
- Select the Save button to confirm your changes. The updated SLA notifications now apply to that job, overriding the default per-team notifications.
- If you make any changes here, the banner at the top of the pop-up will update to say “This job has custom notification settings.”
- Select Reset to default if you want to cancel any changes you made. This removes the job’s custom notification settings, and reverts the job to your team-level SLA notifications.
Turn off notifications
Recruiters always have control of their SLA notifications, and can opt-out manually. Follow these steps to opt out of recruiter notifications (note that this only applies to recruiters, and not any other job roles).
- Select your account at the bottom of the main sidebar, then select the Profile settings option in the dropdown.
- Select the Notifications header.
- Scroll down to the SLA exceeds notifications option and un-tick the Email checkbox.
- Gem will no longer send recruiter email notifications when SLAs are exceeded.
Note that feedback from recruiters may be best addressed by making adjustments to the notifications for individual SLAs.
Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.