Please refer to this article for best practices when it comes to search setup and filtering with Gem AI Sourcing. The goal of filters is to carve out a “talent pool” so the Gem AI can rank relevant candidates and present you with the best ones.
Get started quickly with AI-assisted filters
To kick things off, try asking Gem AI to populate an initial set of filters based on an active job post or description. For the best results, we recommend pasting in any notes or qualifications you jotted down from your hiring team, in addition to importing a job post or job description. This will help Gem AI to suggest the most relevant filters that you can easily verify and fine-tune as needed.
General tips
- Make sure your talent pool is big enough, but not too broad - watch the ‘talent pool’ size to make sure you’re not restricting the pool of candidates to be scored (for ex. if it’s <1000, bot may not return any candidates or very few and exhaust the search)
- Ideally you want at least a few thousand candidates in the talent pool.
- Use your intuition - your filters may be too broad if you see:
- A pool of more than 10k for a non-niche, location-specific role.
- Or a pool of > 10-20k for a non-niche, location-agnostic remote role.
- When a pool is too large, Gem AI can only score a fraction of the pool — so unless everyone in the pool is truly a potential fit, you won’t get as good of results.
- Most filters are “contains” filters by default - these work by substring matching.
- This means that you can use keywords to do broader searches - for example “software” will match all of “Software Engineer”, “Software Developer”, and “Software Development Engineer”.
- ‘Ask AI’ features can be helpful where useful - it’s important to remember that it’s best to not blanket-rely on AI.
- Something to look out for is that if you only input specific companies or specific schools into these filters, the talent pool might be greatly restricted.
Job titles
This works like our Prospect Search filter. It defaults to “contains” which means that the below example will pull up Senior Product Managers, Retail product lead, etc.
Tips for job titles
- When building a search, include many title variants. Research which titles are common for your role (and similar ones), and be sure to include all of them to widen the talent pool.
- Job titles vary a lot between companies, even for the exact same role:
- “Software engineer” or “Product engineer” or “API developer”
- “Enterprise architect” or “Solutions engineer” or “Sales engineer” or “Implementation manager”
- “Technical support engineer” or “Customer support analyst”
- Use keywords to include as many relevant title variations as possible to ensure you start with a holistic talent pool — Gem AI will then help you find the best matches based on your criteria.
- For example, popular keywords like “software” will cover a lot of engineer titles; and “support” will cover a lot of support roles.
- Think about current vs. current & past:
- How important is it that candidates are currently in this role? Would someone who transitioned away potentially want to come back to it?
- Use “Exclude job titles” (“Does not contain” filter) to make your search more precise.
- For example, you might search for:
- Contains “Product” AND does not contain “Product Marketing” to include variations on Product roles (such as Product Manager, Product Designer, etc) but exclude Product Marketing.
- Or contains “Customer Success” AND does not contain (“VP” or “Vice President” or “Director”) to search for customer success candidates while excluding anyone in leadership roles.
Location
The Location filter has 4 drop-down options: metro, city, state, and country. We recommend starting as wide as possible (country) or leaving this blank if possible.
For in-person roles, we recommend inputting a metro first, including all relevant cities, and then adjusting as needed.
Tips for location
- Remember that the four types of location filters are a hierarchy: Country > State > Metro > City.
- Remember to go wide when possible.
- Overly strict location filters can shrink your talent pool and give poorer results.
- Prefer Metro like “San Francisco Bay Area” over City like “San Francisco” - people can commute!
- If your role is in-office in San Francisco, consider “San Francisco Bay Area” since candidates may be willing to commute. Or even consider all of California (or other states), if you offer relocation or think candidates would be willing to move.
- Use “Exclude locations” (“Does not contain” filter) to exclude specific locations.
- For example, “State is New York AND Metro is not New York City Metro” would search for candidates in New York state but outside of NYC.
Experience & tenure
You have the ability to set Months at current company and Overall years of experience.
Months at the current company can be set if you don’t want to source people new at their current role.
Overall years of experience is overall professional job experience, so if someone was a software engineer for even 1 year but has overall 5-10 years of professional experience, they might be grabbed by the sourcing bot (we have ways to improve this in the ‘scoring criteria’ section below and are looking to improve this more).
To filter down to specific years of experience x job title, you can use the ‘years of experience x title’ filter. Say you are looking for an engineering manager with 5 years of experience in management. Specifying 5 years of experience would likely return many prospects who have 5 years of experience in roles outside of management. With this filter, you can easily limit ‘years of experience’ to only ‘Manager’ titles to find prospects with the right experience for the role.
Tips for experience & tenure
Months at current company
- Months at the current company in any role.
Overall years of experience
- This is total years of work experience in any role.
- Setting too small of a range will shrink your talent pool significantly.
- This includes anything listed in the the person’s LinkedIn profile as work experience, like:
- Volunteering in high school.
- A cashier job in college.
- A previous 10-year career in a different field.
Companies
With the Companies filter, you can select ‘presets’ (default ones we created or save your own. If you already have a list of ‘bullseye companies’ you can drop in a comma-separated list here.
You can ‘Generate similar companies’ via Gem AI. Gem AI will recommend additional 20 companies based on what you have selected in the filter already.
Tips for companies
- Keep in mind that using this limits the search to candidates who worked at these specific companies. Using this filter can shrink your talent pool significantly.
- Use Presets, ‘Generate similar companies’, and Gem AI suggestions to expand the list of specific companies you’re targeting.
- Type a sentence in this field to ‘ask AI’ and get back a list of companies matching your description.
Industries & Specialties
- Use industries and specialties to target very large lists of companies (thousands to millions) based on generalized categories.
- These filters are additive - they use OR to combine with the list from the Companies filter - so choosing an industry or specialty is the same as adding all of those companies to the list.
Current company size
- Use this to narrow the set of companies based on their approximate current number of employees.
Exclude companies
- Removes candidates who worked at these specific companies from the search results.
- Type a sentence in this field to ‘ask AI’ and get back a list of companies matching your description
Education
With the Education filter, you can select ‘presets’ or enter schools, degrees, and fields of study.
You can ‘Ask AI’ for schools instead of sourcing for specific personal attributes.
Tips for education
School
- Only use this if you want to restrict your talent pool to candidates who attended just this specific list of schools. Using this filter can shrink your talent pool significantly.
- Use Presets to expand the list of specific schools you’re targeting.
- Type a sentence in this field to “ask AI” and get back a list of schools matching your description.
Degree
- Use this filter to narrow the talent pool to only candidates who list this specific degree type on their profile.
- We advise leaving this blank for roles that don’t have a specific advanced degree requirement (for example MD/DO degree, JD, or MBA). Using this filter can shrink your talent pool significantly.
- Most jobs require “bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience”, and usually job title filters alone give a talent pool that meets this requirement.
Field of Study
- We advise leaving this filter blank unless it’s critically important to the role. Using this filter can shrink your talent pool significantly.
- Not everyone lists their field of study on their profile, and different schools use different names for the same field.
- Work experience is often more important than field of study as a hard filter.
- Use keywords instead of full field names to target a wider set of fields, because schools have many different names for the same major / field of study.
- Computer Science also may be called “Software Engineering” or “EECS” or “Electrical Engineering & Computer Science” etc.
- It’s better to be too wide than too narrow here - you can use AI qualifications to narrow in.
Looking for more articles on Gem AI Sourcing? Please take a look at **AI Sourcing!**
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.
- Get started quickly with AI-assisted filters
- General tips
- Job titles
- Tips for job titles
- Location
- Tips for location
- Experience & tenure
- Tips for experience & tenure
- Companies
- Tips for companies
- Education
- Tips for education