Overview
If your team uses Google Workspace, Gem uses OAuth login to request access to your Calendar data and sync events. In Gem, this allows you to see meetings that have been scheduled with a candidate in their Activity Feed. We’ll surface all non-private Calendar events in a candidate’s Gem Activity Feed that meet both of these criteria: (1) Contains the candidate’s email as an event attendee and (2) includes anyone from your team (they will need to have given Gem access to their Google Calendar as well).
This feature is helpful for anyone involved in the hiring process to get more detailed visibility into past engagement with a specific candidate.
Example Use Case
You are a recruiter and want to see all of a candidate’s recent interactions so you can check if the Hiring Manager ever got in touch with the candidate. With this feature, you would be able to see exactly when the Hiring Manager and the candidate had the casual phone chat they were planning on having to know when to follow up with the candidate afterwards.
Requirements & How to Enable this Feature
This feature is available to you if you log into Gem using your Google Account.
Please note that your team’s Google Workspace admin may need to enable calendar sharing for this to work.
How to Set up this Feature in Gem
- You can grant Gem access to your calendar by clicking the “Grant Access” button on your Gem Settings page, Homepage, or on any candidate Profile.
- When prompted, click “Allow” to give Gem access to your Google Account and calendar.
- If you do not see the “Grant Access” button, it means you’ve already given Gem calendar access. The button disappears after setup is complete.
- New Gem users will also see the option to “Grant Access” as part of user Onboarding.
Important to Note
- After granting permission, you may not see calendar events appear in Gem candidates’ activity feeds immediately. It can take ~12 hours to sync them.
- After setup, Google Calendar data will typically be sparse within your team’s Gem candidate Activity Feeds. This will improve over time as more members of your team grant calendar access so that more events can be shared with Gem.
How This Feature Works
Gem looks for Google Calendar events that meet the following criteria:
- Event is not marked as “private” in Google Calendar.
- Event contains a candidate as an attendee. We identify who a candidate is by looking only at calendar events with an external guest (i.e. the attendee’s email domain is not under your own company domain), and that guest’s email matches to a Gem candidate email. This means we won’t sync events like your internal team meetings, 1:1s, etc.
- Gem will sync all of your past, non-private calendar events to backfill candidate touchpoints, letting you see event history prior to the date that you set this feature up.
- We sync events up to one year into the future and show future scheduled events in candidates’ activity feeds.
Limitations & Things to Note
- GoodTime interview events won’t appear in the Gem activity feed.
- This is because GoodTime schedules 2 separate calendar events for each interview: one for the candidate, and one for the internal interviewers, which don’t have the candidate listed as a guest.
- Events must include a Gem user on your team as an attendee to be synced, so any events scheduled with employees that do not have a Gem seat will not be included. This means that you may look at a candidate profile who has in fact had meetings with someone at your company, but none of those events appear in the activity feed because those other teammates do not have a Gem account and haven’t synced their calendars.
- Recent changes to an event: We run several data syncs per day, so if an event recently changed or was added/removed, there might be some delay before those changes are reflected in the Activity Feed.
- Events more than 1 year in the future are not synced or displayed.
- Google Calendar events marked “Private” are not synced or displayed anywhere in Gem.
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.