Overview
When using Talent Pipeline in Gem, our built-in status and service level agreement (SLA) indicators show how long each candidate has been in an interview stage. By knowing a candidate’s status within a stage and how long they’ve been in it, you can prioritize your work accordingly and determine who you need to pay attention to right now and what action(s) you need to take with them. This article covers how to understand Talent Pipeline statuses in Gem, and customize your SLA targets and notifications.
This article is aimed at users in organizations which don’t use Gem ATS, and instead have access to the specific Talent Pipeline section of Gem. If your organization does use Gem ATS, please refer instead to Gem ATS: Status and SLA indicators.
Requirements
- Your team must use Talent Pipeline in Gem.
- You must be a Gem Admin to configure Talent Pipeline SLA settings.
- To use Slack notifications for Talent Pipeline SLAs, you must connect Slack to Gem in Profile settings. Refer to Gem Integrations: Slack for more details.
Understand statuses in Talent Pipeline
Gem provides a series of Talent Pipeline statuses relating to various aspects of the interview process, including scheduling, assessments, offers, and hiring decisions.
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
Here are the default Talent Pipeline statuses with SLAs:
Status | Why am I seeing this status? |
Offer sent | An offer has been created and sent to the candidate, but is awaiting a resolution. |
Offer needs to be sent | An offer has been created, but has not been sent to the candidate yet. |
Needs offer creation | The candidate was moved into the Offer stage, but an offer has not been created yet. |
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 scheduling | No interviews have been scheduled and none are complete. Once any interviews in the stage are complete, this status will not appear again. |
Needs decision | All scorecards/feedback have been received for completed interviews. |
Needs touchpoint | The candidate is due for outreach. |
Statuses without SLAs
Some statuses don’t require an SLA or are outside of your control, so no SLA will be applied.
Here are our default Talent Pipeline statuses without SLAs:
Status | Why am I seeing this status? |
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 (will only appear briefly or not at all since hired candidates are not displayed in Talent Pipeline). |
Rejected | The candidate has been rejected (no distinction between rejected by them or you). |
Understand SLA notifications in Talent Pipeline
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 (refer to 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 most organizations have different expectations on when to get back to candidates, you can customize your SLAs (in hours) to reflect your organization’s own guidelines.
Though all teams that have access to Talent Pipeline can have access to SLAs, only Gem Admins can edit them.
Follow these steps to edit your Talent Pipeline SLA targets:
- Select the Talent Pipeline page in the main left-hand navigation.
- From the Candidates by job tab, select the SLA dropdown and then select the Manage SLAs option.
- This will open the Manage SLAs pop-up. The default tab 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.
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.
- Select the Save button to confirm your changes. Anything you change here will apply to all jobs.
Customize SLA notifications
There are two ways to customize your Talent Pipeline SLA notifications in Gem:
- Select the Talent Pipeline page in the main left-hand navigation, then from the Candidates by job tab select the SLA dropdown followed by the Manage SLAs option. Switch to the Notifications tab on the Manage SLAs pop-up.
- 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.
Though all teams that have access to Talent Pipeline can have access to SLAs, only Gem Admins can edit them.
Follow these steps to customize Talent Pipeline SLA 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 milestones dropdown. This applies to both Emails and Slack.
- Select the Save & close button to confirm your changes. The updated SLA notifications now apply to all jobs.
Turn off notifications
Recruiters always have control of their 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.
Note that feedback from recruiters may be best addressed by making adjustments to the notifications for individual SLAs.
Usage notes
- 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 SLA.
- Greenhouse teams: Refer to Gem and Greenhouse data sync intervals to learn more about the amount of time it takes to sync activity from Greenhouse into Gem.
Additional resources
To learn more about Talent Pipeline, check out the following resources.
Relevant articles
Videos
- Improving Candidate Experience and Time in Stage Metrics - Talent Pipeline with SLAs (8 mins): This video covers how to use Talent Pipeline SLAs to manage candidates across interview stages, reject candidates, view interview scorecards, and more.
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.