🔍 Articles in This Section

Please use the following list to see additional internal articles regarding Gem Extension:

• (Internal) Design at Gem
• (Internal) Gem Design Principles
• (Internal) Gem Brand Guide and Resources
• (Internal) Gem Product Personas (📍you are here)
• (Internal) Color

Sources:

* Interviewing Gems
* Marketing Case Studies
* Collaboration with CS
* Gong calls

See also:

JTBD - Personas & Goals

Persona Development Guide

Sourcer

Role description

The sourcer is responsible for finding and engaging with potential candidates. In addition to getting interested individuals into the application process, sourcers also engage and keep track of all prospects who might be interested in applying to the company in the future.

Sourcers work closely with Recruiters, who will take over candidates once they are in process, and Hiring Managers for the role(s) to be filled.

(Is similar to Sales in the SDR/AE division of labor, though less hierarchical.)

Environment

[What other tools, context, lifestyle]

Sourcing can be a numbers game when it comes to having enough people engaged in the pipeline to hit hiring goals, but this needs to be balanced with reaching out to the right people with relevant targeted messaging.

Sourcers are often working in a fast-paced environment, finding and engaging new qualified individuals, reengaging existing pools of prospects, and staying on top of all ongoing communications.

Sourcers frequently use a medley of outreach and tracking tools including

• LinkedIn and Email (and occasionally phone/texts) for outreach
• Spreadsheets for tracking prospects
• Calendar reminders and other task management tools for staying on top of follow-ups
• ATS when moving people into process
• Various tools for email finding, message automation, and tracking results

In addition to staying on top of their own outreach, they must stay coordinated with other sourcers on the team to avoid redundant messaging.

Goals and motivations

[What are they measured on, what does it look like to excel, what relationships are key]

Planning is a huge part of the job. Sourcers need an assumption of how many individuals they will need to reach out to get enough interested responses that enough make it through process and are hired. Because so much of this is finding the right people to begin with, there is a lot of benefit to building their network so the first question they can ask is “Who do I already know?”

Refine messaging to get a higher response rate. Understanding what works well across the board and what kind of personalization has the largest impact.

Building trust with the hiring manager is essential, demonstrating that they will source the right candidates, and potentially widen the hiring manager’s view of who might be a good fit for the role.

Challenges

Biggest challenges sourcers say they face is finding the right qualified candidates, and ensuring the right skills for the role. In addition there are a lot for factors outside of a sourcer’s control that can result in losing candidates that do make it through process, most commonly counter offers from other companies or compensation packages being too low.

Finding new candidates can also be challenging when they’ve done a search for a role many times over and are encountering a dry talent pool. This often means needing to find creative places to look for candidates (e.g. GitHub, Dribbble, StackOverflow, MeetUp groups, etc), and nurturing old prospects they may have reached out to a year ago.

Finally there is often simply the challenge of recognition of the amount of work and time sourcing involves, particularly when it may not be visible to the majority of a company.

Quotes

Segments

• Agency sourcers
• Sightly different pain points, less visibility into down-funnel metrics, differ in flow (handoff of first screen), collaboration with multiple of companies (and their software)
• Old-school sourcing wizards
• Change management, over trust/lack of trust in tools, resistance to change
• Volume-focused (pipeline of people) - not a lot of personalization

Recruiter

Role description

The recruiter is responsible for managing candidates through the hiring process, handing everything from a candidate’s phone screen to an offer.

Recruiting is usually segmented into Technical Recruiting and Business Recruiting — the motions of the interview process tend to be different for these two groups.

Recruiters work very closely with the Hiring Manager , who is their primary stakeholder, often acting in a consulting capacity to help managers expand their views on who to look at.

Environment

Recruiters help keep momentum in the candidate process while navigating any shifts in company hiring plans and allocating resources accordingly. (This could be anything from steady growth, to a hiring freeze, to plans to double in size by the end of the year.)

Similar to sourcing, recruiters spend a lot of energy ensuring they stay on top of all candidates in process, following up on interviews and moving people through to next phases in a timely manner.

This often involves also following up regularly with Hiring Mangers and anyone on the interview panel to make sure they are prepped and are providing feedback on candidates quickly and consistently.

Similar to sources, recruiters typically use a medley of tools to keep the hiring process moving, including:

• Company ATS
• Email and calendar reminders

Goals and Motivations

One of the recruiter’s main goals is ensuring that candidates have a positive experience interviewing at the company, whether or not they are ultimately hired. This is important in attracting talent, building a reputable brand, and maintaining long-term relationships with candidates and prospects for future hiring plans.

Recruiters are also likely keeping an eye on interview/hiring process as a whole: is it successfully repeatable; are there any bottlenecks or points where candidates fall off more than expected; are there strategic improvements that can make the process more efficient; are there ways we can better ensure we are hiring the right people?

It is also in the recruiter’s interest to help educate those outside of the recruiting org who are involved in hiring on best practices, and engaging prospects and candidates. This is especially true of Hiring Managers who may be able to help with activities like prospecting or setting up interviewers with the right lens for a particular candidate.

Challenges

Similar to sourcers, recruiters cite finding the right candidates as one of their biggest challenges.

Working with Hiring Managers can present its won set of challenges as recruiters must navigate different personal preferences, work styles, and willingness to compromise when collaborating in the recruiting process.

Nearly ¼ of recruiters say they spend more than half their working hours crafting and sending outreach, which takes precious time away from research, current candidate engagement, and strategic business functions.

Quotes

Segments

• The data-driven recruiter
• The inbound-optimized recruiter (large company, known brand - does little sourcing)
• Full-cycle recruiter: A recruiter that does their own sourcing.
• More specialized roles, very tough
• Some teams where Sourcing / Recruiting teams are separate orgs
• Some paired organizationally teams they are hiring for (e.g. Roblox)

Hiring Manager

Role description

Any manager at the company who is responsible for hiring on their own team(s).

The Hiring Manager works closely with their Recruiter and/or Sourcer to stay aligned on the skills and experience they are looking for in a new hire, and what indicators to look for in finding someone who matches their criteria.

Environment

A Hiring Manager is likely trying to balance the important and time-consuming task of growing their (understaffed) team while handling all of their existing responsibilities.

Hiring activities involve reviewing prospects, syncing regularly with recruiting, interviewing candidates and facilitating the process for other interviewers, and sourcing from their own networks.

Goals and Motivations

Hiring Managers need to stay on top of their hiring pipelines so the best candidates end up on their teams. They must balance staffing team as quickly as possible with finding just the right people for the role. Depending on the growth of the company as a whole, Hiring Managers are likely thinking about both immediate hires and backfills, and long-term team growth plans.

When working with recruiters and sourcers, HMs are incentivized to help clearly articulate what the team is looking for and how to identify people with the right experience to reach out to.

Challenges

Major challenges for the hiring manager include the time involved, finding qualified candidates, and looking for good predictors of candidate’s ability to work well with and be successful on the team.

Quotes

Segments

• Hiring managers who are very involved in sourcing & outreach

Recruiting Manager / Sourcing Manager

Role description

Manages recruiting and sourcing teams. Recruiting managers are responsible for making sure their teams are performing and that the company is hitting hiring plans.

Recruiting managers’ primary stakeholders are Hiring Managers , particularly for departments or larger teams, and Executives focused on the company’s strategic hiring initiatives (Growth, DEI, Efficiency, Employer Brand).

Environment

[What other tools, context, lifestyle]

Goals and Motivations

The Recruiting Manager is responsible for meeting hiring goals and growing the company by means of building and supporting a strong recruiting team. This involves the usual duties of people management and making sure everyone on the team has the tools and guidance they need to be successful. It may also mean identifying strengths and gaps on the team, ensuring that people are playing to their strengths, or learning best-practices from those who are more successful in their outreach.

The recruiting manger is also motivated to identify overarching practices or improvements that gain the team efficiency, such as identifying best messaging, points of friction in the hiring process, and effectiveness working with hiring managers. Ultimately this enables the team to do more with less, so they focus on areas of high impact.

Recruiting managers will likely also be executing on company initiatives around diversity hiring.

Challenges

A major challenge for recruiting managers can be a lack data to help identify whether the team is on track to hit their goals. Without a good understanding of, or real-time way to track, indicators of success, recruiting managers can only retroactively observe if the practices put in place over the last [x] months were effective in hitting targets on diversity hiring, offer acceptance rates, etc.

Similar to other roles in recruiting organizations, finding the right candidates is cited as major challenge by recruiting managers.

They are also concerned with hitting goals within the recruiting budget, and keeping up with shifting external realities, such as changing markets, global pandemic, etc.

Segments

• Recruiting line manager - tech manager primary stakeholder is HM
• Output of team
• Leader/Exec side - primary stakeholder Executives
• (see below)

Talent Leader

Role description

The Talent Leader is responsible for setting culture, tone, and strategy, for talent teams. They focus on big-picture initiatives around how the company is trying to grow, and pays close attention to the company’s employer brand.

The Talent Leader works with Executive Stakeholders to ensure the talent strategy is on track.

Environment

[What other tools, context, lifestyle]

Goals and Motivations

Talent leaders, along with Recruiting Mangers, look for opportunities to work smarter instead of harder, and achieve more with fewer resources. This enables them to spend recruiting budget in other areas identified as high impact, such as events, LinkedIn job posts, etc.

Talent leaders want to be ahead of any issues that prevent teams from scaling or meeting the company’s hiring goals.

The top metrics/KPIs used to track recruiting success are: Time to Hire, Quality of Hire, Source of Hire, and Retention Rate of Hire.

Challenges

Like most everyone else in the recruiting org, Talent leaders cite difficulty finding quality candidates as the primary challenge to hitting hiring goals. They also see challenges in the lack of data around things like pipeline, forecasting, and general insight into the effectiveness of their current strategies, resulting in decisions being more reactionary than proactive.

Additional challenges can include dealing with a weak employer brand and lack of budget to effectively hit goals.

Talent leaders will often be responsible for pulling data for their executive stakeholders, which can involve a lot of piecemeal data from their own managed spreadsheets or dealing with complex BI tools like Tableau.

Recruiting Ops

Role description

Oversees recruiting processes, metrics, and solutions.

As a recruiting operations member, I want insight into all of our talent teams’ processes so I can identify what might require some attention to improve.

to equip the recruiting org with the best tools and processes so they can hit their hiring goals (and we can help our company grow)

A bit of a wild card - can also refer to People Ops - Greenhouse, LinkedIn, Goodtime, Gusto

We interact with those who are responsible for best practices, reporting, QBRs, (Ops would help Caro put together slides)

Recruiting Coordinator

“RC” for short. Responsible for scheduling interviews, meeting & greeting candidates, and coordinating candidate travel.

Execs

(VP of Recruiting?)

Make sure I know where we are against our hiring goals so we can plan for our finances and overall company growth plans more accurately.

Hiring is a top priority but likely unaware of specific details on metrics.

Further segmentation exploration opportunities

Data literacy Persona segmentation

• Is this the larger umbrella per company?
• If business is booming care less about metics, data (butts in seats!)
• Recruiting leaders - piecemeal together own spreadsheets - tableau scares them
• Correlation with company size and growth stage where analytics would only be considered
• Usually comes about because of some external factor

Common segmentation by company size: SMB, Mid-market, Enterprise

• For smaller orgs - Head of recruiting manages everything
• No time to even thing about something like analytics (series A, B companies, teams of less than 5 people)
• 10-25 people - more sophistication, more specialization
• Most of Gem’s current customers fall in the 10-50 recruiter sized teams
• Specialized in specific departments (GTM, EPD)
• Talent leads doing a lot less sourcing themselves
• how data savvy the are is really up in the air - being data-driven is a really different skill set (similar to design - often specialized)
• Sourcer roll different too - tied to specific teams/recruiters
• Other model is centralized sourcing team

Section by optimization - what are personals goaled on in a role

• e.g. Sourcers optimizing per volume
• e.g. Getting candidates to offer
• How do we support them on each of these

• Sources:
• See also:
• Sourcer
• Role description
• Environment
• Goals and motivations
• Challenges
• Quotes
• Segments
• Recruiter
• Role description
• Environment
• Goals and Motivations
• Challenges
• Quotes
• Segments
• Hiring Manager
• Role description
• Environment
• Goals and Motivations
• Challenges
• Quotes
• Segments
• Recruiting Manager / Sourcing Manager
• Role description
• Environment
• Goals and Motivations
• Challenges
• Segments
• Talent Leader
• Role description
• Environment
• Goals and Motivations
• Challenges
• Recruiting Ops
• Role description
• Recruiting Coordinator
• Execs
• Further segmentation exploration opportunities