The Great Resignation is putting a lot of companies in a bind where they need to backfill and hire for growth at the same time. Meanwhile, a long overdue push for diversity is suddenly at the top of every recruiter’s priority list. San Francisco-based company Gem is on a mission to provide recruiting teams with the tools necessary to address these needs and more.
On Tuesday the recruiting platform announced that it raised $100 million in a Series C round led by ICONIQ Capital. The raise cemented Gem’s status as a unicorn with a valuation of $1.2 billion.
The fresh financing couldn’t have come at a better time. Over the last year Gem has tripled the size of its annual recurring revenue, doubled the size of its customer base and boosted its average deal sizes by 70 percent, according to the company.
Just over four years ago, when Gem co-founders Nick Bushak and Steve Bartel started the company, the recruiting world was in the midst of a paradigm shift. Companies were going out and looking for top talent rather than waiting for talent to come to them, according to Bartel.
The two of them witnessed how powerful that proactive approach was during their respective engineering runs at Dropbox and Facebook.
“We also saw that along with that new strategy came a new need: recruiters didn’t have a single source of truth to track and manage all the work that happens before candidates apply,” Bartel, CEO of Gem, said in an email to BuiltIn. “This meant that recruiters weren’t keeping tabs on, or getting visibility into, the vast majority of their work and it’s why we started Gem.”
Traditionally, recruiting teams spend a ton of time nurturing referrals, hosting events, running branded email campaigns and spending money on ads. Gem operates as a system to track and manage all of that work, kind of like a Salesforce for recruiting, according to Bartel.
“Fortunately, we’re solving a problem that almost every company has: it’s really, really hard to hire great people,” Bartel continued.
Gem serves over 800 businesses across a varying number of industries, including tech leaders like Lyft, Spotify, Affirm, Peloton and Gusto.
The company will use the additional capital to expand its integration capabilities. Gem already connects to talent networks like Github and Handshake, as well as applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse, Workday and SmartRecruiters. The recruiting platform will also invest in smart features to automate repetitive workflows.
Gem also plans to invest internationally. The startup will look to expand its go-to-market capabilities abroad with a focus on local points of contact in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
As Gem continues to spread its wings overseas, the recruiting platform will continue to hire for its team at home in the U.S. Gem is now hiring for more than two dozen roles across its customer success, engineering and sales teams, to name a few.
The unicorn has raised a total of $148 million in venture capital financing to date, according to the company.
Additional investors Greylock, Accel and Sapphire Ventures participated in the round, among others.
