Fixing the Candidate Pipeline

Live from UNLEASH America, we're talking talent turbulence with Steve Bartel, CEO of Gem, and Alla Mezhvinsky, VP of Talent & Workplace at Glean—and let’s just say, this ain’t your standard LinkedIn thought leadership fluff.

👀 Steve shares how he scored Gem.com (hint: it involves bold moves, not fairy dust).🎢 Then we dive into the real rollercoaster:

• AI automation vs. TA burnout

• Resume spam that reads like ChatGPT gone rogue

• Deepfakes, ghost candidates, and tech stacks that need therapy

• Transparency that doesn’t suck

💰 Shrinking budgets, shifting tariffs, and clients who want it all yesterday? Yeah, we go there.

We wrap with the big Qs:

• Is your tech stack helping—or just hemorrhaging cash?

• Are you building a hiring machine or just duct-taping broken processes?

If you’re into real talk, smart guests, and a future where data doesn’t just sit there looking pretty—hit play.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

0:00:00.4 Alla Mezhvinsky: So you have to find the tools that make the process more. It's not that you're changing the workflows, it's that you're finding different ways to get to that same step, right? So for example, sourcing. We posted a role at one of the companies, 14,000 applicants over one week.

0:00:16.8 Chad Sowash: How many?

0:00:17.4 Alla Mezhvinsky: 14,000 applicants in one week.

0:00:22.8 Joel Cheesman: All right, let's do this. We are the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheesman. You know him as Chad Sowash, and we are here with Steve Bartel , CEO and founder of Gem, and Alla Mezhvinsky , did I say that correctly?

0:00:38.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: That's perfect.

0:00:38.9 Joel Cheesman: She is the VP...

0:00:40.4 Chad Sowash: He's been working on that. He's been working on that.

0:00:42.8 Joel Cheesman: Of talent and workplace at Glean. Guys, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

0:00:46.4 Alla Mezhvinsky: Thanks for having us.

0:00:47.2 Steve Bartel: Good to be here.

0:00:48.9 Chad Sowash: Excellent. So right out of the gate, how in the hell did you get Gem.com

0:00:53.4 Steve Bartel: That's a good story. 

0:00:55.2 Chad Sowash: Oh, got to hear that because that is, I mean...

0:00:57.8 Steve Bartel: Yes.

0:00:58.8 Joel Cheesman: And then we'll get into who the hell you are.

0:01:00.3 Chad Sowash: All right, so this is the big question right out of the gate.

0:01:02.1 Steve Bartel: So who here has heard of us as ZenSorcerer?

0:01:05.3 Chad Sowash: As a ZenSorcerer? 

0:01:06.7 Steve Bartel: Yes. Did you know that?

0:01:07.4 Chad Sowash: Yes, yes, yes. I remember.

0:01:09.4 Steve Bartel: That's bringing it way back.

0:01:11.2 Chad Sowash: Yeah, I remember the transition. It was like, holy shit, how'd they get Gem?

0:01:13.3 Steve Bartel: Gem.com. Wow. All right. So we started with ZenSorcerer. I mean, the story goes way back to then because we were applying to YC. 

0:01:22.4 Chad Sowash: And this is what year?

0:01:23.8 Steve Bartel: This  is 2017.

0:01:24.5 Chad Sowash: Okay.

0:01:25.4 Steve Bartel: Summer of 2017. We're like, oh my gosh, we could apply to YC late if we get an application in in the next 12 hours. And so we were looking at the application. It was like, well, we need a name. We need a website. We went on some sort of domain site. We started searching. We're like, oh man, a lot of companies are naming their things Zen these days. And so we looked for ZenRecruit, ZenRecruiter, and then they were all taken and we're like, oh, ZenSorcerer. Perfect. All right. So we have a name, but we knew that that name would just get us started because...

0:02:02.0 Chad Sowash: Paint you into a corner.

0:02:03.2 Steve Bartel: Exactly. Our vision was to become like an all in one recruiting platform to become the salesforce for recruiting. And we're actually like, you know, basically there today. So I'm excited to talk more about that. But a few years in, we had just raised a series A funding, and we're like, this is the perfect time to rebrand because how do you get the word out about a rebrand? You pair it with a hot fundraise announcement because otherwise nobody cares. Nobody cares when you're a Series A company and you're changing your name. So raising a bunch of money from top tier investors was like the perfect time to get the word out. Then began the journey of trying to find Gem.com. I mean, I could go into the long story, but...

0:02:43.3 Joel Cheesman: Just let us know the check amounts. That's good enough.

0:02:46.4 Steve Bartel: That's maybe the one thing I can't share. But here's the one thing I can share.

0:02:51.9 Chad Sowash: Yes.

0:02:52.6 Steve Bartel: Normally, a company name like Gem.com would sell for $2 or $3 million. Three-letter. Spellable. It's a.com. . $2 to $3 million.

0:03:04.7 Joel Cheesman: No question.

0:03:05.1 Steve Bartel: When you're a Series A company, you don't have that kind of money.

0:03:07.7 Chad Sowash: No.

0:03:09.3 Steve Bartel: We did find a really creative way to structure a proposal, though. We framed it out almost like a lease on a house.

0:03:16.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: Did you offer up some stock or something or what?

0:03:19.3 Steve Bartel: No stock, but we gave a down payment.

0:03:22.9 Chad Sowash: Okay.

0:03:24.3 Steve Bartel: And then we structured the payments over seven years.

0:03:27.3 Chad Sowash: You don't have a balloon payment, though, right?

0:03:29.3 Joel Cheesman: No balloon. 

0:03:30.1 Steve Bartel: What's the balloon payment?

0:03:31.1 Joel Cheesman: Oh, the end.

0:03:32.7 Steve Bartel: Well, actually we do. So at the end of seven years, we have the option to buy it for the remaining amount.

0:03:37.8 Chad Sowash: Oh, okay.

0:03:38.4 Steve Bartel: And first of all, we got it way less than $2 million. But we also got to space out the payments over seven years, which is great for a startup from a cash flow perspective. Because either you make it and you go on to raise hundreds of millions, which we did, or you don't. And then you give the domain back. So that's the story.

0:03:58.4 Joel Cheesman: Can we do a quick intro, because...

0:04:00.4 Chad Sowash:  We've got to get the listeners sucked into the good stories.

0:04:01.5 Joel Cheesman: Not everyone knows you guys. A lot of our listeners, viewers out there. Let's start with Alla. Just give us the elevator pitch on you and your experience and where you're coming from on a recruitment side.

0:04:12.1 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. So I'm currently the VP of Talent and Workplace at Glean. I've just been there for about seven weeks. Prior to that, I spent 15 years in hyper growth companies. So I started my career at Zynga, then went on to Square, a couple of smaller startups. And most recently, I spent six years at Instacart. So that's my quick journey.

0:04:31.0 Joel Cheesman: That's a pretty light resume. 

0:04:32.3 Chad Sowash: Just a little bit.

0:04:33.0 Joel Cheesman: How did she make it onto the show? I don't know.

0:04:36.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: It's been a fun ride.

0:04:38.1 Steve Bartel: Well, maybe the way I'll humblebrag is Square, Instacart, Glean, all Gem customers. So thanks for being a Gem customer.

0:04:46.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: Loyal Gem customer.

0:04:49.8 Steve Bartel: Love to hear it. I'm the founder CEO of Gem. We've been building Gem for about eight years. We've got thousands of customers. We partner with some of the best brands out there like Glean, Instacart, and Square. But also a bunch of Fortune 100s, companies like Walgreens, McKesson, Salesforce, Workday's own exec recruiting team uses Gem. And then a lot of that fastest, hottest, fastest growing AI companies. So Glean, of course, being one of them, Anthropic, Scale AI, the list goes on. And then most of the private tech companies as well.

0:05:24.3 Joel Cheesman: So we're here live from the Gem booth. We're at the Unleash conference. I know we're barely into it, but what are some initial takeaways, things that have caught your attention? What's your sense on the show at this point?

0:05:37.3 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think maybe to zoom out a little bit, I would say being in this industry for the past 15 years, in the last five to six years, I'm so incredibly proud of how much innovation has happened in this space. Like if I remember back in the day when I first started Zynga, you had your ATS and you had spreadsheets and everything else in between was not really solved for. And it's just good to be here to see all of these different products out there. So much innovation happening, so much tooling that's accessible for both recruiting leaders, recruiters, sourcers, you name it, there's something for everyone. And so I think just being here and feeling that energy and seeing all of it is really great. 

0:06:14.4 Joel Cheesman: Steve?

0:06:14.6 Steve Bartel: Yeah, totally. I mean, the industry, I mean, every industry out there is going through unprecedented disruption. And so, of course, the talk of the town is AI and how that's changing recruiting. You know, I really think that there's this dividing line that's being formed between the teams that are adopting AI and the ones that are being left behind, quite frankly. So there's a lot of talk about that. There's a lot of talk about replacing recruiters. My take is AI is not going to replace recruiters, it's going to enhance recruiters. And actually, what's going to happen is the ones that adopt AI, that become AI fluent.

0:06:48.6 Steve Bartel: They're going to replace the recruiters that don't, right? So it's not about replacing recruiters, it's about the ones that adopt AI will be the ones for this new era. But you know, my favorite part about these conferences is like, wow, it's just so awesome to get to spend in-person time with folks from the industry, talk to our customers, talk to future customers, other folks from the industry. I mean, that's why we all got into this profession in the first place, right? We're people people. Most of us.

0:07:16.4 Joel Cheesman: Love people most of the time.

0:07:17.7 Chad Sowash: Over 80% of you watching right now, you watch over and over. We know you do, but you haven't liked and you haven't subscribed. Let's do that. Let's do that now.

0:07:27.1 Joel Cheesman: So you talk about it empowering and then also kind of like powering up recruiters, but aren't there stats around teams getting smaller?

0:07:38.6 Steve Bartel: Oh yeah. I mean, that's why it's even more important. So recruiting teams are smaller than ever before. If you look at the data from 2021 to 2024, take the average customer from SMB to enterprise, the average recruiting team has dropped from 29 to 24 over the last three years, but they're facing so much more work. So on average, recruiters are per recruiter owning 55% more job recs. Applications have gone up nearly three X. They're 2.7 X per recruiter compared to 2021. And guess what? Here's the thing. Everybody knows they're getting more inbound. What people might not realize they're feeling it, but they can't put a number to it. Is it's taking eight days longer to hire each role and it's taking 43% more interviews to make one hire.

0:08:30.4 Joel Cheesman: Ouch.

0:08:31.2 Steve Bartel: Ouch. It's a perfect storm of smaller teams being asked to do a whole lot more. I mean, a lot of people are, especially people outside of the industry, they're looking at the industry and they're thinking, Oh, like there's less hiring happening. Recruiting teams must be having a good time. I mean, all I can attest is quite the opposite.

0:08:51.1 Chad Sowash: So talk about the squeeze Alla. I mean, the teams are getting smaller, recs are getting more, more applications. How do you balance that knowing that more than likely you're not going to get more resources? I mean, how do you actually balance into all of this?

0:09:08.6 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah. I mean, the word that I heard for the last two years especially is efficiency. I mean, you just have to figure out how to make that workflow more efficient for you.

0:09:17.6 Chad Sowash: And have you changed workflows?

0:09:19.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: Absolutely. Absolutely. In so many ways.

0:09:21.5 Chad Sowash: I think it's many companies, they don't change workflows. They just continue to do it and they just push harder. And it's, I mean, it's like you're going to break the system. So talk about how you do that and how you get your teams to actually receive that well.

0:09:35.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, absolutely. So adoption is a very big part. We were just talking about it. But so you have to find the tools that make the process more efficient. It's not that you're changing the workflows, it's that you're finding different ways to get to that same step, right? So for example, sourcing. We posted a role at one of the companies, 14,000 applicants over one week. 14,000 applicants in one week. I don't care how many recruiters you have on the team. It is actually not efficient for them to go one by one by one by one trying to figure out which of the ones move forward and which ones don't.

0:10:10.2 Joel Cheesman: I thought AI was going to solve all that. We're going to AI everything. Is that not the case?

0:10:16.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: I mean, yes, but you also, you know, these AI tools are new. And so there's a lot of like trust and, you know, verify and how do you really go about this? And did AI go and filter it in the right way? And so you still have to have a lot of oversight. But I think what's been interesting is trying that, right? You have to lean in and you have to try and figure out, okay, so let's set an AI tool or let's do some AI filtering or let's figure out how we can decrease that 14 to 5,000. And then that 5,000, you know, what are some of the other knockout things that we could do, whether it's knockout questions or very specific things that you start to calibrate on a little bit more with your teams. And then you start to see, okay, actually the AI tool or the filtering that we use did work. So then the next time you lean into it more and you lean to more and you start to trust it a little bit more. So those are the types of things that you end up leaning into.

0:11:06.9 Alla Mezhvinsky: There's also, you know, technical assessments that are now automated, you know, whether that's with code signal or, you know, a couple of other different companies that come to mind. It plugs into the process. You're no longer utilizing the hiring manager's time or the technical interviewer's time or the recruiter's time. You're able to get through some of those stages in a little bit more of an automated, consistent way. And then you add the human touch to it. Then you add all the other layers like the onsite, like the hiring manager screen, which are still really important. And I don't want to say never, but I don't see them going away in a short period of time, like eventually, maybe. But right now, it's how do you automate some of the administrative work, like reviewing resumes, doing some of the initial screening, so that recruiters have the time to actually focus and give candidates a good experience. So I think that's what you're leaning into, is just automating the admin work that you can automate.

0:12:02.4 Steve Bartel: I love that. Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it on the head. There's so much talk. If you just go on LinkedIn and scroll for a few posts, you're going to see everybody talking about how candidate experience has gone downhill. But the thing that nobody's talking about is recruiter experience. Recruiter experience has gone way downhill, and we can't solve candidate experience unless we first solve recruiter experience, because when you're drowning in 15,000 applicants for a single role, how are you going to get back to everyone? How are you going to provide a personalized touch? And so, yeah, automating the busy work, automating the manual tedious work, the parts of the job that frankly kind of suck.

0:12:41.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, the scheduling, the manual stuff.

0:12:44.5 Steve Bartel: Exactly. And then that frees up teams to provide a better candidate experience and be more strategic to the rest of the organization. And you talked about using AI to automate inbound. One of our customers, Zillow, just rolled that out. They're saving 75% time on inbound app review.

0:13:03.1 Chad Sowash: Is this external sourcing only? Is it a hybrid between external and internal in their database that they have?

0:13:12.7 Steve Bartel: So that's for just their applications using AI to rank their applications. And the cool thing about that is not only do they save 75% of their time, but also, like we were just talking about, there's no way every single applicant can get a look. And now whether you're applicant number 8 or 800, you get the same fair chance to get reviewed by an actual recruiter if you've got the right qualifications for the job. And so on the app review side, they're saving 75% time. On the sourcing side, they're actually also using us for sourcing. I know that we were just rolling that out at Instacart before you switched to Glean, but their results there are even more astounding. I think they're seeing a 58% match rate on folks that Gem AI sourcing finds for them. So you think about that, compare that to going manually on LinkedIn one by one by one, where you might reach out to like 1 in 10 or 2 in 10. Now with like these new AI models that take natural language, you can just say, here are the five to 10 things I care about. Start ranking my inbound, take those same criteria, apply them to all the public profiles out there on the internet, and get a shortlist of 200 people to review every week.

0:14:29.7 Chad Sowash: Well, it's important though, because the job description has sucked for how long now to be able to get those things, those requirements that are actually what you need. And I mean, so, I mean, it's almost like a change in thought process. And I almost think that like this whole replumbing of the system is making TA rethink, and then also challenge hiring managers. Do you really need this, this, and this? Is that not happening in broad base? Are you guys seeing that?

0:15:00.3 Steve Bartel: It needs to happen. So the first thing that needs to happen is folks need to get more specific about what they're looking for. And actually that helps with the inbound problem right out of the gate, because if you post a more specific job description, you're gonna get more specific candidates that are actually a good fit for that role instead of like a generic inbound. Now, the other reason that's helpful is because the way these new AI models work is you can take in natural language. And so if you have a very specific job description, you can pass that into the AI and it can actually produce remarkable results based on natural language. And one of the things that we build in though, cause like not every team is gonna really nail the job description and make it super specific, even though we'd love them to, we build the ability to ingest an intake doc or like a hiring manager spot doc or whatever you wanna call it. There's like 20 different names for this doc. It's the internal doc that you have with your hiring manager where you've collaborated with them on requirements. Sometimes these are things that you wouldn't wanna post on your career site, but if you put those in, the AI can get even more specific about matching.

0:16:10.6 Joel Cheesman: And we're hearing a lot of horror stories, lazy apply, deep fakes, job seekers getting pretty savvy around shotgunning, machine gunning their resume to companies. You have a lot of companies using Gem, you get a lot of applications. Are you guys seeing this? Is the hype real and how are you fighting it? Or is a lot of hot air?

0:16:30.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, I mean, the stat you mentioned, which I think is like double the applicants, we felt it. 2024 Instacart got 400,000 applicants.

0:16:41.3 Chad Sowash: What was that?

0:16:42.5 Alla Mezhvinsky: 400,000.

0:16:44.7 Chad Sowash: 400,000, okay.

0:16:47.3 Alla Mezhvinsky: In one year. And that was, I wouldn't say almost close to double from previous years. So smaller recruiting teams, more applicants on the market, if you don't bridge that gap with some efficiencies in the process, unless you're able to hire large teams, which honestly still is inefficient. Like you don't want your teams, even if they're large, to be inefficient. But one of the things that I think you guys do really well on top of some of the things we've discussed is that analytics and insights piece. And something that I've worked really hard over the last few years is making sure that not just I'm able to get data and deliver that to our leaders, to our hiring managers, but every recruiter is actually able to understand that data, utilize that data, be able to send quarterly, monthly business reviews to their managers proactively so they're understanding what's happening in the pipeline. So I'll give you an example. We had a hiring manager that was saying, oh, it's taking too long to fill this rack, what's going on, we're not seeing too many candidates end up at the onsite stage.

0:17:50.2 Alla Mezhvinsky: And for whatever reason, it's so easy to say, well, recruiting is not doing something right.

0:17:54.4 Chad Sowash: Oh, of course.

0:17:56.6 Alla Mezhvinsky: Of course. It's always that.

0:17:57.5 Chad Sowash: It's not the market, it's not your requirements.

0:17:59.5 Alla Mezhvinsky: And there's no bad intent. It just, yes, if you're not getting candidates to the onsite, something's broken in the recruiting side. And we had just started using Gem insights. And so we were able to show the hiring manager like this funnel of like, here's how many applicants, here's how many we reviewed, here's how many talked to the hiring manager. And then we saw this crazy drop-off rate at the onsite stage. And so from hiring manager to case study to onsite, there was this massive drop-off. And so it actually wasn't necessarily the recruit, it wasn't happening at the recruiter stage, it was happening later down the process. And so, but unless you have that data and it doesn't live in spreadsheets, because it's really hard to visually make it appealing, but being able to pull, you know exactly which chart I'm talking about, being able to pull that and show that to the hiring managers and actually say, actually, here's the stage and let's dive into that stage. And what we realized is, it's true that it was taking too long, the case study was too hard, it was not consolidated with the onsite. And so people were like, you're gonna make me go through this hoop and then do an onsite?

0:19:03.4 Alla Mezhvinsky: No. And so we ended up consolidating and piling it a few different processes. And then all of a sudden it was like an unlock and we were able to get candidates to the onsite stage, get candidates into the offer stage. So it's things like that. And to your point, there's so many different parts of Gem, but that insights piece I think is making recruiters not only more efficient, but just like be able to work smarter and lead with data and influence their hiring managers based on that.

0:19:28.8 Chad Sowash: Well, turning that around though too, can you also show the hiring manager the time that they took in the process to help them say, look, I understand, we want this, we wanna squeeze this a little bit more, but your portion, can we work on that as well? Because I think it's a team effort, right? They don't understand if you have the insights, that's beautiful. And are the insights something that can be generated like right off of like the historical data? If it's something that you've hired for before that you understand this might be a long and here's the drop-off rate, those types of things.

0:20:06.2 Steve Bartel: Totally, yeah. And so the way the insights work, and I know exactly which chart you're talking about, that's our like pipeline analytics report. The cool thing about Gem is we can take all the data at the top of the funnel from your sourcing, your CRM, your talent marketing efforts, any of the different Gem products that you're using, and then marry that with the data from your ATS, whether you're using Gem ATS or, you know, greenhouse in your case at both of your previous roles. And we can take all of the conversion rates from your recruiting funnel, combine that with your sourcing efforts, your recruiting event strategy, your branded emails, and piece together a full funnel.

0:20:45.8 Chad Sowash: Everybody wins at Gem.

0:20:49.2 Joel Cheesman: Looks like there was gems for everybody.

0:20:50.9 Steve Bartel: Somebody just won some headphones back there. That is cool. This is why I love doing this stuff live. It's so fun. But yeah

0:20:59.5 Alla Mezhvinsky: I thought that was people getting excited about Gem analytics.

0:21:02.9 Steve Bartel: We'll take it. Yeah. Gem analytics, there it is. The cool thing about this though is it democratizes data, right? Previously you either had to track this stuff in spreadsheets or you had to like talk to somebody on recruiting ops or the people analytics team.

0:21:19.2 Chad Sowash: Just to get the data.

0:21:20.0 Steve Bartel: Just to get the data.

0:21:20.9 Chad Sowash: Yes.

0:21:21.4 Steve Bartel: Now a recruiting manager or even an individual recruiter and sourcer can pull up their funnel and they can bring it to their hiring manager and they can have an educated conversation and you get out of this game of like pointing fingers and guessing.

0:21:34.3 Alla Mezhvinsky: It's just all there.

0:21:35.9 Steve Bartel: It's right there.

0:21:37.4 Alla Mezhvinsky: I think the adoption piece is something important too. We've all worked for companies and had tools that accompany on boards and they do a quick little training and they send some sort of instruction guide and then you're expected to go at it. We did that in 2019 with Gem and we did a very lightweight introduction and all of a sudden we were like, well, there's only a couple of recruiters that are actually using it. You have this question of like, okay, is it the system or is it us? Did we do it the wrong way? I wasn't ready to hang my hat up on Gem and so we decided to relaunch it and we knew that we actually wanted to use it more. So we leaned into it quite a bit and really made sure that all the recruiters knew where to go, how to use the system, but more importantly, why? The why is if you're going into a meeting with your hiring manager and they're asking you these questions, you should be able to answer them. They shouldn't come to me. They shouldn't have to go to the top. Every recruiter should have this at their disposal.

0:22:41.2 Alla Mezhvinsky: And so doing that training and you guys did a great job of partnering with us and we're doing ongoing trainings. Well, maybe not we anymore, but Instacart continues to do ongoing trainings to make sure that all the product releases that Gem is doing, Instacart and whatever other company can actually take advantage of. Because otherwise the product knowledge gets stale and you end up only using the tools that you know about or the features that you know about. But as we talked about innovation, things are moving very quickly. And so kind of having this continuous partnership and continuous training is really helpful.

0:23:15.0 Steve Bartel: Totally. And there's so many new things coming out, but there's also so many new recruiters that join the team over time. And so that's why we always love to show up as an extension of the team. And I think you nailed it on the head. Like adoption, having a good product is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is like, you know, how do you get people enabled? How do you do the change management, especially if you're adopting something really powerful? It's a new way of working. And so especially with our larger customers, but also for folks that maybe haven't used sourcing automation, haven't used a CRM yet, haven't had like data at their fingertips before, maybe, and especially with this new wave of AI where every recruiter is trying to learn how to become AI fluent and how to use AI, how to prompt well, that kind of stuff. You know, that's where we like to show up as like a strategic partner.

0:24:04.6 Joel Cheesman: Steve, this one's for you. I know you talk to your customers a lot intimately. We're taping this at the beginning of May, so I don't want to hold you to anything from future perspective, but the geopolitical scene is pretty volatile right now. Tariffs, people worried about empty shelves, et cetera. It's no secret. Are you hearing from your clients a lot of concern or changes in their behavior at this point with how they do business?

0:24:30.9 Steve Bartel: Great question. It's impacting some in really obvious ways. I mean, take Wayfair, for example. I mean, they import 95% of their furniture from overseas. And so, you know, some companies are just in a really tough space. I think it's especially impacting larger enterprise companies. They tend to just do more global business. And so those folks are already seeing an impact. For your average, like, mid-market tech company, for like an AI startup, those folks are all pretty much business as usual. But we'll see. Like, a lot of that depends on how this develops over the next year. If there continues to be more unpredictability with, like, the tariff situation, with the geopolitical situation, you know, you could see us enter a recession. And then now there's going to be trickle-down effects to every company because every B2B SaaS company that sells to enterprise companies that do business overseas, they're going to see less sales. They're going to have to slow down their headcount and stuff like that. So, you know, really hard to see how this stuff shakes out. There's the really obvious first-order effects for a company like Wayfair. For anybody that's doing a lot of importing. But then there's the second-order effects, and those are, like, way, way harder to predict.

0:25:49.2 Joel Cheesman: How about Walgreens? Are they worried about empty shelves? Obviously, pharmaceuticals, like anything from Walgreens that you're hearing?

0:25:55.9 Steve Bartel: I haven't caught up with Walgreens about this personally, but thinking from first principles, yeah, that is a little bit uncertain.

0:26:04.1 Joel Cheesman: Doesn't impact you at all, I assume, from where you sit.

0:26:09.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: I think the theme is efficiency. Like, no matter what happens, I think teams are just continuing to focus on how do you get the most bang for your buck. And whatever happens, I think that continues, that has been the trend for the last two years, three years, and will continue to. And so I think that's, like, if you just focus on that, you're almost immune to a lot of things that are happening around you.

0:26:32.2 Steve Bartel: Yeah, totally. I mean, we saw this two and a half years ago when hiring really slowed down. We saw this when COVID first hit, and everybody froze hiring. A lot of layoffs happened. And the name of the game for both of these hiring slowdown cycles was efficiency. But the other thing that really accelerated was consolidation. I think that folks realized, first of all, you can save 30% to 50% on your stack by consolidating more things. But now I think a lot of people are really bought into the vision that an all-in-one consolidated stack is just better because your recruiters only have to learn one system instead of, like, 9 or 10 different tools. They don't have to jump and swivel between 10 different tools to do their job every day. So you actually get efficiencies by streamlining all that. You get better data because everything's fully integrated. To our conversation about data earlier, you get the most complete source of truth when everything's under one roof. That gives you better analytics, but it also gives you better AI. And so for folks that are trying to leverage AI, the really interesting piece, the hard part about AI is no longer the algorithm.

0:27:40.1 Steve Bartel: OpenAI, Anthropic, like they've kind of solved that with their new foundational models. The hard part is what context does the AI have? What data does it have access to? Right. And so for a really like simple example, if you were going to use an AI sourcing bot to automate some of your sourcing, you wouldn't want it reaching out to somebody that your team was already in contact with two months ago. You wouldn't want it reaching out to somebody that was rejected in your ATS seven months ago. And what you would want it doing is if somebody were attended a recruiting event, or if you met them on campus three years ago, or if they had a great conversation with a hiring manager 15 months ago, you'd want it to reference that in the reach out and offer a hyper personalized approach. And so where I see this stuff headed, whether there's an upmarket, recruiting teams are hiring like crazy or a downmarket where everybody's slowing down, looking to get more efficient, looking to consolidate is towards AI first all in one. And that's where we're positioning Gem in the market.

0:28:40.2 Chad Sowash: So when it comes down to all of this, right, it seems like there are two schools of thought and there always are. One platform to rule them all and then just having a very integratable solution, right? And it seems like agents are everywhere, right? Agents are everywhere and it seems like there are good point solutions that could prospectively integrate and kind of help instead of you trying to be everything to everybody to try to pull in some point solutions. Is that kind of like part of the partnership ecosystem that you guys are building? And for you, how important is that for the organization to know that, hey, look, the system that we're using is adaptable?

0:29:29.4 Steve Bartel: Yeah, it's a great question. So I think there's pros and cons. I think that if you're stitching together 10, 15 different tools that don't talk to each other super well, that's not a great status quo. And that's why I think consolidation is really appealing to people. Now with Gem, we never want to be building a product that isn't the very best, right? And so our take is to focus on the most important things and do them really well so that companies don't have to choose between a subpar product and an all-in-one.

0:30:03.7 Steve Bartel: But then partner with leading players for other parts of the stack that we don't do. For example, I think really highly of the call intelligence space, companies like RideHire and MetaView that are doing call intelligence and transcription of interview notes. It just saves you so much time. And we don't have that. We partner, we integrate. We're always going to integrate with any player in the stack. And so even though we have scheduling automation as part of our platform, if you prefer good time or modern loop, you can plug that into Gem ATS. No problem. They already integrate. We just think things will work a little bit better together if you use everything from Gem. It's kind of like Apple. You can pair an Apple headphone to an Android phone. And you can kind of pair these devices, but they just work a little bit better if you use the same system. 

0:30:57.8 Joel Cheesman: Sort of Spotify versus Apple Music, right? This works a little bit better with Apple products, Apple Music.

0:31:03.0 Steve Bartel: Although Spotify is better. 

0:31:06.6 Joel Cheesman: Yes. But does it integrate better? I can't interact with Siri and ask it to play songs on Spotify.

0:31:15.0 Chad Sowash: Oh, you can't? You should have Android then.

0:31:19.2 Steve Bartel: I guess we just all use Androids.

0:31:20.6 Chad Sowash: Thank you. Alla, for you, the most important piece, how is it? We keep hearing about the slimming of the stack because it just keeps growing and growing and growing. How important is that for you guys? How often do you reassess the stack and the process? And then also the nimble question.

0:31:41.4 Joel Cheesman: You're not making a comment about my weight, are you? Slimming of the stack? No? You're very passive aggressive sometimes.

0:31:47.8 Chad Sowash: I didn't know that you would catch on to that, but kind of. But anyway, the slimming of the stack, less cheeseburgers. Is that important? Have you guys focused on that? And then also, how often do you reassess?

0:31:59.2 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah. I mean, honestly, I reassess every year just because you have to. You're looking at your budgets. You're looking at your team. You're really trying to figure out what's the best path forward. And I think you're doing it right. For different reasons, companies may not be able to just go all in. They might be embedded with a system already that they've used for many years, and it's hard for them to come off of that. They might not have the resources. They might have a long-term contract that is hard to get out of.

0:32:25.2 Chad Sowash: They might be forced to use workday. 

0:32:26.9 Alla Mezhvinsky: They might be forced to use whatever. And so not limiting yourself to saying, no, you only have to do all Gem or nothing, I think allows you to be great partners to whatever client's needs are. But you also are a subject matter expert and a leader in a lot of these different other components. And so it allows customers to still sign on with you for those things. And I think as I think about myself and all the other leaders that I talk to, that is important. That flexibility, being nimble and being able to kind of pick and choose what you need for this moment, for your budget, for your team's needs, is what we're all looking for. You know, we all obviously want something that consolidates everything. That would certainly be the best path forward, but it's not always a perfect world. It may be eventually, right, as we continue to add on different products. And as I talked about training our teams in different features, ultimately that's the goal. But I don't know that we're like trying to get there as quickly as possible and really just solving for what the team needs are today.

0:33:25.6 Steve Bartel: I think that's really key. And that's actually one of the differentiated approaches that we take at Gem is we're the only all-in-one recruiting platform that can meet you where you are today. We're the only all-in-one that can be your ATS or can sit alongside your ATS. And that's really important. I mean, because like, think about like an ATS migration. That's already such a huge lift. If you're talking about ripping out your entire stack and doing that at the same time.

0:33:50.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: And onboarding, you know, something new...

0:33:53.7 Steve Bartel: That's like a huge undertaking. And so one of the cool things about Gem is you can get started with sourcing, CRM, analytics, like we were just talking about. You can layer on scheduling automation, maybe some of the talent marketing. You can use some of the AI products. And then now the team is like using the full power of Gem alongside their ATS. We flip a switch and now you're on the ATS. And like the change management for that piece is so much lower because you're already using Gem across the entire recruiting team for all these other workflows.

0:34:24.6 Joel Cheesman: I'm hearing a... 

0:34:26.2 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah, I was going to say, I think to add to that is companies may not even realize that certain tools do these things. So I'll give you an example. Last year, we went on this whole journey of looking for a sourcing tool. And frankly, we just didn't even know that Gem does it. And so going through that exploration, looking at all the tools and then Gem saying, oh, we do this as well. It allows you to really understand what the market and compare and again, like pick the right product for you. And of course, Gem made a lot of sense because we were using it. It solved all of our problems, but you don't... It's like hard to just say, well, I'm only going to choose Gem because this gives you a bigger picture to make more educated guests.

0:35:07.6 Joel Cheesman: So hearing a lot of analytics, data, statistics, etcetera, from you. And what we've heard from a lot of recruiters and TA professionals is in order to get that seat at the table where our opinion matters and we can evoke change, data is paramount. Proof. Proof. Not just how I feel, this is what's happening. So I'm curious in terms of when you build these products, is that part of what you want to deliver to your clients? Like here's a story through data that you can show your C-suite to get things done. And for you, are you using such data to go to the table and get things done? You're nodding your head yes.

0:35:43.6 Steve Bartel: So I'm actually going to let Alla answer that because I think the work she did at Instacart is like a prime example of how to do this well. 

0:35:51.8 Alla Mezhvinsky: Yeah. So I talked about it earlier in the session today, but I used to wake up in the morning and have this pit in my stomach that I was going to get some sort of a ping. And I would. I would get a ping and it would be anything from hiring managers asking me, hey, how's a certain role going? How's that pipeline looking? Or, hey, the recruiting team isn't going fast enough. Do you have any data for pipeline analytics or what we have? And in order for me to get that data previously, it would be a combination of pulling a report from our ATS, looking at various manual trackers, and then downloading some information from the recruiters' heads that was pretty anecdotal. And it would literally take me hours, days, weeks, nights, weekends to pull this data together. And I'd cross my fingers that it would actually be somewhat correct. And so we spent a lot of time at Instacart trying to figure out how to automate this. And we started the partnership with Gem in 2019. And that was a big part of it is this analytics, the insights. How do you pull all the information together from, as Steve mentioned, your sourcing efforts, your ATS, everything that you're doing? How do you pull that into one source of truth and actually be able to get data that is, first of all, at your fingertips, isn't outdated on a daily basis, and isn't just for me to use?

0:37:08.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: I think that was the part that was really important is, yes, I want the data to be able to do these questions, but how do I enable the team to have access to this data as well, to understand where to pull it from, how to slice it and dice it, and be able to actually proactively provide that to their managers? And so we built great dashboards that included everything from time to fill, level of hires, broken down by every which way you can think of, whether it was tech versus non-tech. And then recruiters can slice it and dice it for their specific teams, for their specific roles, for their specific functions. And that became our format for all of the monthly business reviews, the quarterly business reviews. And it took that pit out of my stomach, but the recruiters were much more educated, much more able to influence with data and actually show much easier sort of the narrative behind the work they were doing.

0:38:01.8 Steve Bartel: Yeah, I love that. At Gem, we talk a lot about democratizing data, so putting it in the hands of recruiting managers, rec ops. We also talk a lot about elevating the function and helping our customers show up as strategic partners to the rest of the organization. And it was really cool to get to partner with you all on that.

0:38:18.2 Joel Cheesman: So let's talk about the future for a second. I know at Gem you have a roadmap of what you want to build. Alla, I know you have a wish list of what you want to see companies build. I'll let you pick who goes first, but I want to know what the future looks like or what we hope the future looks like.

0:38:34.5 Alla Mezhvinsky: Hey, I'll start and then you can say if that's on your roadmap or not.

0:38:37.8 Chad Sowash: Take notes, Steve.

0:38:39.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: I mean, the notion, you know, we talked about efficiency. We talked about efficiency. We talked, you know, one-stop shop for all. Like, if we can get those right over the next few years, I think we're going to be in a really good, I think Gem's going to be in a good position, but I think recruiting teams are going to be in a place where they're not having to chase all of this information. They're not having to demo so many different products. They're able to just trust one partner and really hit all of the different challenges that they have and solve them. So that's, you know, it's a little bit high level, but there are still a lot of systems that we're working with and it would be great to consolidate.

0:39:16.6 Steve Bartel: Amazing. That's music to my ears. I mean, at Gem, we're building the only AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. And so the newest things that I'm most excited about, the ATS, it's coming along super quickly. We already have hundreds of customers, but that's a big part of our roadmap because we're bringing it up market really quickly. Today, it is in general availability for companies of up to a thousand customers, but we actually have an upmarket ATS design partner program with 15 incredible brands that you would all recognize. Not allowed to talk about them publicly yet, but they're on a multi-year journey with us of pre-purchasing the ATS.

0:39:55.9 Joel Cheesman: I think you're talking about OnlyFans, Chad. I think OnlyFans is going to be on it. OnlyFans? It's pretty big.

0:40:00.2 Chad Sowash: It's pretty big.

0:40:01.0 Steve Bartel: Fingers crossed. All of them are migrating in the next year as we continue to build out the enterprise readiness requirements for companies of up to 3,000 and then up to 10,000. And so I'm really excited about that. I'm also really excited about the new AI products. We talked about AI app review. We talked about AI sourcing. Those two are in the product today. We're making tons of improvements. In terms of analytics, we talked about data on top of your hiring funnel and on top of your top of funnel. We're also adding talent insights on top of public market data to round out that picture. And then on the AI side, we're adding in, in the next month or two, we're adding rediscovery. So imagine this.

0:40:40.5 Chad Sowash: There we go.

0:40:41.3 Steve Bartel: Boom. You can set up your AI search. Yes. It starts ranking your inbound. You get it calibrated. Now it goes to work on top of your ATS and your CRM to surface all of the folks that have already raised their hand. And then that same AI that you've already calibrated goes to work externally to start shortlisting 100, 200 people a week. And that is, I think, the true power of an AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. The AI works better together, and it works across all of your different channels.

0:41:10.1 Joel Cheesman: Did you guys have fun?

0:41:12.5 Steve Bartel: Yeah.

0:41:13.0 Alla Mezhvinsky: That was great.

0:41:13.5 Joel Cheesman: Cool. That was the warm-up. We're going to do it for real now. Pretty good.

0:41:15.7 Alla Mezhvinsky: As long as I can do it for my flight.

0:41:17.5 Joel Cheesman: Guys, we are live from the Gem booth at Unleash. That is Steve Bartel with Gem. That is Alla Meshvinsky with Glean. Chad, another one in the can.

0:41:27.7 Joel Cheesman: We out.

0:41:27.8 Chad Sowash: We out.

0:41:28.0 Podcast Outro: Thank you for listening to what's it called? A podcast. The Chad. The Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout-outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar. Blue. Nacho. Pepper Jack. Swiss. So many cheeses. And not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.