Interns Blogpost Spring 2025

Gem has been fortunate enough to welcome three bright minds from the University of Waterloo into our fold as interns over these past few months. We sat down with them to talk about their experience during their time with us at Gem.

Yuhao Jia

What projects did you work on at Gem and what was the impact on the end user?

I worked on implementing email notifications for our AI ranking product, which allows users to be notified when candidates that meet a certain threshold apply for a particular role. When dealing with a large volume of applicants, it’s often easy for recruiters to miss individuals who may be a good match against their criteria, and this feature ensures that the right candidates are visible in a clear, concise format. These emails were designed to be minimalistic and easy to read, and intended to be scanned at the start or end of one’s day.

Navigating to Gem, finding a particular role, opening up app review and then honing in on a candidate can be a cumbersome process, which is why these notifications also provide ease-of-use to recruiters through hyperlinks directly to top candidates so they can be easily evaluated and advanced. The notifications themselves also include a link to applicant review so that other top candidates that were unable to fit in the email can be considered as well. All-in-all, this feature was meant to highlight top candidates, generate excitement around our AI ranking product and empower recruiters to hire the right talent for their role.

What challenge(s) did you run into while delivering the project, and what were your biggest takeaways from the experience?

With any product, the security of customer data is paramount, and Gem is no exception. There are a number of moving parts to our application pipeline - certain tables store user data, while others contain information about specific roles or candidate resumes. It was important to scope out the fields that were needed from each of these tables and the relationships between them to ensure that users would not be mistakenly notified of roles or candidates not pertaining to the ones under their organization, for this would not only be undesired behavior but a breach of confidentiality. We were able to guarantee this goal by carefully drawing out the implementation, understanding the underlying keys that build relationships across tables and meticulously testing across a variety of roles once the feature was complete.

Another challenge was determining how often the notifications should fire, with daily, weekly and semi-weekly frequencies as possible options. We were able to decide on a daily frequency after discourse with our Product Manager and Designer, both of whom had more context on customer needs and usage patterns. This was something that I was then able to build in the backend using a scheduler and logic surrounding last_modified timestamps.

Favorite part about working at Gem?

My favorite part about working at Gem is the exciting culture and fun, collaborative atmosphere across all teams. I look forward to starting each day with shared smiles as I walk by my colleagues and eagerly await our light-hearted yet insightful conversations at lunch. When I’m stuck with direction, I know I can turn to anyone around me to discuss potential approaches or existing issues with my code. Everyone is extremely supportive, helpful, and willing to foster my learning and development as an intern through constructive feedback, all of which have been integral in enriching my journey here at Gem.

George Wan

What project(s) have you worked on so far at Gem and what was the impact on the end user?

I worked on improving the user experience around using interview plans and interview scorecards within Gem’s applicant tracking system. Specifically, I implemented a template bank that allows customers to create interview templates and scorecard questions that can be reused across multiple different jobs. This means that common questions, for example those about company values, can be easily reused across the interviews for all the relevant jobs. This feature is part of a long-term goal to bring Gem ATS up to par with other ATS options so that customers are not losing out on ATS capability by having Gem as their all-in-one recruiting platform.

The template banks streamline the process of creating scorecards and interviews for each job, as users no longer need to manually enter details from memory and can instead easily reuse questions and interviews that already exist within Gem. Reusable templates also allow questions and interviews to be simultaneously updated by simply editing the template. For example, users can make interviews for all technical positions 15 minutes longer by updating the template instead of needing to find all the relevant jobs to update!

What challenge(s) did you run into while working on these project(s), and what were your biggest takeaways from the experience?

Creating the template banks required a delicate balance in UI/UX design to ensure that this feature would be noticed, and subsequently adopted, by customers. However, it was also important for the UI to remain familiar with customers so that their existing workflow and habits would continue to be supported.

The initial iterations of scorecard questions took an aggressive approach by forcing users to search through existing questions from the template bank before allowing them to create their own questions. However, customer discussions quickly revealed that this would be a pain point as it took additional steps for the user to accomplish the same end result. From the user perspective, this overcomplicates the product for not much gain. As a result, we settled on keeping the existing functionality and workflow for creating scorecard questions, but instead added a button to publish those questions to the template bank. This way, we are preserving old behaviours while also encouraging users to utilize the template bank.

This experience taught me that when delivering new features, accommodating the workflows that customers have already settled into is just as important as delivering new features that make their lives easier. As a software engineer, my job is ultimately to deliver a product that customers enjoy using, rather than designing a product that decides how customers should work.

What is your favorite part of being a Gem intern?

My favorite part of being a Gem intern is the company culture and team spirit that present itself in the open and collaborative work environment. Not only is everyone eager to help, we also enjoy hanging out outside of work during activities such as weekly pickleball or a Lake Tahoe ski trip. Gem has been the only workplace I have seen that feels like not just a group of colleagues, but a group of friends. Whatever question I have, whether it be about coding practices, food recommendations, or just life in general, I feel confident that I can receive the help, support, and advice I need.

Richard Zhang

What projects did you work on at Gem and what was the impact on the end user?

I worked on making improvements to Gem’s job boards. This included refactoring backend logic to improve data efficiency and to pave the way for future feature development in our job boards. With this change I was also able to implement the ability to add hiring team members’ contact information for internal job boards, and introduce the ability to create unlisted job postings for external boards.

I was extremely excited to work on this project because job boards are a critical component of Gem. As an engineer on the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) team, my goal was to ensure a seamless experience - from the moment a candidate applies to a job to when the hiring team reviews applications. By enabling hiring team visibility, we allow candidates to know who to reach out to, and unlisted job posts allow hiring teams to seek applicants without the need to publicly expose the job position.

What challenge(s) did you run into while working on these project(s), and what were your biggest takeaways from the experience?

Job boards are a very important feature of Gem due to being publicly accessible. This means it was pivotal for me to ensure only the essential information gets exposed. Making these improvements thus taught me the significance of effective communication and thorough planning. Having a second eye throughout the development process allowed me to correct smaller issues before they escalate, and it also keeps everyone updated on progress. Without it, serious consequences may have resulted such as blocking application flow which would prevent applicants from applying to job postings.

What I took away from this project is an appreciation to be more meticulous in overseeing end-to-end development. By deeply understanding customer needs, I’ve learned how to pick better approaches to development and approach testing new features with greater caution and precision. As an intern with limited experience, it’s always tough to not know what you don’t know. By working closely with people with more experience than I have, it has taught me to ask better questions and continue to refine the quality of my work, allowing me to leave, what I believe to be, a meaningful impact on Gem in these short few months.

What is your favorite part of being a Gem intern?

My favorite part of being a Gem intern is the supportive team culture and diverse opportunities of career development. Not only is everyone dedicated to self-improvement, but they are also supporting each other, ultimately accelerating the entire team’s growth. Outside of work, our numerous social events have enhanced our overall team bonding. Through the work I’ve done, I’ve experienced many opportunities to improve Gem for the better, making meaningful contributions to our codebase, and looking back from the day I started at Gem, I definitely recognize my professional growth over these last few months.