Introducing Gem Talent Compass

TalIt’s no surprise to members of our community that all eyes are on Talent Acquisition (TA) these days. Company executives, department leaders, and even hiring managers are starting to realize that how they recruit and who they hire are among the most important drivers of success for their organizations. Consequently, they want greater visibility into recruiting strategy, and they want to partner with Talent Acquisition to drive strategic recruiting decisions.

For recruiting leaders, this welcome sign means Talent Acquisition is finally being given the resources and support they need to drive successful recruiting outcomes. But this newfound appreciation also comes with responsibility: they are now in the driver’s seat when it comes to demonstrating the success of their efforts and identifying opportunities to further augment their end-to-end recruiting strategy. That means going beyond basic data reporting and instead identifying what’s working well and where there are opportunities to grow. Simply put, they need insights that offer strategic guidance, rather than simply report on what’s already there.

Today, we are proud to introduce Talent Compass, Gem’s insights & planning solution. Talent Compass offers full-funnel visibility, hiring forecasts, performance metrics, and executive reporting that TA teams use to plan ahead and guide their recruiting strategy.

For those of you familiar with Gem’s Pipeline Analytics and Dashboards, you may recognize some of the tools shown above. But over the past few months, we’ve been investing more in our solution with the intention of giving you more than the capacity to look at recruiting data and report surface-level metrics.

So what does that mean? Well, Talent Compass comes with 5 core solutions within the product line. 

End-to-end visibility

By consolidating recruiting data from Gem and your ATS into a single system of record, Talent Compass offers the ability to capture snapshots of your entire funnel, but also dive into details. Our customers use the Pipeline Analytics module to slice and dice across different lenses. Prioritize best sources of hire, identify recruiters and hiring managers that work well together, and uncover departments that are particularly selective during resume review and interviews. There are number filters and breakdowns, which means the possibilities are endless.

Angela Miller, Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition and Ops at Pure Storage, explains how she uses Talent Compass: “My Operations Manager actually relies on Gem for pipeline throughput. The fact that her operating rhythm has pivoted to lean on Gem’s Pipeline Analytics speaks volumes about the accuracy and the reliability of Gem’s data.”

Executive reporting

Executive reporting allows teams to present insights that can be tailored to their unique audiences—whether that’s hiring managers, department heads, or senior leaders. Talent Compass’ dashboards module comes with configurable widgets that allow users to customize the type of visuals, filters, stages, and even breakdowns they want to present. Users can also set targets for key metrics like total hires, average time to hire, and offer acceptance rate. TA teams use this to get a recurring download on progress, present to cross-functional partners & leaders, and even review internal performance metrics.

The value, as Amber Hayes, VP of Global Recruiting at Unity, describes it, is that “talent acquisition has even more credibility now because they are no longer speaking anecdotally; they’re speaking with data.” 

Forecasting & planning

Talent Compass includes a forecasting calculator that not only projects the number of hires you’re on pace to make, but also when. This can be forecast at the individual job req or at an aggregate level, like department. Default passthrough rates and time-in-stage are based on historical data, but can be adjusted if you want to quantify the impact of potential process improvements. The calculator also works backwards: users can input the final number of hires they would like to make and the calculator will output the number of candidates required at each stage in order to meet final goals. This feature is particularly useful for teams looking to capacity plan resources and headcounts in the face of ever-growing hiring goals.

As Carmen Coleman, Head of Business Recruiting at Envoy, explains, “Gem essentially tells me how many hours of work we’ll have to put in to suffice a new headcount. As soon as you have that data, you know whether you’re under-resourced or not.”

Performance optimization

Within the Pipeline Analytics module, recruiting managers and leaders can monitor individuals and roles to better understand how their teams are faring. Reviewing specific job breakdowns allows managers to observe pipeline risks across roles or even spot any troubling candidate bottlenecks and/or drop-offs. Within dashboards, managers can even create widgets with specific metrics for their individual recruiters (e.g., phone screen to interview ratio, offer acceptance rate, etc.), serving as an internal performance scorecard.

As Mike Moriarty, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Dropbox, puts it, “we have much better insights into which parts of the funnel to optimize.”

DEI insights

Talent Compass offers organizations visibility into how their businesses recruit diverse talent, from initial outreach to hire, and everything in between. The Pipeline Analytics and Dashboards modules come with the ability to review breakdowns by gender and race/ethnicity from top to bottom. This enables leaders to track how their team reaches out to candidates from diverse backgrounds and how that translates into building diverse talent pools. Teams can also apply this lens throughout the rest of the funnel to spot any disproportionate drop-offs or bottlenecks and investigate what might be the cause. All of this is meant to give our customers transparency with the hopes that this visibility can drive honest & productive conversations. 

Joel Torres, Talent Acquisition Manager at Twilio, put it best: “I can look at the numbers as stark truth… if I see a team that’s moving the needle on diversity, I dig into it.”‍

Peer benchmarks

When it comes to evaluating recruiting performance, finding benchmarks can be a bit of a black box as talent teams have to rely on word of mouth or outdated reports, both of which may not be specific enough. Fortunately, Talent Compass comes with Peer Benchmarks, empowering Talent Acquisition teams to contextualize their recruiting KPIs. With exclusive access to our customers' CRM & ATS, Gem aggregates and anonymizes this data to offer our customers a lens into how other high-performing recruiting orgs are faring. Our customers can benchmark how their organization competes when it comes to delivering a great candidate experience (time to hire), closing offers (offer accept rate), and recruiting diverse talent (pipeline diversity ratios). On top of that, these benchmarks are customizable by company size, location, department, and valuation, allowing for an apples-to-apples comparison.

‍Conclusion

Talent Compass was built to empower Talent Acquisition with insights and guidance on how to drive their recruiting strategies forward. As we continue to invest in Talent Compass, our intention is to give our customers the tools they need to come prepared to their next meeting, ready to demonstrate their value!

Thank you to our customers for your continued support and partnership in helping us build Talent Compass into what it is today, and what it will grow into tomorrow. Your conversations and insights have been invaluable, and we’re honored to be partnered with you on this journey.