Over the past few years, the talent market has had its share of ups and downs, challenging even the most seasoned talent acquisition professionals. At Faire, the recruiting team stays focused on their mission: to find top talent that will help grow their platform and support small businesses globally.

We caught up with Emily Sykes, Recruiting Operations; Jojo Zou, Product Strategy, Analytics Recruiter; and Agnaldo Junior, Senior Tech Recruiter at Faire to learn more about the challenges they’re facing and how they’re turning to tools like Gem’s AI Sourcing, Recruiting CRM, and Full-Funnel Analytics to find the top talent they need to make their company successful. 

Gem adds a lot of transparency and helps our team make informed decisions for sourcing, so we don't have to make assumptions of why one role closed faster than the other. We can actually look at the data and see that so and so has a great response rate. They're leveraging this tool. We can see where we're falling short in terms of underrepresented groups in our pipelines. And I think that's really helpful for removing assumptions and allowing us to make data-informed decisions. We don't have to guess. We can actually have data, set more metric-based goals, and measure success in a way that would be challenging without Gem.

Emily Sykes

Recruiting Operations Specialist

Faire was created in 2017 with a simple vision: to help small businesses come together and compete on a more even playing field against the big box stores and massive online retailers. And today Faire is the online marketplace where independent retailers discover their next bestsellers from brands across the globe. Millions of products are sold each year on Faire from retailers located across 50,000 cities. Faire has several offices across North America, Europe, and Brazil. 

Faire’s challenges: Improving offer acceptance rates by delivering a faster, seamless hiring experience

As a midsize company, Faire is often competing against big-name tech companies for talent. With the current job market starting to heat up again, Emily says that the Faire TA team is keeping their eyes on offer acceptance rates: “A couple years ago, a lot of places had paused hiring and we're starting to see these big giants come back with their name recognition or comp packages, so trying to stand out from the rest can come into play.” 

One of the areas where Emily sees a lot of opportunity is in speeding up time to hire by reducing the amount of time candidates spend in the process. She says, “We can make sure we don't have a long, tedious process because that's something that we can have a little bit more control over than a larger organization.”

Prioritizing DEIB in the talent pipeline

Regardless of market conditions, Faire’s leaders are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), so it’s also critical for the TA team to have insights into the diversity of their talent pipeline. This is especially important since Faire hires for many technical roles that have traditionally seen fewer female candidates. Hiring managers and leaders expect recruiters to share reliable and data-backed insights into the composition of their hiring funnels. 

How Gem AI helps Faire find qualified talent faster 

AI Sourcing identifies new, relevant talent—fast

Faire’s TA team recently ran a trial of Gem AI Sourcing with impressive results. In the span of two and a half months, Gem AI Sourcing surfaced over 7,700 new candidates across 8 open roles (that’s 100+ matches a day!). Of this pool, up to 40% of qualified matches were immediately added to Gem’s projects and sequences, allowing the team to accelerate outreach and divert extra time to sourcing for other roles. And perhaps most significantly, they were able to hire their first senior engineer surfaced by Gem AI after less than a month. 

One thing I like about the AI Sourcing tool is I feel like I'm finding new candidates I haven't seen before. I like being able to describe exactly what I'm looking for, like experience in a marketplace. It's been really helpful in terms of finding new people to reach out to. There are some functionalities in the Gem AI tool that I really like in the sense that it's just easier to create a profile that I'm looking for.

Jojo Zou

Product Strategy, Analytics Recruiter

Senior Tech Recruiter Agnaldo Junior calls out the speed of Gem’s AI Sourcing, saying,

The search setup is not only easier, but also more time-efficient since new results are brought up automatically. This means that even if you only have ten minutes, you can reach out to a good number of candidates. Since our team already uses Gem for outreach, having this tool fully integrated into the main product was a smooth transition. It feels like a natural addition, unlike other tools I’ve tried that felt like extra steps in the process.

Agnaldo Junior

Senior Recruiter

Gem powers stronger conversions with email finding, SOBO (send on behalf of), & outreach stats

When it comes to engaging passive candidates, the Faire team has clearly found a winning strategy—they have higher open, reply, and interested rates than industry benchmarks. And they rely on Gem to get it done. 

Emily says that Gem allows them to test different tactics and gather data to demonstrate what’s working well. “There were maybe some hacky ways in the past to see if someone engaged or clicked on your content, but now it's really clear to see someone's messaging because we're using an executive email alias or because we linked to a recent funding article that is doing really well. That transparency on what's resonating from a sourcing standpoint is where Gem can be beneficial.” Emily also appreciates the fact that Gem has so many reference materials and templates baked into the system, which provides plenty of ideas for ways to experiment. 

Gem reporting promotes transparency and helps Faire meet DEIB goals

Emily and Jojo are both big fans of Gem’s reporting features. Emily explains how consistent reporting helps improve team performance: “One of the benefits of Gem—as opposed to just individual LinkedIn recruiter accounts and projects—is the data tracking and performance metrics. I think that's been really helpful to even encourage and foster some healthy competition across the full-cycle recruiters and sourcers, to be able to see outreach stats and open rates.”

Jojo says Gem’s reporting allows her to keep close tabs on her performance and fine-tune her outreach messaging. “Being able to get insight into candidate interest rates is helpful because our team can see if  we need to change our outreach messaging because our candidate interest rate is low, and what we might think is the reason for that.

Because DEIB is a top priority at Faire, Emily and Jojo say that Gem reporting allows them to track how they’re performing, course-correct when necessary, and keep their key stakeholders informed. 

We use Gem for DEIB metrics to reflect our full applicant pool and to illustrate how our recruiters and sourcers build top-of-funnel with intention. For instance, in engineering, where we see fewer women engineers, we prioritize sourcing candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. This approach not only broadens our pool but also helps us present a comprehensive, diverse talent slate to hiring managers, aligned with our commitment to DEIB.

Emily Sykes

Recruiting Operations Specialist

Gem helps the TA team reduce their spending on agencies and job boards 

Gem AI helps Faire find qualified candidates to source with less friction, which cuts down the need to spend in other areas like job boards and agencies. Jojo says the TA team is beginning to use Gem’s CRM features to start with existing relationships rather than always starting searches from scratch: “Gem lets you re-source or look for candidates within the projects as well. And that's also been helpful for us to go back to people we've sourced in the past—let's try them again. It's easy to pull that information.” Jojo recalls that for at least one role she’s supported in the past year, rediscovered candidates made up around half of the candidates. “We’re finding a lot of quality in our passive candidates by tapping into existing relationships,” she added.

With Gem’s outreach features like SOBO, Emily finds that they’re not relying on executive search agencies as much as they had in the past. She explains, “We've been able to work on some more senior director level searches without relying on external agencies because we can leverage Gem’s personalized outreach features. Senior-level candidates are more prone to engaging with us because it's coming from some trusted leader in their network or maybe it's going directly to their found email address because they're a busy person and they're not always on LinkedIn.” 

Gem is Faire’s “must-have sourcing tool” 

Emily agrees, saying that Gem delivers insights that empower TA team members to continuously fine-tune their tactics and improve their performance: “Being able to self-monitor and self-correct, being able to iterate over time and get that tracking can be helpful. I don't think all recruiters and sourcers would have had that with prior tools as easily.”