About Mission Cloud

Mission is a leading born-in-the-cloud managed services and consulting provider, offering end-to-end cloud services, innovative AI solutions, and software for AWS customers. As an AWS Premier Tier Partner, they help businesses optimize their technology investments, enhance performance and governance, scale efficiently, secure their data, and embrace innovation with confidence. Their team of AWS experts empowers businesses to accelerate technology adoption, including generative AI, while seamlessly migrating, managing, and modernizing their cloud environments.

As Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud, Tony Le brings nearly 20 years of recruiting experience and has worked with almost a dozen different ATSs throughout his career. His team faced the challenge of scaling recruiting operations while maintaining high-quality standards and a white-glove candidate experience.

With increasing market volatility and fluctuating applicant volumes, Tony needed a solution that could help his team work more efficiently regardless of market conditions. When it came time to evaluate new recruiting technology, Tony was looking for a platform that could truly transform how his team operated rather than just serving as "a fancy file cabinet."

The challenge: From outdated technology to modern recruiting demands

Mission Cloud faced several critical challenges with its previous recruiting technology:

First, they were working with tools that hadn't evolved significantly in years, operating more as basic candidate repositories than strategic hiring platforms.

"Most ATSs have been a fancy file cabinet, and so eventually the ATS gets devalued."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

Second, the team struggled with overwhelming administrative work. In today's volatile hiring market, they needed to manage both high-volume inbound applications and strategic sourcing efforts — their existing system wasn't equipped to handle this dual challenge efficiently.

"Today's market has a lot more volatility — now Gem can help with the flood of applicants that come in and manage the flow without wasting hours and hours of time to find the one applicant that I want."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

Third, their previous tools fell short when it came to analytics. "TA has become more data-driven. Data used to be a post-analysis. Today, you need real-time data to pivot quickly or make an informed decision before you start," Tony noted. Their previous solution provided only high-level data, forcing the team to export information into spreadsheets and build their own reporting solutions.

Finally, the team was dealing with disconnected processes that created friction in their recruiting workflow. Tony described how "everything just flows with Gem — other ATSs, things like the candidates, the jobs, the requisition all live in different places — like different browsers, so you're jumping between tabs all the time."

Faster candidate reviews and evaluation

One of the immediate benefits Mission Cloud experienced was the significant improvement in how they reviewed, evaluated, and managed candidates. The team uses Gem's AI-Powered Application Review to quickly identify top candidates from high-volume applicant pools. Tony notes that "AI Ranking has been 'on the nose' with our matching percentage — hiring Managers are incredibly impressed with the candidates being surfaced."

"I haven't seen any other platform that has enabled speed and quality like Gem has and using technology to keep innovating on how to make that process better."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

Through self-service access, hiring managers have visibility into their hiring pipelines. Tony shares, "Every manager can log in and see how many applicants we are reviewing, and with AI ranking, they can see the quality of the pipeline. They can make their own inferences."

This transparency eliminated constant status update requests, avoiding the constant "Where are we with this?" inquiries. Managers could even proactively identify promising candidates: "They'll even go in and start reviewing candidates by themselves and say, 'I went into your pipeline, and I saw there were like three or four people who ranked pretty high. I went ahead and clicked them, and I think they're great. Let's try to get them in the mix too.'"

The improved candidate evaluation process was a key factor in enabling Mission Cloud's lean recruiting team to manage 3x more open roles with the same staffing level.

Automated scheduling and candidate communication

The team uses Gem Scheduling to standardize interview templates and define the hiring process, interview stages, and interviewer assignments in advance. Scheduling that previously took days of back-and-forth emails was reduced to minutes. 

"I can click a couple of buttons and schedule 20 emails to candidates and get this all scheduled on my calendar in minutes."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

Tony's recruiter can "schedule 15 interviews within 30 minutes" with just a few clicks. The team achieved 30-50% faster interview scheduling, eliminating days between communications with candidates. 

"An hour's worth of time setting up your role in Gem saves you 10 hours of time scheduling down the line"

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

The automated scheduling also eliminated the need to manually coordinate across multiple calendars: "I don't have to type the same interviewer's name 30 times. And I don't have to look at four people's calendars and play Tetris all day long."

This acceleration was critical to their improved time-to-fill metrics, which decreased from 65 days to 57 days and continued to improve.

Data-driven recruiting operations

The team uses Gem's reporting capabilities to track key metrics across their entire recruiting funnel, from open requisitions to offers and hires. As Tony explains, "TA has become more data-driven. Data used to be a post-analysis. Today, you need real-time data to pivot quickly or make an informed decision before you start."

Instead of exporting data to build custom reports, the team can access the insights they need directly in Gem. Tony noted, 

"One thing I can say about Gem is that I have spent a lot less time creating spreadsheets than any other solution."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

The team has direct visibility into pipeline health, allowing them to be more proactive: "Go into candidate pipeline and see if I'm missing anything, any SLAs at risk. Enables us to ping people who need to take action → then dig deeper into individual Jobs."

"Every week I have to report open reqs, hires, candidates in offer stages, final onsite stages, internal candidates → how many people do we have to onboard, how many laptops do we have to buy...When you make 10 hires assuming an average $100k, you're bringing a $1M onto the books, which is a lot of money, so finance wants to know if we're running on time."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

Looking ahead

Tony Le and his team continue to see value from their investment in Gem's AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. The platform's ability to adapt to changing market conditions—whether helping source candidates in a tight market or efficiently processing high application volumes—positions Mission Cloud for continued recruiting success.

"If you want a process you're proud of, you should choose Gem."

Tony Le

Head of Talent Acquisition at Mission Cloud

When asked what he would say to companies considering Gem, Tony advised: "Ask yourself what you're trying to solve for. Don't think about cool features... The answer should be I'm trying to hire as fast as I can with the highest amount of quality with as much information as I can and that's what Gem delivered. It made it easier to identify candidates, interview them, get feedback, and deliberate. I haven't seen any other platform that has enabled speed and quality like Gem has and using technology to keep innovating on how to make that process better."