Scale AI

How Scale reverse engineers Gem’s recruiting data to fill 12 roles in 3 weeks

With the explosion of generative AI technology since late 2022, hiring has also skyrocketed at Scale AI, a San Francisco-based company that helps customers like Microsoft and Meta leverage their enterprise data to unlock the power of AI. 

Director of Technical Recruiting Brie Bastidas explains that her team has had to respond nearly in real-time to requests from different areas of the business. “It was the first time we had to build a machine not only for volume but also for velocity to get to a specific timeline goal,” says Brie.

Scale turned to Gem to reverse engineer recruiting data, getting both hiring managers and company leaders to buy into the process as well. “Gem was really helpful in bringing all these threads together so we were collectively participating towards the building of a collaborative cross-functional machine, instead of it just being the recruiters’ responsibility,” says Brie.

Location:

San Francisco, California, United States (HQ)

Size:

700 employees

What they do:

Scale helps companies like OpenAI and Meta deliver value from AI investments faster with better data by providing an end-to-end solution to manage the entire machine learning cycle better.

ATS:

Greenhouse

Website:

Scale

Gem product:

Full-Funnel AnalyticsCRMTalent Sourcing and Outreach

Pain points / Challenges

• Resource constraints: The explosion of AI drove headcount goals up in a short period of time, while the team was still lean

• Stakeholder management: Executives required regular updates on the hiring progress.

• Changing market circumstances:
Fluctuations within lines of business frequently influence hiring goals.

Results with Gem

• 12+ engineering hires in 3 weeks: Gem improved Scale’s operational efficiency to help them hire high-priority talent on time.

• Talent rediscovery: 70% of hires were past silver medalists, improving hiring speed and reducing overall sourcing costs

• Scalable candidate engagement: Automated personalized email outreach sequences to engage candidates at scale.

• Pipeline reporting: Gather real-time visibility into sourcing effectiveness, time-to-hire, and conversion rates through the funnel.

How Gem accelerates hiring by providing insights into pipeline analytics

Perhaps not surprisingly at a company like Scale that helps its customers harness their own data, everyone was hungry for metrics on how the hiring process was tracking. Brie—and the rest of the recruiting team—rely on Gem’s reporting capabilities to keep everyone, from the CEO to hiring managers, informed of how they are tracking toward a hiring goal. 

Members of Scale’s recruiting team, like Technical Recruiter John Lee, have found Gem to be an indispensable tool in their toolkit, especially when it comes to accelerating hiring and identifying potential problem areas: 

"Gem serves various purposes, with its most significant impact being the acceleration of the hiring process through enhanced diagnostic capabilities, which facilitates quicker adjustments. I reverse engineer a talent pipeline's analytics, specifically pass-through rates, and even trace this back to sourcing metrics to obtain more precise TTH (time-to-hire) projections. Additionally, Gem's sourcing metrics play a critical role in enabling me to calibrate the team in real-time if I detect a lack of calibration, particularly indicated by low "Interest" or "Conversion" rates. All of this is crucial for maintaining high quality at the top of the funnel. These instances represent just a few examples of how I integrate Gem into my daily workflow."

John Lee

Technical Recruiter

A few of the data points Brie regularly shares with her hiring manager stakeholders include their historical time to hire, volume, and conversion rates so they can easily understand if they currently have the right amount of volume to ensure the end state goal. Some of her most-used features in Gem include outreach stats, pipeline analytics, and pipeline forecasting. 

Scale can meet any hiring challenge with confidence—and accurate projections

Having all hiring data stored in one place is a game-changer for Brie, who previously worked out of Google Sheets and had to build functions and pivot tables to move data from one system to another.

“You can understand Gem is the central source of truth. Gem integrates really well with your ATS. It gives visibility not only to higher-up stakeholders like your executives but also your hiring managers, front-line managers, recruiters, and recruiting managers.”

Brie Bastidas

Global Director of Technical Talent

Executives at Scale are understandably keen to know how they’re tracking toward hiring goals. While in the past she was using Tableau, Brie says it wasn’t as integrated as it could be and it needed a lot of maintenance. Gem dashboards simplified reporting. “We built out the Gem dashboards to showcase exactly what I’d need when going into meetings with the CEO,” says Brie. “We were getting so many questions from our executives, so we built these dashboards for visibility.”

But it’s not just executives who want to keep tabs on hiring performance—the recruiting team is often responding to needs that fluctuate along with business performance. When one line of business is doing well, they may need to hire dozens of technical roles within the span of a few weeks. Gem allows recruiters to look at the funnel and reverse engineer it. “In our case, time was of the essence,” says Brie. “So how do we start to think about the funnel in reverse to get to the end goal of this deadline? We were doing a lot of reverse engineering, looking at how to improve our pass-through rates, how to get more feedback from hiring managers so we could be laser-focused on what talent we were actually looking for to increase all these numbers to get to the end state.”

Brie loves how the insights from Gem’s pipeline tool allow her and her team to generate predictable results. They can model out different scenarios, like what would happen if they increased their passthrough rate, volume, or efficiency by a specific amount. “You can work with some of the numbers and strive towards those micro goals as a recruiter. It’s incredibly empowering to have a tool that can calculate that for you so quickly,” says Brie. 

And of course, speed is of the essence when hiring for competitive roles within tight timelines. This is why Brie is a big believer in the power of data that’s now accessible thanks to Gem. “I’ve been coaching my recruiters to better understand how to be effective day to day and how to understand the micro-signals they need to pick up on in order to course correct quickly. If you wait a month, it’s too late. If you wait a quarter, it’s too late,” Brie explains. 

In addition to the insights Gem provides through reporting, it also accelerates hiring at Scale thanks to the candidate rediscovery features. Brie says they recently opened 12 roles in one line of business and were able to fill them all within 3 weeks. The most impressive statistic of all? Seventy percent of the roles were filled with candidates who were already in their pipeline.

“70% of hires were either silver medalists or other people we’d sourced through Gem that we moved to a different track. Had we not had access to candidate rediscovery through Gem, there’s no way we would have been as efficient”

Brie Bastidas

Global Director of Technical Talent

From high-level executive reporting to extremely detailed views on how individual members of the recruiting team are performing, Brie says she couldn’t imagine life without Gem: The fact that Gem has helped her fill competitive roles within a matter of weeks is what leads Brie to say,

“Gem is a backbone to how we run the recruiting team. We love Gem. Gem is the best. I’ll forever be an advocate.” 

Brie Bastidas

Global Director of Technical Talent