Customer Story

How Gem ATS Empowers Everyone to Participate in Hiring and Cut Costs by 50%

Upollo Logo

Location:

Sydney, Australia

Size:

8 Employees

What they do:

Upollo is on a mission to help subscription businesses grow. We provide real time insights on who is ready to convert, churn or expand and why so sales, customer success and product teams can take action and grow revenue.

ATS:

Gem ATS

Website:

Upollo

Gem product:

Gem ATS

Pain Points and Challenges

  • Sourcing technical talent: A small, early-stage startup quickly exhausted employees’ referral networks

  • Lack of transparency and collaboration: Limited resources and budget only allowed one person to view applicants

  • No consistent candidate experience: Candidates were falling through the cracks or unintentionally going through the review cycle multiple times

Results with Gem

  • Reduced spend: Gem ATS resulted in a 50% cost savings and allowed everyone on the team to access the platform

  • Streamlined candidate experience: Gem ATS ensures all candidates are tracked and progress to the next stage in a reasonable timeframe

  • More efficient, collaborative review process: All team members can now participate in application reviews and automated communication keeps candidates in the loop

For any subscription-based business out there, Upollo is a magic tool that helps predict which customers are ready to churn or expand—and why. This Sydney-based company helps customers focus their efforts on the right accounts by analyzing thousands of different signals. And they’ve got the numbers to back this up—on average, Upollo adds over $1.3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for their customers.

As a small but mighty company there’s no such thing as a dedicated recruiter. “Everyone is on the recruiting team,” says Founder and CEO Cayden Meyer

Don’t let their small size fool you—Upollo has already hired more staff engineers away from Google than any other company in Australia.

Transparency and collaboration are the keys to growth 

As an early-stage startup, Upollo previously relied on their employees’ existing networks to source talent, but they quickly reached the limits of this strategy. Because they needed to hire data scientists and junior engineers—and didn’t have many people who fit this description in their networks—they knew they’d need to cast a wider net.

They turned to LinkedIn for sourcing and began using LinkedIn Recruiter Lite. Again, they quickly realized the limitations of this approach. They could only see who applied, and Cayden (the only one with a LinkedIn license) was the only one who could see the list, so collaboration was impossible. LinkedIn Recruiter was also quite limited in its capabilities—it didn’t allow them to schedule interviews or manage pipelines. With Cayden being the only person on the team with full access to their recruiting tool, they knew they needed a solution that wouldn’t leave candidates waiting if Cayden was unavailable. 

It was time to invest in a dedicated hiring tool, and collaboration was one of their top priorities: 

The collaboration aspect has been huge. The reason we looked for a tool is because we didn’t have any collaboration workflows. People looking to adopt Gem ATS are teams that are looking to grow and will need better collaboration and need to get out of spreadsheets.

Cayden Meyer

Cayden Meyer

Founder & CEO

Upollo Logo

Gem ATS empowers everyone to participate in hiring while saving time and money

The Upollo team knew it was time to invest in an ATS to better manage the talent pipeline and communication, but he kept running into the same problem: “With other ATSs, every single one of them said, ‘If you’re smaller than 50 people, we don’t want to talk to you’’’.

With Gem ATS, Cayden saw the possibility of better collaboration and visibility for the entire company. They’d be able to create a better experience for candidates—and no one would be held up waiting for him to return from vacation. “Having only one tool where we could unlock access for our entire team was why we went with Gem ATS,” says Cayden. 

The goal was to get everyone at Upollo involved in recruiting and it was clear that Gem would enable that. “How do I go from me doing everything to having my team doing more? They want to be involved in hiring and we can do it together,” says Cayden.

Since choosing Gem ATS, the results have been clear. “We could self-serve our needs from day one,” says Cayden. These needs include: sending candidates through a streamlined process, providing visibility into all the candidates in the pipeline to everyone throughout the company, and instilling good hiring habits among everyone at Upollo. “A lot of the things that came out of the box were encouraging good behavior,” says Cayden, calling out the SLAs that ensure they don’t leave candidates waiting and preset automated message templates.

Gem has also saved the Upollo team countless hours during app reviews. “The biggest time sink used to be reviewing applicants. Being able to go through and collaboratively review them without manually responding to them means we can still have a good candidate experience with a lot less effort,” says Cayden. Gem also allows them to see if a candidate has applied before, saving them a lot of time in not re-reviewing the same candidates. They can also immediately disqualify candidates who aren’t a good fit and focus their attention on higher-quality candidates.

Time isn’t the only resource the Upollo team is saving—adopting Gem ATS is also saving them money. They no longer have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on buying LinkedIn Recruiter seats for team members so that they can be involved in hiring. “We’re cutting costs by at least 50% by going with Gem ATS,” says Cayden. And this doesn’t even include the valuable engineering time they saved by sparing them from manual work that’s now handled by Gem ATS. 

With Gem as a central source of truth, both candidates and current employees have a better experience. Employees can easily submit referrals and tag them in Gem so the rest of the team is aware of them. “If we didn’t have all this information in one place, our team and our candidates would have a terrible experience,” says Cayden. They’re not accidentally dropping candidates or leaving them waiting for extended periods of time.

The process of rolling out Gem ATS was a huge win: “It was super easy to sign up, get onboarded, and connect with the processes we already have. It was really easy to import data and get up and running.” 

With their newly streamlined approach to hiring, thanks to Gem ATS, Upollo is set up for success in its next phase of growth.

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