ZenSourcer, an all-in-one recruiting platform that provides a single source of truth for talent teams, today announces a $9M Series A funding round from Accel and the business' rebrand to Gem. Gem is also launching a CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) platform, which helps companies track and nurture relationships with talent.

As unemployment numbers hit historical lows, recruiting great talent is more challenging than ever. To keep up, companies have evolved the way they hire into a multifaceted practice that includes proactively sourcing new talent, marketing through a company's employer brand, nurturing candidates with community events, and building long-term relationships with top talent.

As the recruiting cycle has lengthened, recruiters struggle to provide candidates with a consistent and seamless experience. "What do you do when a candidate tells you 'not now but stay in touch'? Before Gem, I was using a notebook and a spreadsheet to track my follow up for hundreds of candidates, "says Maisha Cannon, Sourcing Leader at Procore Technologies. "There was no way to know if any of my colleagues had reached out, what their interaction was like, or any signals about when I should be following up. Now, I have all my candidates in one place, and I know I'm not stepping on anyone's toes when I engage."

Currently, recruiters are building lists of candidates at the top of the funnel using professional social networks while tracking converted prospects in their applicant tracking system (ATS) at the bottom of the funnel. Unfortunately there are very few tools on the market that address the middle of the funnel where talent professionals nurture and manage their relationships with prospects who have not formally applied for an open role at their business.

"As hiring managers at Dropbox and Facebook, we connected with a lot of amazing candidates, but for many of them the timing wasn't right," said Steve Bartel, co-founder and CEO of Gem. "We didn't want to give up on those conversations so we created lists of Gems and invested in long-term relationships with our ideal candidates."

"We built Gem to give recruiting professionals the candidate relationship management (CRM) tool they need to build relationships and nurture their talent pools at scale," said Nick Bushak, co-founder and CTO of Gem. "For us it was a no brainer to deliver the marketing automation and relationship management power that sales and marketing teams have to recruiters."

Gem launched 18 months ago and is seeing tremendous success in the market with 100 paying customers including Dropbox, Pinterest, and Slack. "We invested in Gem because it's built by a team that experienced the problem first-hand. It's more difficult than ever for companies to hire the best talent. The Gem team leveraged their experience to build an incredible solution to help recruiters excel at their jobs," said Dan Levine, partner at Accel. "Gem achieved impressive growth through word-of-mouth and the value its CRM platform delivers to recruiters. I couldn't be more excited for the innovation they're going to deliver to talent teams in 2019."

About Gem

Gem is an all-in-one recruiting platform that integrates with LinkedIn, Gmail, Outlook, and your ATS. We enable world-class recruiting teams to find, engage, and nurture top talent.

Recruiters use Gem Sourcing to build lists of people to reach out to, find email addresses, and automate follow-ups. We save time, double response rate, and give visibility into what's working. And everything syncs to your applicant tracking system with best-in-class data integrity.

Teams use Gem CRM to collaborate on candidates, discover best practices, and never reach out to the same person twice. Companies build talent relationships at scale by hosting events and sending personal content at optimal intervals. Each touchpoint is automatically tracked, which provides visibility into the entire recruiting pipeline from reach-out to offer out. This allows recruiting leadership to track goals, forecast, and understand where hires come from.