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Gem ATS: Referrals

Overview

Gem ATS allows your employees to submit referrals to your recruiting team in a standardized flow using a customizable form, allowing your company to collect referrals from employees in a more organized fashion.

Typically, at most companies hiring for knowledge workers, a common rough benchmark is that up to 30% of hires are made from referrals.

 

Eligibility

Your team needs to have Gem as your ATS.

 

How to set up Gem ATS: Referrals

Although employees do not need Gem licenses to access Gem to submit referrals, only Gem ATS admins can configure the referral form (including creating and editing) and disable the referral form.

 

Configuring

  1. To enable Referrals, navigate to ATS Settings > Referrals. 
  2. In the "Referrals" section, toggle ON "Enable referral submission in Gem". Referrals are enabled by default for all Gem ATS customers.
  3. In the "Referral form" section, select which fields and custom questions you want to appear on your referrals form for employees to fill out. Note that the “Resume” upload field will always appear at the top of the form. This is because upon uploading a resume, Gem parses the resume and automatically populates subsequent fields such as name and email address.

 

The Default Fields are candidate identifiers and are tied to certain fields in the candidate profile and their applications. The email address provided will be the one used to communicate with the referral about their application going forward.

The referral form comes with a few custom questions that are already created for all customers:

  • How do you know this person?
  • How well do you know this person’s work?
  • Is your referral actively looking for a new role?
  • Does this person know they are being referred?

These Gem-provided custom questions are fully editable (and optional) and are intended to be a starting point to collect this type of information during referral submission.

Gem ATS admins can configure custom referral questions the same way they configure custom application questions. For example, “How do you know this person?” or, “In what capacity have you worked with them?"

 

Disabling

Gem ATS admins can disable a referral form altogether by navigating to ATS Settings > Referrals and toggling OFF "Enable referral submission in Gem".

 

How can employees submit referrals?

To submit referrals, employees can log in to Gem and navigate to My Referrals and click + New referral. Although they do need to log in to Gem, employees do not need Gem licenses to access Gem to submit referrals.

Employees can select up to 3 different jobs (job posts) to refer the candidate to.

Note that the resume upload field will always appear as the first field after the job selection menu, since Gem parses resume files and auto-fills the subsequent fields such as name and email, if possible.


If an employee has already filled out other fields such as name and email manually before uploading a resume, we will not overwrite those fields with the parsed resume info.

 

What happens after a referral is submitted?

Application created

Gem creates applications for the referred candidate in each of the selected jobs (up to 3). 

  • If the candidate already exists in Gem, we automatically detect the duplicate profile and will not create another one (based on email or LinkedIn URL).
  • If the candidate already has an active application for the same job(s) that they were referred to, then we merge the referral into the existing application(s), instead of creating a duplicate application in a job they’re already on.
    • The candidate will still show up in the employee’s My Referrals page even though a new application was not created.
    • The candidate’s application will preserve its original created date and application source, but referral custom questions will be appended to the application for the recruiter’s context.

Profile

The referred candidate’s application source is set to “Referral” (as is the Gem profile source, if the candidate didn’t previously exist in Gem), and the candidate's Activity feed shows who the referrer is and for which job (s).

 

What happens after referral form submission?

My Referrals page

Employees can view all their referrals and the high-level status of their referrals on this page in Gem.

 

Scorecard detail modal

Interviewers (without access to the rest of Gem ATS) cannot see that a candidate they’re interviewing was referred (i.e. in the right side of the scorecard detail modal where the candidate’s info is shown).

 

Profile page > Application detail

Users with eligible permissions can see answers to custom referral questions:

Custom referral questions appear even if the candidate already had an open application on the same job before they were referred (i.e. we merge the applications but retain the custom referral questions since they provide helpful context for the recruiter, even if the referrer won’t get credit for that candidate).

 

Application Review

Users can view answers to custom referral questions but cannot filter on them at the moment.

 

Prospect Search

  • Filter on "Source" = "Referral".

 

Talent Compass

  • Filter on "Gem Profile Source" = “Referral”.
  • Filter on "Gem ATS Application Source" = "Referral".

Please note: This would apply only to new candidates added to Gem via a referral. If they already existed in Gem before they were referred, their original profile source remains the same. 

This is separate from the "Gem Profile Source": each application has its own source (e.g. a candidate could apply first and then be referred a few years later, and each application would have its own source, but their overall Gem profile source would be set from the first time the candidate entered the system, i.e. when they applied directly).

 

Current limitations

  • Job followers and the referrer are not notified after a referral is submitted.
  • Employees are not notified as their referrals move through the interview process - they can only see the high level status of their candidates by checking My Referrals.
  • It's not currently possible to refer candidates without having to associate them to a job (i.e. passive candidate referrals), but is something we’ll work on soon.

 

Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.

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