Data Retention Policy

How does Gem support data retention policies?

• Gem can automatically anonymize candidate data from your Gem account

• Team Admins can set a custom data retention period for their organization (ie Gem will anonymize candidate data after the customer-determined amount of time, if they applied data retention to that specific candidate)

• Once the data retention period is enabled for your Gem account and the team admin has set the data retention period, individual recruiters and sourcers can set the policy to apply automatically for candidates during a sourcing session

What data does Gem anonymize?

• Gem completely removes everything about the candidate in your Gem account (name, email, LinkedIn, school, location, any custom fields, etc)

• These anonymized candidates will still be counted in analytics. For example, if candidate X was deleted from a project, their open & reply stats will still show up under Outreach Stats

• Gem does not have control over your Greenhouse data, so if the candidate is still in your Greenhouse account, the candidate may show up in Pipeline Analytics

  • Likewise, Gem respects data retention rules configured in Greenhouse. Candidates deleted in Greenhouse will have their linked Gem profiles deleted simultaneously.

Will we receive any notification when candidates are anonymized?

Yes, we currently send team admins weekly email notifications for upcoming and recent candidate anonymizations based on Gem's data retention policy, and allow team admins to extend the retention period.

Please note, these weekly notification emails only apply to candidates who are identified by Gem's data retention rules. For candidates your anonymizes in Greenhouse, and thus are immediately respected within Gem automatically, our weekly notification emails won’t include anonymizations that were the result of your team taking action in Greenhouse since your team is already aware of those.

What happens if someone on my team adds a candidate that was previously anonymized from our Gem account?

Gem users will still be able to re-source the candidate if the candidate’s data had been previously anonymized because of data retention policies.

How do I add a candidate to the blocklist?

If you want to permanently remove someone from Gem and not be able to contact them again from your Gem account, we give you the ability to add a candidate to a blocklist. To do this, open the Gem extension for the candidate, click on the 3 dots/ellipsis in the bottom right corner. You will see the following menu:

1. Remove and Block: removes the candidate from Gem and you are able to re-source them into your Gem account, but you will see a banner explaining you cannot email them.
2. Remove from Gem: removes the candidate from Gem, but you are able to re-source & email again

Does Gem support location-based data retention rules?

Yes; team admins can specify different retention periods for different countries, and allow different retention periods based on whether a prospect replied to your company's outreach or not. Please note that only teams on "Advanced CRM" have this functionality.

Can I apply this data retention policy retroactively to a group of candidates I've already sourced?

If this is the first time your team is setting up data retention rules in Gem, you’ll need to contact your CSM to ensure that Gem retroactively applies these rules to candidates for you.

If your team has existing data retention rules set up in Gem and you are editing/adding new rules, the updated rules will automatically apply to all candidates immediately.

How can I implement a data retention policy for our team?

1. Team Admins, contact your Gem Customer Success Manager to enable the feature for your account. Please note that only teams on "Advanced CRM" have this functionality.

2. Once enabled, open the Team Settings dashboard to the Additional Settings tab. You can also access this page at https://gem.com/admin/additional.

3. Under Data Deletion & Privacy Options check the box next to Enable data retention policy for team to turn this feature on for their entire team.

4. Enter the number of months you would like to keep a candidate’s data in their account (only applies to the candidates you choose going forward).

Default Candidate: Applies on a per candidate basis. Once the toggle is turned on for a particular candidate, we will anonymize the candidate’s data in Gem after X amount of time from their original source date. For example, if a customer’s data retention period is 12 months, and a candidate is sourced on 5/1/20, on 5/1/21, that candidate's data will be anonymized from their Gem account (as long as data retention is toggled on for that candidate).

How to activate data retention policies when sourcing:

1. Once the data retention policy is set for your team’s account by your Admin, individual team members will see the following checkbox in the Gem extension:

When the checkbox is checked, that means data retention applies to this candidate (their data will be anonymized after the determined time).

2. If you do not want to apply data retention to the candidate, you uncheck the checkbox.

3. If you, an individual team member, wants to default your toggle to either on or off, you can go into your individual account settings & they will see the following (Data Retention at the bottom):

If you want all sourced candidates going forward (or for a period of time) to have the data retention policy automatically applied, you need to check the box next to “Enable data retention for newly sourced candidates”, to default apply data retention to the individual candidate → meaning the toggle will default to blue when you go to source candidates.

Use case: if you are going to be sourcing candidates from the European continent, go into your Gem account settings and check the box under Data Retention so the toggle will stay ON for each candidate. Even if you are going to be sourcing candidates based from the European continent for an hour so you want the data retention policy to be applied, you can check the box for that hour, & then uncheck when you are done sourcing those candidates in Europe continent.