Revolutionizing Recruitment: Robinhood's Efficiency Boost with Gem

Robinhood is a fintech company based in Menlo Park, California. The company disrupted the brokerage industry in 2013 when it pioneered commission-free trading. Since then, it has become a favorite among millennials who use its platform to invest in stocks, ETFs, options, and trade cryptocurrencies. In July 2019, Robinhood announced a $323M Series E funding round and landed a $7.6B valuation. The company has recently opened a new office in Denver, its fourth office globally, and plans to make around 800 hires. Joe Gillespie, Head of Tech Recruiting at Robinhood, was instrumental in implementing Gem in the company's recruitment process.

Robinhood, a fintech company on a mission to democratize the financial system, faced significant challenges in its recruitment process. The company's workflow was a patchwork of free extensions and paid products, some of which were effective, while others were not. These tools were used for various tasks such as creating templates, sequencing, email finding, and social media scraping. The company had products integrated with Gmail, extensions in Chrome, and manual spreadsheets. This approach was not only inefficient but also lacked visibility into the activities of the recruitment team. The company was also unable to measure what elicited engagement from potential hires. As Robinhood expanded, opening a new office in Denver and planning to make around 800 hires, these challenges became more pronounced.

Robinhood found a solution to its recruitment challenges in Gem, a comprehensive recruitment tool. Gem offered a range of features that streamlined Robinhood's recruitment process. It automated the downloading of prospect information, eliminating the need for manual activity addition. This saved the company 2-3 minutes per prospect, a significant time saving considering the volume of hires the company was making. Gem also offered a sequence feature that allowed Robinhood to send emails on behalf of senior leaders in an efficient manner. This feature, known as SOBO, was particularly useful for leadership hires and key individual contributors. Gem's analytics provided visibility into the performance of these outreaches, enabling the company to compare success rates and factor this intelligence into their strategies. The tool also centralized all information, allowing recruiters to observe open rates and reply rates and optimize their strategies accordingly.

• The implementation of Gem in Robinhood's recruitment process resulted in more than just time savings. It provided the company with visibility into how their outreaches were performing, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies. The centralization of all information enabled recruiters to learn from each other's successes and failures, leading to the crafting of better outreach emails. The SOBO feature allowed for more strategic hiring for leadership roles and key individual contributors. Overall, Gem has helped Robinhood think more strategically about message copy and timing, and has been instrumental in optimizing their top-of-funnel workflow. Joe Gillespie, Head of Tech Recruiting, has praised Gem as one of the best recruiting tools he has worked with, noting its functionality and its ability to serve the recruiting mindset.

• Saved an estimated 8-10 hours per week per sourcer, significantly increasing overall efficiency.
• Saved 2-3 minutes per prospect due to automation of downloading prospect information.
• Enabled efficient send-on-behalf-of (SOBO) outreaches, improving outreach success rates.