Octave

How Octave's data-driven recruiting strategy fueled 280+ hires and saved over 3,000 recruiter hours

At a growing company with diverse hiring needs like Octave, an innovator in outcomes-focused behavioral health care, data is the key to success. Because Octave hires for two distinct sets of roles — clinical and corporate — they needed a tool that could adapt to their needs and provide valuable insights and predictions.

Alison Cohen

TA Program Manager

“When you buy Gem, you’re not just investing money, but you’re investing in your team and candidates.”

Octave’s talent acquisition Program Manager, Alison Cohen provides operational support for the team of 15 recruiters. The team relies on data analysis to track their goals and identify areas for improvement, like how to accelerate time to hire or cut sourcing channels that aren’t delivering expected results. 

Location:

Remote

Size:

250-350 employees

What they do:

Octave’s mission is to create a new standard for mental health care that’s both accessible to people and sustainable for providers.

ATS:

Greenhouse

Website:

Octave

Gem product:

CRMFull-Funnel AnalyticsTalent Sourcing and Outreach

Pain points/challenges:

• Scalability: Rapid growth leads to bottlenecks in hiring

• Adaptability: Two distinct groups of roles require different sourcing strategies

• Stakeholder management: Executives and investors want regular updates on hiring performance

Results with Gem: 

• Reporting is streamlined and simplified

• Access to data promotes accountability and efficiency

• Sophisticated forecasting makes it easy to adapt to internal and market changes

How Gem makes data accessible to everyone

Executive reporting

Alison is responsible for monitoring recruiting metrics week over week and sharing trends, wins, and areas of opportunity with the TA team and executives. She says Gem makes this process simple because she can easily pull the most relevant information for different audiences, whether they prefer a quick overview or want to drill down into the details. 

“One thing that makes Gem stand out is it’s great for those who are different learners,” says Alison. “For example, those who are very numbers and data-focused just want to see numbers in terms of pass-through rate. But others are visual learners and want graphs and charts. With Gem there’s a lot of flexibility for everyone to get the information they need in the way that best works for them and the team appreciates that.”

Benchmarking data to identify bottlenecks

Gem’s data and reporting also allow Alison to identify bottlenecks and compare their numbers to the industry average. “For a good candidate experience, we want to make sure time to fill and time to hire is lower than the industry average. We compare ourselves against that via the Gem benchmark feature,” explains Alison. Access to this data helped Alison see that scheduling is often the biggest bottleneck, and she’s found ways to help hiring managers move candidates on to the next stage more efficiently.

Centralized candidate history

Gem also simplifies the process of managing prospects. “I like that Gem candidate data and history is centralized,” says Alison. The TA team at Octave prefers to maintain a clean ATS with only viable candidates, and Gem allows them to do this. 

Gem holds everyone accountable while promoting efficient hiring practices

Octave has seen impressive results in their efficiency thanks to Gem, including a 112% increase in reply rates when implementing auto drips, over 280 hires made through Gem outreach, and over 3,300 hours saved on the TA team. 

Gem’s Capacity Planner is another favorite, allowing Alison to capture the right insights and historical context on recruiting capacity to drive productive conversations with finance. 

Alison says Gem’s dashboarding, pipeline analytics, and capacity planner tools have been invaluable, especially when dealing with fluctuations on the TA team. “It’s so helpful to plug in when someone is out on leave or has an unexpected emergency and we can see if we’re going to meet our goal or need to adjust our pivot targets depending on the team's availability.”

Gem supports both inbound and outbound recruiting

Alison appreciates how Gem supports the active sourcing Octave requires for its clinical roles. “Clinical is very active in Gem when it comes to sourcing — outreach, prospects, sequencing. We’re always looking to spread awareness about Octave among clinicians, ensure they know which opportunities are available to them, and generate conversations. ” On the corporate side, where they receive more inbound applications,Gem features like prospect search and app review allow the TA team to move quickly and keep candidates engaged.

Investing in Gem pays off within weeks

Alison says that any time you invest in a tool like Gem, it’s important to think about the payback period. But at Octave, it’s clear that the payback was realized within a matter of weeks.

“Gem is an investment of your team’s time and effort, your candidates’ time and effort. Within the first few weeks, you’ll notice it’s drilling down on information you didn’t know you needed.” 

Alison Cohen

TA Program Manager

Alison is constantly impressed by Gem’s ability to predict the features she’ll need. “I often didn’t even realize I needed the features that are rolling out until my quarterly check-in with our account manager.” This is one of the major reasons she recommends looking into Gem: “The features that are getting rolled out and the fact that they’re answering questions you never thought to ask make it worth looking at Gem.”