How Vectorworks Inc. cut costs, consolidated tools, and accelerated hiring with Gem’s all-in-one recruiting platform

Location:

Columbia, Maryland

Size:

390 FTE

What they do:

Software solutions for design professionals

ATS:

Gem

Website:

https://www.vectorworks.net

Gem products:

Recruiting CRMATSEnd-to-End Analytics

Pain Points

• Exorbitant costs: Their previous vendor charged yearly without making meaningful product enhancements.

• Clunky legacy ATS: The complicated interface created a steep learning curve for the recruiting team, leading to internal frustration and wasted time.

• Poor user experience resulting in poor candidate tracking: The cumbersome workflows prevented recruiters from moving candidates through the pipeline smoothly, resulting in poor data tracking.

• Complicated reporting: The legacy ATS’ difficult-to-use reporting prevented the team from readily accessing the metrics they needed.

• Lackluster customer support: Requests took days to be addressed, and formulaic answers redirected the Talent Acquisition team to lengthy documentation rather than providing a simple, straightforward response.

Results with Gem:

• Cost-savings through tool consolidation: Vectorworks consolidated sourcing, CRM, ATS, and analytics in one platform, saving $15,000 in technology spend.

• Improved productivity: Gem’s beloved UI and automated alerts made it easy to track candidates and reduced back-and-forth communication between teams.

• 3x faster scheduling: Gem’s integrated scheduling automation reduced back-and-forth and the need for manual invites across Zoom, Outlook, and the ATS.

• Self-serve reporting and insights: Gem’s pre-configured dashboards and easy-to-use interface enabled the team to review key metrics and share actionable insights with leadership. 

• Seamless migration and implementation: Gem’s implementation team successfully migrated all 8 years of Vectorworks’ data, allowing the TA team to get up and running immediately with all their data secure and up to date.

About Vectorworks Inc.

Designers worldwide rely on Vectorworks technology to sketch, draw, and model their architecture, landscape architecture and design, and entertainment projects. A subsidiary of the Nemechek Group, Vectorworks Inc. is known for attracting and keeping great talent. Martina Branan, manager of Talent Acquisition, says that attrition has remained consistently low in her seven years at the company.

Martina attributes Vectorworks’ high retention to its focus on cross-functional collaboration and employee growth: “Because we're so collaborative, it allows people to not only grow in their roles but also be exposed to multiple departments.” She cites one recent example of the marketing team partnering with the R&D team to develop a new home screen for the software, a collaboration you’d be hard-pressed to find at other companies. 

When it comes to their hiring process, Martina believes it’s essential to be just as innovative and tech-forward as the rest of the company. She explains,

We spoke with Martina to learn more about the challenges she was facing with her legacy ATS and why she turned to Gem to solve them. 

Challenges: A clunky and complicated ATS was causing bottlenecks and impacting the candidate experience

Describing their previous ATS, Martina says, “It's a big product. It's hard to use and configure. It took a lot of training and an upfront learning curve to reach a certain point.”

And despite the complexity of the technology, Martina was disappointed with the customer support. She explains, “I was just told to submit a support ticket. No one was willing to sit down and teach me how to do it.” 

However, Martina found the customer support ticketing system could have been efficient and cookie-cutter in its responses. “Sometimes, my issue was a little bit more nuanced. And they had so much documentation they’d try to send me to. I just wanted to get on the phone with someone who could show me quickly.”

Recurring technical issues with email meant that Martina and her colleague weren’t consistently receiving messages from candidates. “If my colleague cc'd me on an email, sometimes one of us didn't see it. Or if a candidate responded, even if they replied all, sometimes only one of us would see the response,” says Martina. This lack of transparency caused delays and a less-than-ideal candidate experience where they would be unintentionally left in the dark for days.

“That's massively delaying the scheduling, making me worry that we will lose candidates because we're not getting them in on time. If we can't get them scheduled fast enough and they get an offer somewhere else, then we lose them from the pipeline,” explains Martina.

Despite the lack of customer support and continued technical issues, the vendor continued to raise their prices every time a contract was due for renewal. Martina realized she couldn’t continue this way and began to look for alternatives.

Gem offers a more efficient, streamlined tool stack without compromising data

Because Vectorworks was already a Gem CRM customer, when their renewal with their legacy ATS was coming up, Martina saw the opportunity to consolidate tools by switching to Gem’s all-In-one recruiting platform. 

Martina knew that preserving the data from their old ATS was key when evaluating tools. They had eight years of resumes and other candidate data that they didn’t want to lose. “Our data is precious. That's why we have an ATS. If we have no data, it's useless to us,” Martina says.

Making the case for the switch was straightforward:

Results with Gem: Cost savings on a consolidated tech stack plus noticeable improvements in hiring team performance

Right away, Martina says consolidating tools unlocked $15,000 in savings. The time saved was also immediately obvious: Scheduling interviews is now three times faster since there’s no need to toggle back and forth between multiple tools and manually create internal and external calendar invites. This increased efficiency means that Martina’s team now has the capacity to support the corporate head office with some of their open roles.

“We can take on more and we have been, which is why we've been recruiting for corporate as well now.”

Martina sees other benefits, too, like the peace of mind that comes from knowing that candidates are kept in the loop with regular communication. “With Gem, you can see who needs to get scheduled right on the dashboard. We don't really have to worry about tracking emails anymore.” 

Martina loves the fact that Gem is powering a tech-forward candidate experience.

Another major benefit of switching to Gem is accessing better data and analytics. “Our data is going to be much better going forward,” says Martina. “There's more that I want to do with analytics. I just haven't been able to get there with what I've had previously. Now, we can clearly see our close rates, scorecard data, and source data, and we can divide it by job or department and other metrics. I can make the data simple and clean. The dashboards are really user-friendly.” 

Next steps for Vectorworks Inc.: Taking a more data-driven approach to recruiting and leaning into AI tools

Martina is thrilled that Gem’s user-friendliness makes it easier for everyone to follow a consistent workflow. “Now we can really dig in and find out where the issues are in the pipeline and which things we can control.”  

One of Vectorworks’ core values is innovation. They are investigating AI throughout company workflows, so Martina is excited to explore Gem’s AI tools, like AI Sourcing and AI tokens, in email outreach. “It’s nice sometimes to get another perspective or way of saying things. I just love the interface—it's so user-friendly.”

For anyone considering Gem’s ATS, Martina offers these parting words, “With Gem, you just get that extra touch as a customer that you're not going to get with legacy ATS companies.”