Gem CTO and President Nick Bushak on Everything You Might Want to Know About Tech Recruiting

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Nick Bushak is the co-founder, chief technology officer and president at Gem. Gem is a platform for modern recruiting. It simplifies workflows, automates tasks, and gives companies the data they need to nurture top talent.

The benefits of international experience for an engineer

… Four years into my career at Facebook… I was working on Facebook’s business profiles and ads, and the Facebook ads team was actually acquiring an ad-tech company called LiveRail… A lot of their engineering team was based in Romania… and [were] going to be joining Facebook London. We needed a few experienced engineers and engineering managers to be part of the landing group in Facebook London and help… the acquired team get connected into Facebook and set them up for success…

… It was always on my bucket list to go [to] a different city. It was also really cool to learn about all the challenges associated with acquiring a company and setting up an acquired team for success within a larger company.

It was also really interesting for me to see some of the challenges associated with being [in] a remote office. The Facebook London office, which at the time was one of a small number of offices for Facebook other than their Menlo Park office that actually had engineering, product and design, there was some interesting… thinking about how collaboration would happen with headquarters.

The importance of trusting your “gut” feeling

I knew as a kid that I always wanted to do a smaller company, which is kind of weird to know… but I was really into computers as a younger person. I read Bill Gates’ autobiography, and so I heard stories of Silicon Valley, and it [got me] really excited in the early, early stages of a company.

When I started full-time at Facebook, I remember thinking, “This is actually a little bit big for me.”

I think in the back of my head, I was always trying to optimize for the smaller company and potentially starting a startup… Even when I was at Facebook, I was thinking about what skills… [I would] need when I eventually join a smaller company and startup.

How Nick founded Gem

I met [Gem co-founder and CEO] Steve in college at MIT, and so I’ve known him for a really long time… I think it just so happened that both Steve and I were thinking about our next thing at around the same time. Steve had just taken a little bit of time off and was eager to kind of get started on something, and I was at a point at Facebook where I’d been there for six and a half years…

Steve and I hung out, did some nights and weekends brainstorming and then it got to the point where we realized that we weren’t going to be able to make a ton of progress without actually going full-time.

What is the hiring process like at Gem?

We’re really proud of the team that we’ve built, and we just want to hire the very best people; and of course, the very best people have a lot of options.

We probably spend more time on hiring the best people compared to just hiring kind of okay people to fill the seats. That does take more time… We spend more time with [candidates], and they can see what it’s like to work with us.

… A lot of the time is spent… with candidates making sure they understand the business. It’s also spent nurturing some of the best people we’ve worked with him in the past in the hopes that when the time comes, that they’ll actually choose to work with us.

Gem offers competitive compensation packages

I think our compensation is quite good, and we’re definitely in a really exciting place… Certainly, there are people that we’ll index a lot on the compensation piece.

We base our compensation… on benchmarks, and we are on the higher end for sure.

How job candidates can stand out at Gem

I think folks who have actually spent time to understand the company, understand what we do, and are excited about recruiting… I think that comes out relatively early in the interview process, and it’s something that… helps people stand out.