Steve Bartel

Steve Bartel is co-founder and CEO of Gem, the recruiting platform he launched with Nick Bushak in 2017.

Employee 25 at Dropbox

Bartel joined Dropbox when it had 25 people, he told Accel; four and a half years later it had 1,500. As an engineering manager he helped close 50 to 100 candidates.

In 2013 he asked to start a data science team. The vice president of engineering agreed and, with recruiting stretched thin, told him to hire it himself. For about a year he did his own sourcing and worked as his own full-cycle recruiter. "I became intimately familiar with the pain points that recruiters and sourcers deal with every single day," he said.

Fifty Interviews Before Founding Gem

Bushak had felt the same pain scaling teams at Facebook, according to Greylock. Before starting Gem, the two talked to 50 organizations to check whether Dropbox's approach to recruiting, which looked more like sales and marketing, was common. They found that almost all of them worked the same way.