In Noom’s world, loss is usually the goal. The company uses proven behavioral science to empower people to take control of their health by ditching unhealthy habits and replacing them with sustainable, positive ones.
While the coaching platform has helped millions of people meet personal health and wellness goals, including weight management, it’s now expanding offerings to other chronic and non-chronic conditions, including stress and anxiety, hypertension, and diabetes. The goal to achieve a healthier world for all is ambitious and will take equally dedicated people.
For Noom, that means attracting the right candidates with the right skills so that the company can expand its health and wellness options.
Noom implemented Eightfold AI for Talent Acquisition and its career site in April 2021. Noom’s goals included simplifying the hiring process with one view of all its talent and supporting data.
“Noom specifically is super experiments-focused and a data-driven company, and we just weren’t able to pull any of the insights we were looking for as a talent team,” said Kelly Hanna, Talent Operations Program Manager, Noom. “That was the big motivator for us to move.”
Finding better fits
Noom’s talent team primarily uses Eightfold to collect information on prospects for open roles. The Eightfold Candidate Profile puts all the applicant feedback in one place, so hiring managers and their teams have the same information at their fingertips.
This information also helps Noom’s talent leaders better assess candidate fits, with 45 percent of applicants considered “highly qualified” for their chosen roles. In fact, Hanna ran an experiment when it came time to recruit integrated logistics support engineers, a specialty outside her areas of expertise.
“Our hiring team that sourced for iOS mobile was all out-of-office at the same time, but we had two urgent heads to fill,” Hanna said. “I ran an experiment where I filtered in Eightfold for the job requirements and a strong match score, and then reached out to them in bulk. We reached more than 750 candidates at once, which is the work of one source for approximately two months.”
“We actually got three candidates to offer through that method before,” she continued. “So that’s a super-successful experiment I ran using the match for our key indicator as opposed to manual eyes on the profile.”
This method was so successful that Noom is replicating it to find qualified candidates in other talent pipelines more quickly.
A more personalized approach
Noom has also been experimenting with Eightfold Scheduling to create a more welcoming experience. By sending invitations on behalf of hiring managers and scheduling interviews with prospects directly on their calendars, Noom recruiters help candidates connect with the person who might be their new manager. And that “super-cold” contact is now a warm lead for the recruiting team to guide through the process, Hanna said.
Eightfold also helps hiring managers understand that Noom recruiters are finding them the best candidates. “The hiring managers see our recruiting process in real-time, and it gives them more confidence in our team’s ability to source the correct talent,” Hanna said. “So it’s setting realistic hiring manager expectations.”
In addition to improving the process, Eightfold opens the door for promising candidates who might not have met the hiring manager’s initial checklist of qualifications, including academic degrees, years of experience, or other factors. Instead, Eightfold identifies strong candidates based on their skills and ability to learn new ones — not only what they’ve done in the past.
“It’s more quality over quantity,” Hanna said. “Building out a more robust way of effectively utilizing the AI to aid with that quality search is how we’re going to think about talent for the future of Noom.”
Simplifying the talent process
When Hanna joined Noom over two years ago, they were using three tools that have since been replaced with Eightfold. But talent leaders needed a better way to see, understand, and apply their data. Noom’s talent team uses Eightfold to complement its Greenhouse ATS. With Eightfold, they can organize information about potential leads, assess talent, and manage all the subsequent data that comes with these activities.
Now, Noom uses a dashboard built with Eightfold data to get a real picture of how many messages are being sent, the pass-through rate per week, and how performance metrics
vary in every pipeline. Tracking candidate outreach was a “very tedious and manual” process previously. With the current view, Hanna said that Eightfold data allows them to see and understand everything about inefficiencies in the hiring pipeline.
To date, Noom has 435,000 up-to-date talent profiles in its platform, with 85 percent of new candidates visiting its career site submitting a completed application.
“I see Eightfold as the playground for everything that happens before a prospect becomes a candidate,” Hanna said. “We do everything as far as outreach, scheduling, and phone-screen feedback in Eightfold, then transition to our Greenhouse ATS for the interview, offer, and closing.”
For Noom, the transformation to be more holistic and purposeful in talent acquisition makes perfect sense. The brand is known for helping people lead healthier lives by replacing unhealthy behaviors with positive changes. Now, with deep-learning AI driving its talent programs, Noom is better positioned to make winning talent decisions, too.