It’s not easy being a recruiting team of one for a fast-growing, forward-thinking company in a constant state of flux and evolution. Now add the huge responsibility of leading the charge to create an employee-centered, inclusive, and supportive environment for all existing staff.
That’s exactly where Meredith Herberg found herself when she joined Novi as its head of people and culture. Founded by MIT data scientist Kimberly Shenk, Novi is dedicated to helping beauty brands and retailers ensure that all product ingredients meet the highest sustainability, environmental, and quality standards. Industry leaders like Sephora and Credo use Novi’s product development and procurement platform to discover, sample, purchase, and track raw materials from trusted suppliers, all in the service of keeping customers healthy, happy, and well-informed.
Novi thrives on science, innovation, and cutting-edge technology, so Meredith needed to identify talented candidates with highly specific areas of expertise. But that wasn’t all. Once she found the right person, she’d spend many hours engaging with them through follow-up emails, prep calls, interviews, and more. Given the number of hats Meredith wears at Novi, this labor-intensive process – unlike clean beauty ingredients – simply wasn’t sustainable. And with the company working hard to establish itself as a leader in the beauty space, none of the hiring managers had time to search for and reach out to candidates, either.
“We were having a really hard time with the sourcing mechanism because you really do have to have multiple touchpoints to get people interested,” Meredith explains. “It became very clear that we needed help with top of funnel.”
The Novi team initially tried working with a staffing agency, but they ended up paying a hefty $10,000 a month for a service that yielded zero successful candidates. Fortunately, Meredith already knew there was a better way. In a previous role at another company, she’d relied on RecruitBot to find and engage ideal talent quickly and efficiently with help from machine learning and AI. And once Novi got started with the platform, the hires started rolling in.
“The only sourcing tool I now use is RecruitBot,” Meredith says.
Meredith notes that several specific RecruitBot features have become vital to Novi’s recruiting process. She’s able to use boolean operators to get targeted candidate suggestions and filter out irrelevant matches, identifying more suitable talent than other solutions could deliver. Then, she invites hiring managers to give each candidate a star rating, ensuring alignment with their expectations from the outset and prompting RecruitBot’s algorithms to bring highly relevant individuals to the top of the list.
“I like that the AI is baked in,” Meredith explains. “The search function gives me better results than LinkedIn, which was painful because you can’t filter things out.”
Next, Meredith harnesses RecruitBot’s many outreach tools, including email templates and automatic drip campaigns, to engage with candidates in a scalable yet personalized way. Reports on open rates and other metrics enable her to run A/B rests and gain a deep understanding of what type of messaging resonates best with potential hires. She can also share easy-to-grasp visualizations of the entire funnel with the Novi team, gaining extra points with her data science boss. And finally, RecruitBot’s seamless integration with Lever allows Meredith to add candidates to Novi’s ATS without any extra steps.
As Novi continues to gain new customers and expand its range of services, Meredith knows that RecruitBot will play a vital role in helping her build a strong, cohesive, and diverse team. Ready to learn more about the tool behind Novi’s hiring success?
