ZoomInfo is a large, global enterprise — teams across time zones, contractors, region-specific everything down to India-only benefits. The L&D org JJ runs sits inside Human Resources, and for years its quiet bottleneck wasn't strategy or content. It was administration. The story has two parts that share an owner but not much else: an onboarding automation program that is three years live and carries hard numbers, and a company-wide learning consolidation that ZoomInfo is, in JJ's words, "going all in" on within weeks of this writing.

The onboarding story: admin that became a part-time job

Start with the part that's been running long enough to leave a mark.

When JJ took ownership of onboarding in early 2023, the program was regionally fragmented, session-heavy, and held together by manual labor — most of it her small team's. "At one point I do remember, four-plus years ago, sending manual calendar invites and copying and pasting lists of new hires batching into calendar invites on the Friday before they started," she says. After that came the Friday-afternoon emails BCC'ing hiring managers, the manually kept attendance records, the hand-built Slack groups, the Googling of which time zones various states were in (Michigan: Eastern).

The villain wasn't a missing feature. It was the staffing and admin of the tool itself, and the fragility that came with it. "I went through five different folks that were trained for admin responsibilities," JJ says. "And it was a lot of work and a lot of ramping. And so that got to be almost a part-time job for me over the last several years with our current learning management system." Five trained admins cycling through over a few years is five single points of failure. "I never want to worry about losing an employee because they're my one specialist for a job," she says.

"I never want to worry about losing an employee because they're my one specialist for a job."

JJ Steele

Director of Learning & Development

ZoomInfo had adopted Tangelo for onboarding about three years ago, after a traditional multi-month RFP and a roughly 12-week implementation — sign the contract on July 1, race to go live by November. (Hold that timeline; it matters later.) What JJ built on top of it over the following years is the reason the admin burden eventually broke.

The model is templates plus snippets. Universal onboarding language lives once, in reusable snippets; bespoke per-region and per-role details layer on top — India-only benefits surface in a resources tab for the people who need them, and not for anyone who doesn't. On average, about 12 workflow templates fire per new hire. The orchestration runs across Slack, email, calendar, and now text. New-hire email replies route into ServiceNow as tickets instead of landing in JJ's inbox. Survey data feeds a Google Sheet and Snowflake, powering a small internal dashboard that lets her compare, say, May 2025 against May 2026.

The numbers underneath the 300 hours are the volume the team no longer touches by hand: more than 9,000 automated workflows, 20,000-plus calendar invites, 13,000-plus Slack messages in a self-described "very Slack heavy organization," and 17,000-plus emails.

But the operational shift that JJ cares about most isn't volume — it's who can do the work. She designed permissions so that non-L&D partners, including the revenue enablement team on the sales side, can self-serve edits to their own templates and workflows. Her team stopped being the bottleneck. "The days of having someone whose only job is being a learning management system administrator, I think are slowing down," she says. "And so how can we take those same organizational skills and workflows and data science that those folks are good at and actually get their results even more so?" The fragility eased with it — for JJ, "a huge peace of mind" that "nothing relies on any one person."

It isn't frictionless. JJ isn't the Slack admin for ZoomInfo, so some integration changes still need a partner's hands — "relatively a low lift," she notes, but a real dependency. And the recurring cost was always the ramp of training the next admin. That's exactly the cost the self-service model was built to retire.

The people the system actually serves are the new hires, and their experience is where the program proves out. Onboarding satisfaction rose 12% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024, then another 7% the following year, and has held at 4.5 out of 5 across every recent iteration. New hires give the onboarding experience an NPS of 9.44 out of 10. They rate their confidence in performing their role at 4.58 out of 5, and their understanding of company culture, mission, and values at 4.59 — after 10-plus hours of structured learning each. One thing surfaces in their feedback more than any other: the checklist that keeps them oriented and on top of the work when a lot is coming at them at once.

JJ frames the point of all this in her own metaphor: "I like to think about Tangelo as really a great partner of helping us put credit in our bank account, because there are going to be some things that go wrong and some laptop provisioning issues. But really being able to give them confidence in using these tools." A good first two weeks buys forgiveness for the laptop that shows up late.

The learning story: a different problem, and a deliberate non-RFP

The onboarding story is settled. The next one is a live bet.

Underneath the onboarding success, ZoomInfo had a messier structural problem: it was running multiple separate learning systems. "Even with an LMS, a learning management system, they are often built to do one thing," JJ says. "And in this case, it was built to do one thing for our corporate audience. So we already had another LMS also that our revenue enablement team was using for our sales onboarding, and our customers use another LMS as well." Three systems, three sets of product expertise, three integration surfaces, three sets of owners doubling as troubleshooters.

The corporate LMS had concrete failures. The loudest: "The biggest piece of feedback we got regarding our previous LMS was that it didn't integrate with Slack. So we were really reliant on emails, which is not how we communicate internally." Search didn't surface relevant or recent courses, and had no awareness of a user's country or level. Managers couldn't see their teams' completions. The result was a tool people visited only when forced. "Most folks didn't come into our old LMS to browse for learning," JJ says. "They came in because they were enrolled and instructed to learn based off of a program they were in or a compliance course that they needed to take."

The usage data made the under-utilization concrete. By JJ's account, 42% of learners entered the old LMS only for compliance; about 23% for onboarding; about 35% for general learning. Most of the platform's logins were obligations, not curiosity, while ZoomInfo kept paying for seats that mostly went unused.

The villain here is a category, not a product: the "traditional LMS," built to flex for highly regulated industries and every industry at once, and therefore too slow to evolve for a tech company that wants to move at its own pace. JJ never named the incumbent. She did name the real cost. "I would argue the larger cost was staff," she says. "It was the staffing and the admin of that tool that was the biggest constraint for us, and that really led to our decision going forward to step away from a traditional LMS."

What ZoomInfo did next is the part other enterprises will find hard to believe. A full RFP at a company this size is a 10-month undertaking, and JJ had the window planned. She weighed the obvious options — minimizing the existing stack around tools people already used, looking at HRIS-adjacent learning, or buying something net-new. Then she chose not to run the RFP at all. "We had about a 10-month window," she says. "We decided against doing the full RFP after some initial exploration and outreach. We didn't want to waste time. We wanted to work alongside the Tangelo team and use that time to build." Because ZoomInfo was already a customer, the team could test the learning use case in a sandbox quickly, instead of spending months teaching a new vendor how the company actually works.

That recommendation traveled up a short chain. "I really, as the Director of Learning & Development, was the subject matter expert on this tool," JJ says. "And my recommendation was enough for my VP to advocate on behalf of this approach with our CHRO." A successful SCORM pilot — moving onboarding and compliance courses into the platform for new hires — turned the bet into a decision.

The methodology JJ is bringing to the migration is as disciplined as the onboarding model. She's culling content before moving it, bringing over only about a quarter of current course offerings, downloading historical completions, and adding the rest back only if anyone actually needs it. She's been here before, and learned the hard way. "When we went through an LMS transition previously, we just dragged every course over sort of thoughtlessly," she says. "So taking that time to make sure — what are the courses you need to move? Maybe it isn't as heavy a lift as you would have assumed." LinkedIn Learning stays on its own platform, linked from inside rather than re-hosted. Scattered Google Sites give way to a role- and region-aware resources tab. Compliance certifications and e-signatures will push records into the HRIS, where legislation requires them to live.

"I feel like I have a magic wand when it comes to Tangelo."

JJ Steele

Director of Learning & Development

The piece JJ is most animated about is a workflow she used to run entirely by hand: an emerging-leaders program for individual contributors, opened company-wide with manager approval built in. "I feel like I have a magic wand when it comes to Tangelo," she says. An employee starts an enrollment; that triggers a Slack message to their manager with the program detail and time commitment; the manager approves or denies in Slack; on approval, the employee joins the cohort, calendar events with Zoom links generate automatically, the associated e-learnings send, and a Slack group builds itself. "That's all done without spreadsheets and lists and Slack messages that my team used to send" — the work she'd "always" done "largely manually and behind the scenes."

Compliance is also where the manager-visibility gap gets closed: the old LMS gave managers no easy way to see where their teams stood on required training. Tangelo routes that accountability through Slack, where managers already work. When an employee is out of compliance on a required training, the alert goes straight to the manager accountable for fixing it instead of sitting in a report someone has to remember to pull. "If someone's out of compliance with not completing a training that is required, it's ultimately on the manager to make sure that their team is meeting that requirement," JJ says. "How are we easily and seamlessly communicating with them, because they're the ones who are going to really help the employee meet that requirement?" It's the same reach-the-manager-where-they-work instinct as the emerging-leaders approval flow, pointed at the mandatory case.

Here's the honest part: the learning story has no outcomes yet. The company-wide launch to all employees and contractors, compliance training included, is weeks away as of this writing. "We're quite excited that we'll be launching Tangelo for our learning use case across the company with compliance training," JJ says. "We are going all in with all of our employees and contractors in just a few weeks to get everybody through the door." The learning-solution numbers, she says plainly, are "still gathering." What the team has earned the right to expect — a single consolidated platform, less seat and tool spend, no repeat of the 12-to-14-week implementation, learners staying in one familiar tool — is a forecast, not yet a result.

What the two stories share

The two programs transform different units of work, but they converge on the same three themes — one proven, one pending.

The clearest is admin burden. Onboarding automation already retired the manual orchestration and the dependence on a trained admin bench: the 300 hours a month, the five admins consolidated toward self-service. The learning consolidation is built to do the same thing to the per-tool sprawl — to remove the staffing cost JJ keeps naming as the real constraint — but that's a claim the launch still has to prove.

Speed-to-value runs through both. On the onboarding side, the established workflow engine is what lets JJ "keep saying yes" to new programs without adding effort. On the learning side, skipping the 10-month RFP and co-building on integrations that already work is the bet that the next launch avoids the original implementation's months-long ramp.

"If we already have people in Tangelo, let's keep people in Tangelo."

JJ Steele

Director of Learning & Development

And both are ultimately about the people on the other end. Onboarding's end-user scores — 4.5 satisfaction, 9.44 NPS, 4.58 confidence, 4.59 on culture — are the realized proof. Extending that same Slack-native, role-aware experience to all of corporate learning and compliance is the same logic applied at scale: "If we already have people in Tangelo, let's keep people in Tangelo."

What's next

JJ is deliberately refusing to over-plan the next year. "I have no idea what six months is going to look like," she says. "I'm excited for what six months from now or a year from now is going to look like." What she will commit to is concrete: getting the whole company through the door of the new learning platform in a matter of weeks, pushing certifications and badging into the HRIS, deepening the Snowflake reporting, and watching talent-management colleagues experiment with AI role-play for practice and feedback. And she's looking forward to one thing in particular — "having our old learning system fully sunset," and turning toward what ZoomInfo calls defining new possibilities.

The team that gave back 300 hours a month doesn't plan to spend the next 300 the same way it spent the last.