As an east coast resident I always appreciate being able to take Amtrak versus flying so it’s no surprise that the annual Phenom People conference (aka IAMPHENOM) in Philadelphia has become a must attend event for this podcaster.
It’s a great event for lots of reasons. Philly is a great town to visit, Phenom spares no expense to feed and entertain you, and the level of HR executive in attendance is high which makes for great networking.
During the event the company actually shifted their brand slightly, going from “Phenom People” to simply “Phenom” and activated the new phenom.com url to match. They didn't really announce the change, instead focusing their messaging around their new product offerings. But the revised logos were everywhere around the hotel in case you missed it. I got the chance to interview their Senior Director of Talent Keca Ward on the podcast so look for that audio soon.
I find Phenom’s culture to be one of openness and forward thinking as far as how they treat customers and how they view their role in the hiring process. Though the phrase ‘candidate experience’ has been around for a while, Phenom is perhaps the one vendor I’ve seen who has fully embraced it with what they call ‘empathy design’ and by including all the stakeholders--- recruiters, hiring managers, candidates and employees into their software creation methodology. And they push that thinking through their 4 core product modules CX, MX, RX, EX.
But Phenom, like all other big HR tech vendors, is not perfect. During analyst day they even shared a story or two of implementations gone wrong (they didn’t mind being transparent) ….along with what they learned and how they eventually made the client happy. Implementations continue to remain a challenge (as they are for all vendors) but they are doubling down on their Technical Solutions team by hiring more experienced consultants to get clients up and running as quickly as possible.
Their product is also evolving to more of a drag and drop interface (think Zapier like) where one simply chooses a data source icon from a visual menu to create and launch a careers page with jobs pulled from Workday for example.
At night we got to hang out in some cool places around Philly like a ping pong bar where the balls were flying and at the Reading Terminal Market which they had rented out with a great 80s cover band and more food & drink than you could possibly consume. They even organized a run to the nearby Rocky steps for those attendees brave enough to get up at 6:30am the morning after. (apparently Ben Eubanks and Kevin Grossman made that run, kudos guys)
Phenom also launched a number of new product enhancements which you can read about on HR Tech Feed.
Quick shoutouts to some people I finally got to meet in real life such as Ben Eubanks, Micole Garratti (social micole) and the team from Talview, Thomas from Zapinfo, Phenom’s Keca Ward and Michelle Sargent (Recruitics), Lauryn Sargent’s team from Stories Inc who invited me to dinner the first night.
Check out the #IAMPHENOM20 Hashtag stream on Twitter
My raw notes from analyst day follow below. I will also have audio interviews coming out with Phenoms Keca Ward, IKEA’s Direct of TA Richard Carsley, Chad/Sanjoe from Talview, Thomas from Zapinfo and commentary from Josh Bersin’s keynote. Be sure to subscribe to the RecTech podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or wherever you get your pods.
IMAGE GALLERY
Phenom People Analyst Day Notes - #IAMPHENOM20
company update
Purpose: Help a billion people the right job
2011 founded, 300+ global customers, 10% of fortune 500
Work with companies greater than 1000 employees
Focused on experiences for candidate CX, recruiterRX, manager MX, employee EX = TXM talent experience management
From site visitor to employee “talent lifecycle”
10k recruiters using product
AI cuts into personalization, search, insights
New clients include Honeywell, GE, Hilton, Campbells, Carmax, ThermoFisher
Funding History: Series A was 9 mil, series B 22 mil, series C 30 mil
Hari (co-founder) says point solutions are a dying breed
Jonathan Dale: customers saying “I want to buy you but just don’t have budget yet…”
Comments: One of the first HCM vendors to seriously focus on the full experience.
Why no ATS?...Hari (cofounder) ‘we want to have extreme focus, ATS is not a challenging problem to solve right now…’
Data points
571k open jobs per day, 98 million job apps
‘Visits to Apply’ rate 20-90% depending on the industry/type of job..., start to finish--if application process is 10 min long or more there is a 28% drop off rate, 80% of their clients let Phenom host the apply
Creating a career site and populating jobs from a source like WD is a ‘Zapier like’ experience...choose an ATS and in a few clicks, boom!
Integration Challenges
Philosophy: proven process, effortless exp, memorable moments
People: they have doubled staff for Technical Solutions Mgr to run implementations, added more experienced team members
Process: best practices, doc onboarding, training along the way (drip training) Requirement Workbook, gather requirements up front, provide test cases
Technology: has integrated with over 100 ATS vendors to date
Support tickets have steadily declined
They are becoming much more proactive when it comes to integrating with HRIS...if someone changes the workday workflow they are trying to catch those problems ahead of time. But integrations are still a major pain point for most customers. Especially if a global org.
Partnerships
Recognize they need to add more providers to satisfy customers
ATS partners, background check, Agencies...content marketing EB, service implementations, consulting
Partners: what they seek: HCM experience, mutual customers, can they scale, exclusivity, can they help drive sales, shared objectives
They will work with startups, a basic member also requires no contract
Exchange.phenom.com will launch soon for partners
Customer stories
96% of chatbot users who viewed a job clicked apply (one client example)
15% of seekers used the chatbot
17% of total apply clicks on career site came from chatbot users
1 month 58k chatbot interactions
They turned on chatbots for free, a few clients complained until they saw the numbers for apply/conversion rates
Bot faqs, rolling out screening and scheduling
If you are recruiting for high volume roles dont send email send a text
Mahe Bayireddi CEO
Many of the companies they competed with 5 years ago dont exist anymore, PP is winning due to their focus in experience.
CX: 1 person applying online affects the recruiter, hiring mgr and employee (if referral).
Right now AI is a feature, the minute it becomes a platform everything changes...he thinks 2030.
He believes PP is a global player, most enterprise software only built for the English internet.
