A few weeks ago I took an Amtrak three hours South to Philadelphia to attend IAMPHENOM, Phenom’s annual user conference. Along with that came Analyst Day and about 25 or so influencers and analysts sat through a full day of access to Phenom’s leadership team who gave us an update on the talent intelligence experience platform.

The company announced several new features including some ChatGPT like functionality with the aim of continuing its push towards personalization and automation. I’ll detail everything they announced at the end of this post.

The event which had about 1,400 attendees and what seemed like every Phenom employee was well received from what I heard and saw throughout the week. Some of the HR pros I met were either an existing client or waiting for implementation.

Service delivery was a major theme of Analyst day and the company admitted that they need to do a better job at rolling out new customer implementations. Therefore they announced “OGD” One Global Delivery where they completely restructured how rollouts will work going forward.

Getting a customer onboarded with any kind of HR software is always a challenge even for top vendors like Phenom. They said they aim to make their core system rollouts happen with 4 weeks for some customers for example.

It’s been interesting to watch as Phenom evolves and the company continues to inch its way towards becoming a more holistic HR platform (not just for talent acquisition).

They serve multiple constituents: employees, candidates and recruiters. About all they don’t do yet are things like onboarding and payroll. I spoke to one customer, a Workday client who uses Phenom for their career site/CRM but once they hire someone they have to go back into Workday to get them onboarded.

Phenom goes up against the likes of Paradox, Beamery and Eightfold to name a few. They showed us some new customer wins including a huge retailer and even a sports league. Their share of the Fortune 500 is growing.

The company has big goals for itself. Their CFO told us they aim to become a 30 billion dollar company in the next 30 years. That’s a big target which will take massive growth to get there. In the end, that may be too ambitious but its hard to fault them for aiming high.

Analyst Day Notes

They have bigger plans to grow the conference in Philly

Jonathan Dale, VP Mktg

Phenom solves the biggest problems in hiring development and retention
Intelligent talent experience platform is “unique and differentiated”
Phenom positioned for growth, playing the long game
Reason they exist: helping a billion ppl find the right job
6 offices 1400 employees now most of which are engineers/data scientists
Evolved from app to suite to a platform
Any acquisitions fully integrated now into the platform
Category” Talent Experience Management” to now Intelligent Talent Experience (with AI)

Cliff Jurkiewicz, VP Strategy

Customers

600 customers, 15% of Fortune 500 (200 of those are workday)
70% of product comes from client ideas (examples?)
Winning clients with a more integrated solution…replacing a bunch of other systems in the hiring process
Ability to support multibrand operations with diff career sites for example (sub tenet)
High Volume Hiring won them Five Guys vs Paradox, won because they were able to offer a more holistic platform.
Just beat out Avature and Beamery for major retailer
Companies buy phenom mainly for personalization & automation then they move up their tech stack to the experience products

CFO

They want to become a 30 billion dollar company in 30 years 30x30
To get there will need 40% of ARR on new product development (best in class spends 30%)
SVB there will be a scarcity of capital, we are going to see more companies fail, consolidation coming

Saumil Ghandi

SVP Global Delivery

Trying to scale global delivery at scale…from sale to final implementation
Implementations were tedious, drawn out, was affecting adoption
Introducing ‘One Global Delivery’
They break out customer teams into segments
They built a swat team for elevated experience to make the unhappy happy
Common problems in rollouts: data flow, workflow
Core services now led by technical project mgr
Must get back to customers within 6 hours
Introducing The Falcon Model—delivery in under 4 weeks form signature…they have optimal configs based on size and industry of customer.

Mark Macdonnald, Client Care

Moving to more self service support options., faster support times

PRODUCT STUFF

Careers.united.com (sample client site)
Can edit and change any text on the career site
Upload a resume and get instantly matched with jobs
Frontline jobs, no resume req with chatbot, just knockout questions.
Apply on United Starts with just an email
Avg apply rate 26(web) 52% (chatbot) some of their customers have higher rates
Automated sourcing for instant job leads based on 1 billion source profiles
Watchlisted company….see applicants who apply from certain companies
Rescheduling interviews is very easy for both candidate and recruiter
recorded 16 million applies so far in 2023
250k internal hires generated so far in 2023
Generative AI examples: rejection email, job description, suggested interview questions

New Features/Announcements

Phenom announced Experience+ (X+), a new platform-wide generative AI capability that bolsters efficiencies by automating content creation, surfacing actionable intelligence, and eliminating time-consuming tasks for candidates, employees, recruiters, managers, HR and HRIS teams. In addition, the company unveiled 18 platform intelligence and automation innovations to further transform the way talent acquisition and talent management teams hire, develop, and retain talent.

Introducing Phenom X+

The most critical task human resources (HR) must address is how their companies will empower individuals to transfer their potential into the skills and competencies needed for current and future markets. Every company is on a journey of transformation, and requires intelligence and automation to deliver phenomenal experiences.

Phenom X+ is designed to dynamically support an organization’s specific hiring, retention and growth needs by leveraging an ensemble of AI models that consists of: a Foundation Model (any Natural Language Understanding [NLU], DeepLearning, or Large Language Model [LLM] such as GPT, Bard, or Cohere), Specialized Model, and Contextual Model. Phenom X+ differentiates with its ability to take additional context into account — including vertical, market, job zone (e.g., frontline/hourly or knowledge worker), company, team and user data — delivering an unparalleled level of personalization, precision and experience.

For talent acquisition, Phenom X+ automatically:

Generates contextually relevant job descriptions based on role requirements, past ideal candidates, and current high-performing employees
Auto-generates on-brand content and optimizes discoverability via search (SEO)
Offers a natural language search experience for candidates
Highlights best-fit external and internal candidates for any open role
Writes and personalizes emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages and campaigns to candidates
Schedules, reschedules, and cancels interviews using natural language
Develops individualized interview questions and guides
Publishes comprehensive interview feedback in real time for decision makers
Provides hiring teams with interview transcripts, candidate responses, summaries and actionable insights
Interprets notes and creates tasks to be completed
Analyzes Chatbot questions and generates appropriate responses
Scales multilingual experiences
Recommends optimizations to hiring workflows

For talent management, Phenom X+ automatically:

Provides performance insights across teams with next steps
Identifies succession planning opportunities for high-performing employees
Flags employee flight risks and provides prescriptive guidance
Detects skills gaps and surfaces upskilling and reskilling opportunities
Generates personalized emails and campaigns, as well as audience segments to foster development
Interprets and communicates organizational talent trends and ways to stay on pace

New Intelligence Announcements for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management

The Product Innovation Keynote at IAMPHENOM established that insights for knowledge workers are critical to optimize performance and process. To appropriately address the needs of the modern organization, Phenom introduced new technology that improves the hiring cycle for candidates, interview process for internal stakeholders, and growth and retention aspirations of talent management and managers:

Interview Intelligence disrupts the traditional interview process by bringing transparency to hiring teams with recordings, transcriptions, and key takeaways to move the process forward faster and improve decision making. Analysis of interview sentiment, talk speed, talk-to-listen ratio and voice energy are available to inform interview training opportunities and improvements for hiring teams.

Candidate Hub is a one-stop-shop that helps candidates understand where they are in the hiring process and prepare for next steps. Taking context into account, it gives exposure to relevant jobs, company information, hiring status, and potential future career pathing opportunities. Candidates can easily schedule and reschedule interviews, and access a digital interview coach that provides them with a preparation checklist.

Workforce Intelligence provides talent management teams with context and oversight into talent within their organization to ensure they are appropriately onboarded, retained and developed. A main dashboard provides hiring trends, churn rate, retention risks and high performers. Talent management can further drill down into three key areas: 1) Dynamic role architecture to analyze skills, competencies, and additional contexts to determine which employees are available to upskill or reskill into future roles, and initiate upskilling/reskilling initiatives; 2) Comprehensive employee profiles to identify tenure, performance, growth trajectory, fit for openings and progressions, and options for succession planning; and 3) Skills intelligence to determine where gaps and training needs exist, providing visibility into endorsed skills, self-reported skills, open jobs and roles that require skills, and the learning opportunities, mentors and gig projects available to address gaps. With workforce intelligence at their disposal, Employee Relationship Management (ERM) enables talent management and people managers to take appropriate action such as initiating an upskilling project to acquire new skills to enhance one’s job performance or career advancements.

Succession Planning facilitates growth, development, and movement within the organization, providing a means to plan for the future. It identifies existing employees who are suitable for succession for specific roles, and determines eligibility and readiness based on tenure, performance, skills, competencies, and other relevant signals. This feature makes it easy to add new employees to a succession plan, evaluate which successors have been assigned to specific roles, and move and grow employees in the organization.

People Manager provides business leaders with the actionable intelligence they need to build high-performing teams by surfacing an employee’s current sentiment, career growth plans, learning opportunities, recommendations for upskilling/reskilling, and overall talent retention effectiveness. It also simplifies the process of endorsing a direct report’s skills.

New Automation Announcements for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management

Phenom also announced new automation technology for frontline and hourly workers that will empower them to reduce friction and connect candidates with jobs faster, foster employee development, and reduce tedious, manual tasks for recruiters.

Automation Engine is the powerful backend behind phenomenal hiring, growth and retention experiences. It provides the framework and components to identify, build, implement, and monitor automation workflows into new or existing talent lifecycle processes (e.g., hiring, career development, and retention). It includes workflow intelligence for constant monitoring and qualitative analysis of workflow performance and provides recommendations for optimization. Process mining capabilities identify opportunities to optimize further — leading to outcomes such as improved conversion rates and higher volume of hires in less time.

Talent Companion provides an always-on, omnichannel approach to engage candidates throughout the hiring process — facilitating a streamlined application, interview and hiring experience. It provides real-time responses to questions, helps prepare for interviews and shares reminders at the right time to eliminate any guesswork.

High-Volume Hiring delivers full end-to-end automation of the hiring process, from first interaction to hire. It is designed specifically for industries such as retail, transportation, hospitality, and manufacturing that require a fast and frictionless candidate onboarding experience. Using AI-based workflows, High-Volume Hiring removes redundant processes that can clog the volume hiring pipeline. It also reduces the strain on recruiting teams by automating for high-volume and seasonal staffing surges so they can shift their focus to lengthier knowledge worker hiring cycles.

Requisition and Offer Management for High-Volume Hiring enables hiring managers to autonomously raise requisitions and extend offers to candidates, accelerating the process of making opportunities available to candidates, while reducing reliance on other stakeholders and decreasing time to hire.

Career Pathing for Frontline gathers an employee’s experience, tenure and behaviors and surfaces their next best-fit role within their organization. Growth trajectories can be tailored based on an organization’s unique role requirements.

Alumni Network re-engages former employees to strengthen and maintain positive long-term company relationships. The network can be leveraged from a recruitment perspective to make alumni employees aware of new openings that can bring them back to the company — supporting aspirations to rehire already trained talent and provide potential career advancement opportunities.

New Platform Experience Announcements

Phenom designed additional platform enhancements, including: Design Studio which provides talent and brand marketers with high-fidelity career design within a no-code framework; People Analytics that puts data behind every hiring, growth and retention decision; AI Control Center that enables organizations with controls and configurations to maximize the full potential of intelligence across the platform based on individual preferences and requirements; Connector Studio which improves integration with critical third-party applications and technology to improve business performance.

New Phenom Service Experience for Improved Global Customer Care

To better support customers’ evolving needs, Phenom announced a new multi-tiered support model — Phenom Service Experience. By adding more self-service capabilities and a direct line to support, Phenom is accelerating problem resolution and increasing customer satisfaction. Built to provide exceptional support and phenomenal moments, Phenom Service Experience includes: Support Portal, Service Hub, Platform Status Page, Learning Academy, User Community, Global Office Hours, Premium Support Plans, and Managed Services Plans.