The Phenom Blog

When multinational tech company Lumen set out to improve their talent acquisition and management processes while driving enhanced candidate, recruiter, and employee experiences, they turned to Phenom for a holistic approach.

Find out how they’re leveraging multiple aspects of the Intelligent Talent Experience platform — including Career Site, CRM, Campaigns, Talent Marketplace, and Referrals — to exceed job seeker expectations, increase recruiter efficiency, and fill up to 35% of roles internally with better visibility into employee skills.

Check out the full case study!

The Challenge

According to Lumen’s Annie Roberts, Talent Acquisition Operations and Marketing Manager, the team needed to be more agile to meet the speed of their business. Their biggest pain points?

• A career site that was hard to update

• Insufficient visibility into data, including employee skills

• Disjointed sourcing and sharing of external and internal talent

• Lack of transparent opportunities for internal mobility

The Solution

“The idea of a platform that could tie the experience together for candidates, recruiters, and employees was a big draw,” Roberts said when asked “Why Phenom?”

Initially, Lumen implemented Phenom Career Site and Phenom CRM, enabling the team to address their top priority goals:

Optimize their career site in real time. With the help of the Phenom CMS, the team can easily add pages and new, engaging content complete with videos to showcase job roles. We have a very fast-paced ability to make changes and alter pages as we need to,” Roberts said.

Improve recruiter reach and efficiency. Now all candidate data — external and internal — lives in one place: their recruiter-friendly CRM. Phenom AI pulls in passive leads as well as partial applicants, allowing them to reach high-quality talent through hyper-personalized, automated email and text campaigns. “It’s a much better experience for recruiters,” Roberts said.

After seeing how their new career site delivered a superior experience for external candidates, Lumen’s TA team added Phenom Talent Marketplace and Phenom Referrals to break through previous internal mobility barriers. “Lumen is a large organization, and gaining visibility into available skills has been really important,” Roberts emphasized.

The Results

Together, Phenom’s talent acquisition and talent management tools have empowered Lumen to be more efficient while staying aligned with company culture and leadership goals.

“Externally, we’re equipped to drive the right type of talent into our organization and into roles. Internally, we’re doing a better job showing employees the next step in their career and promoting job roles that match aspirations,” Roberts said.

In fact, since implementing the talent marketplace, Lumen has been able to fill up to 35% of roles internally while securing more high-quality talent in a notoriously challenging hiring environment.

Interested in learning more? Check out the full case study

Ready to take action? Book a demo

Yes, talent leaders, it’s that time of year to start planning and strategizing for the Q1 employee All-Hands meetings (for those of you on a calendar year at least).

Chances are your meeting agenda hasn’t changed all that much over the years. It probably has welcoming remarks by the CEO and a cutest pet contest.

Not that either of those items are not worthwhile, yet they can be mundane and standard-issue, making your meeting just another all-hands. You can do better than that! Use the opportunity to activate and energize employees by helping them see how their professional development ties in with overall business goals.

Talent leaders would be wise to remember that HR problems are ultimately business problems. In some of my frank conversations with CHROs, too many executives automatically assume their people understand the company’s strategy and how they fit in their current roles and where their career can take them.

That’s a misguided assumption. And all the more reason why you as the people leader need to own not only the all hands meeting agenda but the programs and culture 365 days a year that inform the content you will use!

Top C-suite Concerns

A fascinating Deloitte study found that C-suites and boards rank the following among their top sources of workforce risk concerns:

• Inability to reskill and/or upskill workers

• Workforce retention

• Ineffective workforce planning

• Inability to flexibly deploy workers

• Ineffective succession planning

“Our research strongly suggests that many companies are not applying risk management disciplines while managing their workforce despite the growing threat of labor shortages, skills shortages, growing rates of voluntary turnover, and the emergence of

Does your organization see employee skills as a business risk? If so, what are you doing about it?

Related: CHROs Can Nurture Employee Growth By Focusing On Skills. Here’s How

To help you get started, I’ve outlined a few things to keep in mind.

Align Employee Development to Business Goals

If you’re not actively talking to your people about how their work matters to the greater good of the organization, you’re missing a huge opportunity to help them understand why their work is important.

I was raised in a service-to-others household, and my dad was a teacher and principal, so having purpose inform my goals and profession was ingrained in my brothers and me since we were little. When I became an HR leader, I’d often challenge people to answer any number of these questions:

• What is the purpose and mission of your organization?

• What are its big goals?

• What are your specific goals and objectives?

• Who must work with you to help you get your job done?

• What are the decisions you can make?

• What are the decisions you need to rely on other people to make for you?

• And then ultimately, what does success look like?

If your employees can’t immediately answer those questions, it means they might be confused on the goals and how they are critical in reaching them. Creating context for your teams is a great opportunity for people leaders to step up and fill the leadership and data void. Here are two meaningful steps you can take.

1. Create a Dashboard

I should really call it a scoreboard, because it’s where you can see who’s succeeding and who needs to step it up.

At Life Time, we had a dashboard for team members. It always started with the company's mission and objectives for that given year. For example, the mission of Life Time was X and the objectives to fulfill that mission were Y. The objectives were typically financial.

The goals were largely operational and customer-focused, and they were broken down by department. The next step was to take the goals and build operational objectives off of them, so team members could connect their work back to the organization’s larger mission.

We always encouraged people to think about a healthy way of life. That was Life Time’s mission.

No two organizations will have the same mission, but most of them will have something that says who they are and what they stand for.

So finishing up my dashboard story, team members were crystal clear on how they fit in the organization, what they were empowered to do, and how their work impacted the organization. They felt connected to something.

The dashboard was a success because our mission aligned with our culture. Try to avoid the temptation to slapdash a mission statement together that isn’t true to your company’s core. Employees and candidates will see right through it.

2. Develop Them on Day One

As I'm talking to CHROs and talent executives around the country, I encourage them to ask new employees what they want to accomplish career-wise from the moment they start at the company. Let them know you’re thinking about their long-term professional development from the get-go.

HR executives should also reinforce this mentality to people leaders throughout the organization, since they’re the ones on the frontlines who will be engaging and nurturing employees day-to-day.

I realize how hard it is to break an old habit. It used to be that we’d want people to prove themselves, to put their head down and do their job and not ask about what could be next for them. It was almost looked at as disrespectful. Then in many organizations, years could go by before having The Talk. It would go something like this:

CHRO: “Jane, I see you’ve been with us for five years now. Hard to believe it’s been so long since you first joined the company. Tell me, where do you see yourself in the next five years?”

We have to break out of that mindset and ask the “where do you see yourself” question much earlier — like during new employee orientation. In fact, offer up to your new recruit the self-service career planning portal I hope your company has and encourage them to plan their “next” from day one.

Allow employees to create a plan for themselves in your organization. Let them develop the skills and competencies required to master their current role, with an eye on opportunities for their next role.

This becomes such a value-add throughout the employee experience.

I invite you to think about four things as we consider the benefits of career planning and employee skills and competencies.

1. They improve retention.

2. They accelerate development, so our employees are not only optimistic about today, but they can see their future in our organizations.

3. They allow us to understand our larger workforce, and plan for the long haul.

4. They reduce risk.

Why Their Work Matters

When you establish a clear link between employee development and business goals, employees understand what they were empowered to do and how their work impacts the greater good. People don’t feel like they are satellites floating around in space, but

Don’t assume talent feels magically connected to the business. Show them. People struggle to understand why their work matters.

It's important for us as CHROs to build a purpose filled methodology. It’s a fundamental aspect of human nature – to know that what we’re doing matters.

So back to your quarterly “All Hands” agenda. Certainly we should have the CEO speak and maybe even have a cutest puppy contest. But in between, if we’ve done the work on building culture and career development, invite your talent to share their stories of purpose and career growth.

You’ll find eyes and ears glued to your content, and people will say to themselves, “That could be me” or “I never thought about the company that way, hmm, I like that.”

We as people leaders have so much opportunity to make a difference with those who make a difference to the bottom line. Using new powerful tools to build culture and career paths is a clear way to a winning company and an exciting All Hands meeting!

If you’d like strategic counsel on how to go about developing a dashboard, please connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s have that conversation.

By now, you’ve already heard about IAMPHENOM — the #1 intelligent talent experience conference happening in Philadelphia on March 28-30. But what you may not know is that we have an entire day dedicated to training for Phenom customers and partners on March 28!

Featuring over 15 live workshops, Pre-Conference Training Day is your chance to hear from our experts as they cover best practices to help you hire faster, develop better, and retain longer with the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform. Begi

At Pre-Conference Training Day, we have something for everyone. In-depth training sessions will cover numerous features and topics, including CRM configurations, employer branding, email marketing, AI, automations, translation solutions, candidate di

Grab your ticket here, select your sessions to reserve your seat, and keep reading to find out what this day has in store for you. 

Why Attend Pre-Conference Training Day at IAMPHENOM?

During Pre-Conference Training Day, you’ll not only be able to kick off your conference a day early, but you’ll also be able to attend exclusive in-person training sessions based on your skills and expertise, networking events, earn additional SHRM cand party with your peers in the City of Brotherly Love. 

Here’s what you can expect from each of our five tracks for sourcers/recruiters, talent marketers, talent management, master admins, and partners: 

Talent Marketer Track 

Connecting with candidates using marketing tools is one of today’s tricks of the trade — only if you’re using the tools effectively. By attending the training sessions in this track, Talent Marketers will discover how to maximize the Phenom platform

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the sessions we have lined up for Talent Marketers:

• Building Communication Templates with the CRM: Explore effective talent-building strategies, master templates, and best practices to elevate how you communicate with top talent.  
  

• Advanced Phenom Translation Solutions: Streamline how you manage translations for multiple sub-tenants to support your global business operations and brand consistently. 
  

• Bringing Your Employer Brand to Life: Website Build & Content Strategy Essentials: Uncover the best ways to showcase your employer brand and apply content strategy best practices to your career site using Phenom CMS. 
  

• Streamlining Candidate Outreach with the 3 Cs of Email Marketing: Communicate, Connect & Convert: Learn how to personalize your email content while proactively and reactively communicating with candidates through Phenom Campaigns. 

Sourcer/Recruiter Track 

It’s vital for TA teams to adjust hiring practices and streamline efforts when attracting, engaging, and converting top talent. 

During our Sourcer/Recruiter track, sessions will highlight effective ways your team can leverage AI and automation to eliminate time-consuming tasks, freeing recruiters to make meaningful connections with best-fit candidates. Some of the sessions in

• How to Manage Your Workload in the CRM: Find out how your teams can improve workflow efficiencies and maximize Phenom CRM to hire best-fit candidates faster. 
  

• Uncovering Candidates with Advanced Search: With Advanced Search, you can get specific about the qualifications you’re looking for in a candidate and engage the right target audience faster.
  

• Automations Recipe Build: Improving Your Talent Recruitment Workflow with Advanced CRM Automations: Discover how CRM automations can improve recruiter productivity by eliminating redundant tasks from your to-do list. 
  

• Phenom AI: Incorporating AI into Your Sourcing Process: In this session, you'll discover how to quickly attract and effectively engage passive candidates with AI-powered Phenom features and tools.

Talent Management Track 

Employee evolution is the name of the game and in this breakout track, we’re talking about the best ways to empower employees to grow while filling critical skill gaps within your organization. 

Each session in the Talent Management track is focused on helping you leverage all Phenom has to offer to encourage talent to travel along their career path, visualize their future within your company, and tackle upskilling opportunities along the wa

• Maximizing Employee Engagement with New HR Tech: Find out how you can support every team when rolling out new technology, including pitfalls to avoid and must-have strategies to make sure you get the highest level of engagement. 
  

• Maximizing the Benefits of the Employee Profile to Move Your Career Forward: Discover how Phenom Talent Marketplace supports employee development through recommended opportunities using interests, skills, and proficiencies. 

Master Admin Track 

For those that typically do it all within the Phenom platform, we created our Master Admin track. This track offers access to any specialized training session so you can learn more about any topic covered on Pre-Conference Training day. We also have

• Successfully Launching (or Relaunching) the Phenom CRM: During this session, you’ll learn how to translate your current TA workflow into the Phenom CRM, as well as the corresponding must-have configurations that come with it. 

Partner Track 

As a valued Phenom Partner, our clients rely on you as much as our internal teams! In this customized training track, you’ll learn about your role during implementation — including what you need to know to successfully lead a client project and go li

• How to Manage Your Workload in the CRM: Find out how your teams can improve workflow efficiencies and maximize Phenom CRM to hire best-fit candidates faster. 

• Bringing Your Employer Brand to Life: Website Build & Content Strategy Essentials: Uncover the best ways to showcase your employer brand and apply content strategy best practices to your career site using Phenom CMS.

• Successfully Launching (or Relaunching) the Phenom CRM: During this session, you’ll learn how to translate your current TA workflow into the Phenom CRM, as well as the corresponding must-have configurations that come with it. 
  

• Phenom AI: Incorporating AI into Your Sourcing Process: In this session, you'll discover how to quickly attract and effectively engage passive candidates with AI-powered Phenom features and tools.

• Streamlining Candidate Outreach with the 3 Cs of Email Marketing: Communicate, Connect & Convert: Learn how to personalize your email content while proactively and reactively communicating with candidates through Phenom Campaigns.

Regardless of what you’re looking for, we have a session for you during our Pre-Conference Training Day. Explore the full agenda that’s available to you here. We can’t wait to see you there! 

There are only a few spots left! Secure your Pre-Conference Training Day ticket right now before it’s too late.

Career sites that deliver a personalized, engaging candidate experience are the ones that consistently convert job seekers into hires. So what’s the secret behind creating and maintaining one that’s best in class?

Recent CandE award winner Regions Bank walked us through a tour of their own career site, and showed us the features that helped grow and diversify their talent community with 8X more job seekers for 20% faster hires.

View the entire on-demand tour with Region’s Scott Ewert, SVP, Talent Acquisition Senior Manager - Innovation & Strategy, and Melinda Littleton, Vice President, Talent Sourcing Lead, here — or catch the highlights below!

An Iterative Journey

Before you can optimize your career site to consistently convert, you’ve got to make sure it has the capabilities to do the things you want it to do in the first place (think holistic solution that can grow with you versus another fragmented point solution).

That said, you can only bite off so much at one time. “Elevating that candidate experience is an iterative process because the way in which your company is working and the way in which you're trying to attract talent, is going to be an evolution,” pointed out Phenom’s VP of Strategy Lindsay Mareau, during the tour. So, start by considering your top goals.

Two major goals guided Regions’ career site update, according to Ewert:

1. Create a best-in-class candidate experience that would keep site visitors engaged and exploring.

2. Attract the right talent. “To us it wasn’t about more candidates — it was more of the right candidates,” Ewert said. That meant designing a home page that would transparently convey Regions’ culture and employee value proposition.

With this in mind, Regions rolled out different career site features in a phased approach and took invaluable learnings from their Phenom Talent Analytics to build out a content strategy candidates can’t resist.

Career Site 1.0

Regions knew a superior user experience would hinge on strong personalization and easy search capabilities. The homepage prioritizes intuitive navigation and spotlights individualized job recommendations in a number of different ways. The common thread? Phenom AI, which gives an effortless front-end experience for candidates and an equally effortless back-end experience for talent teams.

Job categories. With as many as 1,500 jobs open at a time, Littleton and Ewert wanted job seekers to be able to easily filter through relevant options, regardless of whether they’re actively searching, passively browsing, or just looking for a friend.“

Job categories were huge because we're a bank, so we're probably most known for hiring bankers — but we hire for much more than that,” shared Littleton. Using job categories to house various groups and divisions within the company (e.g., accounting, risk management, corporate banking) provides a more intuitive way for candidates — who may have no idea how the organization is structured — to search.“

Having those job categories laid out is critical to help connect candidates with the right opportunities based on what they're looking for and what their interests are,” she continued.

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Talent community. The ability to easily create a talent community is an important career site feature. “This was a huge opportunity for us to engage and convert candidates truly based on what their interests are,” Littleton said, adding that it’s a value-add for recr

Call-to-actions throughout the site invite candidates to join the talent community or set customized job alerts, which has been highly effective in driving conversion. “To have a place to send candidates and connect with them has been really invaluable,” she shared. In fact, with Phenom, they now have 8X the number of candidates they had previously.

Chatbot. Ewert, who calls the career site chatbot a “game changer,” credits the tool with setting the foundation of an easy candidate experience. The chatbot drives conversion, keeping candidates moving nimbly through the site and application process. It also

To get the most out of the chatbot, Ewert encourages reviewing unanswered questions. This helps you “train” the tool to get smarter, he said. The library of questions also serves as a great resource for career site content development.

Skills-based search and job recommendations. “[Skills] is where recruiting is going,” Littleton noted. That’s why personalized job recommendations are based around skills — and not just the skills a candidate brings to the table. Job recommendations also consider how skills gained from one role

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Career Site 2.0

Once the groundwork was laid on the homepage, Regions worked to build out their employer brand more extensively with additional content. The best part? Being able to then proactively market to active and passive leads based on their actions via the Phenom CRM.

Landing pages. Regions developed robust landing pages for each job category. The Phenom CMS makes it simple to drop in images, testimonials, videos, and other information to convey how each group is constructed and where a candidate’s skills might fit.

“Because each job category is distinct, we can really customize and personalize the story based on where a candidate clicks,” Littleton said. “We’re able to craft that message at the job category level to help connect and convert those candidates.”

Using job category page links in email and text campaigns is also a great way to point candidates to information relevant to their job search. “It’s been a really nice enhancement in the candidate experience,” Littleton emphasized.

Multi-touch engagement (and re-engagement) strategies. Regions embeds a variety of touchpoints on their career site, so candidates have a choice in how they want to interact regardless of which page their experience starts on.

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“Regardless of what stage they’re at — Are they actively looking? Are they browsing? Maybe they're wanting to make a move in the future — we can stay connected to them, and we didn't have a way to do this before Phenom and this career site,” said Littleton. “It’s a way we differentiate ourselves in being able to tell our story proactively and intentionally.”

Header update. Candidate expectations have evolved post-pandemic — career decisions now rest on organizational culture and the day-to-day employee experience rather than just a list of job role responsibilities.

To address this, Regions updated the header which lives at the top of every page of their career site to expand on the “why” behind the company’s employer brand. From culture and benefits to DE&I, the header centralizes key information.

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Career Site 3.0: Microsites

Microsites. The TA team created microsites to give candidates even more detailed information about Regions’ job groups and teams. “This is a place where we hope candidates can get lost, but in a good way,” Ewert said. “I think it’s really elevated our EVP becau

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“The functionality of these microsites is just really impressive,” Littleton agreed. “We’re also able to embed featured jobs for that category. Again, we’re wanting candidates to get excited about the story that we tell, and be able to provide those conversion opportunities all in the same place.”

Regions also uses their microsite pages in automated Phenom Campaigns, Littleton added. Since the pages are standalone links, they’re able to easily share on social, in emails, and via text. This empowers recruiters to easily maintain relevant connections with high-quality talent, matching outreach to the stage of the

“We know candidates have a lot of touches before they actually apply. And so by being aware of that and crafting these microsites with that in mind, has been a really great way for us to connect with candidates in a way they want to hear from employers,” Littleton said.

Career Site 4.0

Despite all they’ve already accomplished, Regions is already pursuing what’s next for the career site.

Customized job postings. Because candidates that come in through job boards land directly on the job posting page itself, they end up bypassing all of the carefully curated content across the rest of the site. Ewert explained how they’re starting to compensate for this:

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More video. Embedding video showing authentic stories from leaders and employees throughout the site is definitely part of future plans. “That’s a huge win in being able to tell our story … video is really an impactful content channel, and something we’re reall

Hosted apply. By implementing Phenom Hosted Apply, not only will every step of the application process stay within the Phenom platform for a truly seamless candidate experience, the team will now have access to more powerful analytics.

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Being able to track when an apply click converts to an apply is exciting. Even better? When you see that apply turn into a hire.

Learn more about how Regions Bank is hiring 20% faster
Watch the full career site tour, or download the case study

Want to see how we can help your candidate experience (and more!)?
Book a demo

High-volume hiring is critical to the success of Sweetwater Sound’s business — prompting the retailer to find a solution defined by intelligent automation to drive more efficient recruiter functions.

Also essential? Hands-on freedom to tailor a candidate experience that would remain true to Sweetwater’s employer branding and values while generating quantifiable results.

Find out how they’re leveraging Phenom to reduce the time to schedule interviews from 5 minutes to 5 seconds while increasing candidate engagement and completed applications.

Check out the full case study!

The Challenge

As one of the world’s largest online retailers of audio and musical equipment, Sweetwater realized its home-grown approach to HR technology was limiting recruiters’ ability to quickly get high-quality talent through the door.

For Jordan Applegate, Senior Director of Recruiting for Sweetwater, the challenge was to increase efficiency by finding a third-party solution while preserving hands-on control over the talent experience.“


We reached a point where we knew we needed smart automations to keep up with our hiring demands and stay competitive in the market,” he shared.

The Solution

When Sweetwater found Phenom, Applegate recognized a solution that would solve the need for speed — with tools for application review and selection, interview scheduling, and candidate outreach — while also allowing the freedom to tailor a candidate experience that would remain true to Sweetwater’s employer branding and values.

“The ability to retain control over the candidate experience really won us over,” Applegate said, highlighting the following capabilities:

• Phenom Career Site, CMS and Hosted Apply. With Phenom Career Site and CMS, the Sweetwater recruiting department can create and publish their own career site content — without leaning on other teams, or being locked into vendor-specific templates. “We didn’t want candidates to know they’d l

• Phenom CRM and Campaigns. The CRM gives recruiters one system of record for candidate information, so they can track interactions in real time and create targeted campaigns that catch attention with personalized content. Using templates allows recruiters to “humanize” their
  

• Phenom Talent Analytics. The ease of tracking and surfacing KPIs and metrics saves Applegate time and effort when it comes to monthly reporting. He also noted that metrics on CRM usage helps him improve the performance of his own team members.

The Results

“We’ve already seen a modernization that allows substantial time savings and eliminates system fragmentation,” shared Applegate.

Stand-out results include:

More efficient high-volume hiring. Phenom automations were instrumental to Sweetwater during the holiday peak, Applegate said, with a single recruiter processing more than 500 applications per week. “Using Phenom really set us up for success. We processed more applications and leads

Faster interview scheduling. “Moving through the interview process efficiently so we can make decisions on top talent quickly is a huge part of the success of our business,” said Applegate. By using the recipe automation feature, the team has whittled phone interview scheduling

Stronger candidate engagement. With more consistent branding thanks to the user-friendly CMS and Hosted Apply, Sweetwater increased their completed application rate by 82%. “The ease of dropping in polished content has improved our branding capabilities. We’re showcasing culture-s

Interested in learning more? Check out the full case study

Ready to take action? Book a demo

The New York Times ran an article recently that caught my eye: it said that most tech jobs today are in mainstream industries such as healthcare and retail — industries that one wouldn’t readily think of as “tech-y.” But the fact is these verticals are increasingly looking for talen

While pure tech plays such as Amazon and Meta are shedding talent, they’re quickly being scooped up by the likes of JP Morgan and…Walmart?

“It’s not a secret that Walmart is not the first brand you think of when you think of tech,” a senior technology recruiter at the retailing giant told the Times.

I’ll say. But that quote underscores the huge responsibility you and I have when it comes to brands in general, and the impact it has on a company’s ability to hire. It’s up to us as CHROs to develop and sustain a gold-plated corporate reputation that makes people say “Yeah, I understand what the company is about, what it does, how I fit, and I want to work there.”

That’s why I joined Phenom last year. I was attracted to the purpose of helping a billion people find the right job. I have a service mindset by nature, and it just seemed natural to join a company that was using AI and data to forge a new talent exp

Ask yourself this: why is Warren Buffet one of the biggest investors in American Express? Because “the most important thing about American Express is the brand and the customers that aspire to be associated with the brand.”

I wondered: could that same philosophy extend to people who are looking for their next employer?

It certainly does for The Cigna Group, the health insurance giant whose 70,000-plus global workforce gives life — literally — to the brand.

“We all come behind one mission,” said Effie Gikas, who leads an enablement team at Cigna responsible for talent acquisition, recruitment marketing, and employer branding. “To improve the health, well-being, and peace of mind of those we serve — and

Attracting talent wasn’t really a problem for Cigna. It was getting a handle on the skills of existing employees. Gikas explained that it was harder for internal talent to find their next role than it was for those outside of the company, and that fr

Cigna wasn’t going to let its promise of well-being fall apart with their internal team. So they partnered with Phenom and solved for a pretty complex challenge of matching skills and roles across the company to support internal job placement.

That's a great example of a company not backing down from their employment brand promise, but rising to the challenge and doing what they say! Cigna reinforced its reputation as an employer of choice to talent inside the company as well as outside.

It’s a fact — empowering self-directed career planning and increasing the speed at which you upskill and reskill employees drives retention and increases your positive reputation and profitability.

How Does Your Organization Treat People?

I had a great conversation with a CHRO recently about brand reputation. She said the way you conduct business is also likely the way you treat your people. If you have a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business model, chances are that’s how you treat talent.

Her point of view resonated with me, because I have long believed that whatever you do most consistently is your brand. It's not what you think you do, it's what you do most consistently. If you don't think about your employment brand and look at it every year, then that's your brand. It’s happening whether you like it or not, so you should do something about it.

Most CHROs do. They have an inkling of what people are saying about their organizations through LinkedIn and Glassdoor reviews.

Here’s one review — pro and con — of a random major tech company I found on Glassdoor:

"They provide great benefits and you get a lot of exposure if interested in [a] full-time corporate role."

"Bad managers abound and there is not much remedy for that except for leaving the job."

So some positive comments, some not-so-positive. It’s all there for the C-suite to read.

To me, the real question CHROs ought to ask themselves is: Am I taking in all of this data and more, while also hyper-focusing on and prioritizing my brand? I started the article with this challenge. It’s not a bottom priority, this is a top 1-2 priority to build and defend the employment brand of their organization. Is this a top 2 priority to you?

If not, here’s how you can take the first step.

1. Create a Sense of Urgency

Thinking about your employment brand and how it’s perceived is one of those “very important but non-urgent” things that organizations tend to put way at the bottom of the list of priorities. By lacking routine prioritization where CHROs are continualthat is your brand.

The other piece of that is the ability to strategize and work internally to get the time, talent, and treasure in your organization to actually prioritize the employment brand of your company. Oftentimes what happens is you get the throwaway thoughtsconsumer brand to build your employment brand. And the employment brand has a different point of view. So it becomes a “we know it's important, but we need to make it important” attitude.

Action: Your employment brand falls on you, no one else. Give it the urgency it deserves.

2. Be True to the Brand

Once you build a brand strategy, is your team structured to meet the daily challenge of sustaining the effort? Do you have a dedicated talent marketing manager to maintain your career site and Glassdoor ratings, similar to how your marketing team has

Today’s talent lives in a real-time feedback loop. They aren't getting an impression of you over years; it now takes minutes. And you know the old cliche — you never get a second chance at a first impression.

So, you need to be really aware of the message you're delivering.

Because if you have a dog-eat-dog culture — and that’s fine if you do — then make sure people are clear on that with your employment brand so they can decide whether they want to be a part of your brand or not. You don't have to make your brand somet

Action: People can spot a phony a mile away, so make sure your brand is on the up-and-up.

3. Measure, Move, and Never Settle

After building your brand, run it carefully and diligently with passion and fury. Measure, measure, measure! Challenge leaders and the C-suite to get serious about the promise you are making. Measuring takes effort. External tools like Glassdoor are

Do you know where they are coming from, why they chose you, how many are dropping out, abandoning the brand... and why? Do you know how your internal people are doing in self-selecting skills and new roles they would like to consider? Can you partner

One of the reasons I love Phenom’s purpose of "helping a billion people find the right job" is the experience mindset it fosters. A talent experience that will give you — the CHRO — the one source of truth.

Action: Dig into the numbers. You may be surprised by what they’re telling you.

When it’s Easier to Get into Harvard than Your Company

It may sound like hyperbole, but it’s actually easier to get into Harvard than it is landing a job at some companies.

In fact, a CHRO once confided in me that her former company accepted just 2.5% of applicants — less than half of Harvard’s acceptance rate of 5%. (It’s since fallen even lower — just 3% for the class of 2026). Her point: how do organizations maintain the same brand cachet as Harvard so that people a) want to keep applying or b) want to transfer within to other roles.

Fact is, if you don't have a good employment brand, you're going to be in big trouble to even get that 2.5%, or to get the best of the 2.5% to decide to choose your organization and then to stay long term. It's one thing to promise something to candi

I speak from experience. Similar to the CHRO’s story mentioned earlier, I too once told my recruiting team at Life Time it was easier to get accepted into Harvard than it was to get a job in the company!

Harvard can afford to be choosy. You and I can too. We also have a business to staff in a tight talent economy. So we better find a way to make it easier and faster for talent to choose our company and easier for our talent teams and hiring managers

That analogy is such a good level-set for people because it’s a challenge for some hiring leaders to appreciate what a sophisticated labor marketplace we are actually in, especially with the advent of technology.

Knowing who you are in the market allows you to focus, tell your story, and recruit. Talent is empowered to see and know the truth, so make sure you start there and then move to your strategy to assist your business leaders in hiring the best talent

So I’ve walked this walk, and I can help you navigate a successful path. Create urgency, know and be true to your brand, and then measure and move to win. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and I’ll be glad to show you how to build a powerful employment brand that rivals anything your competitors have to offer.

Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Manufacturing, Food, and Transportation are just a handful of industries mass hiring annually. In Food Services, for example, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there are more than 950,000 jobs available every year with a turnover rate of 75%.

With that much talent needed and leaving frontline and hourly roles, employers must improve their mass hiring strategies in order to attract and ultimately retain employees.

Here’s everything you need to know about mass hiring to set, or re-set, your strategy.

What is Mass Hiring?

Mass hiring, also referred to as bulk hiring or high-volume hiring, is when companies add a large volume of employees to their workforce (usually that number is in the hundreds or thousands) in a very short amount of time, less than a few weeks. Most of the time when mass hiring, the positions that need to be filled are very similar in terms of employee credentials and skills.

The need for mass hiring occurs for a few reasons:

• High churn rate: When a business is rapidly losing a high volume of employees or regularly experiences high levels of staff turnover and needs to fill open positions.
  

• Seasonality: During the winter holiday season, for example, retail companies must hire extra in-store and warehouse employees in order to prepare for increased consumer demands.
  

• Business expansion: This can be due to an increase in demand for a specific service or because the business itself is expanding to multiple locations and will need to staff those new locations.

No matter the season or economic climate, mass hiring will always be relevant. As employers cycle through periods of increased demand for products or services, the need for a well-thought-out volume hiring plan is a necessity.

Related reading: Tackling Mass Hiring No Matter the Season

How to Tackle Mass Hiring Effectively

One of the biggest issues that organizations face when hiring is shortening the critical time to offer to secure candidates who might be pursuing opportunities with other employers. For job hunters with transactional, transferable skills, a rapid job

So, how can you move faster? By automating recruitment processes. With AI technology and automation, most administrative recruiting tasks like screening and scheduling can be put on autopilot. This means your recruiters have more time for building candidate pipelines, building relationships with top candidates, a

Companies using recruitment automation to help with their bulk hiring needs, for example, are able to hire candidates through AI-led processes and personalization. They do this through technology like:

• Conversational Chatbot: Helps guide candidates through relevant job postings based on skills and location, prescreens for required qualifications, and moves talent on to the next hiring stage based on prioritized job openings.
  

• AI Scheduling: An AI-powered interview scheduling tool that automates time-consuming recruiter and hiring manager meeting coordination and syncs calendars of all involved parties, including candidates.
  

• Video Assessments: Engages with and evaluates candidates through one-way video interviews that candidates can complete and hiring teams can review on their own time.
  

• Hiring Manager: An assessment tool that makes it easy for hiring managers to evaluate interviews and video assessments, and collaborate on team feedback — whether remotely or on-site.
  

• Automated Workflows: Minimizes recruiter intervention as candidates automatically progress through a personalized application and hiring process.
  

• SMS and 1:1 Messaging: Sends candidates 1-to-1 or 1-to-many SMS messages to quickly promote open roles, upcoming events, follow up on interviews, arrange next steps, and communicate offers.

Related resource: How to Mass Hire Without Sacrificing Quality for Quantity

When companies have technology like this to automate the majority of typical time-consuming tasks, hiring teams can capture quality candidates quicker and with confidence — ultimately decreasing time to hire.

See how Phenom can help by downloading our High-Volume Hiring Playbook!

Employee development is a vital part of any retention strategy. It’s a way to help connect the dots between where a worker is right now and where they want to be in the future. 

One of the most well-rounded ways to support employee evolution, improve engagement, and better meet pivoting business needs is to upskill, reskill, and redeploy your workforce. 

This may sound like a heavy lift, but upskilling and reskilling are two different ways to empower employee evolution — inspiring individuals to acquire new skills while fostering a more mobile workforce. 

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the benefits of upskilling and reskilling, and answer a variety of questions, including:  

• What is upskilling?
  

• What is reskilling?
  

• What do upskilling and reskilling have in common?
  

• Why is reskilling and upskilling important?
  

• How do upskilling and reskilling support employee development?

What is Upskilling? 

You may be thinking, upskilling and reskilling sound the same — but they refer to different aspects of employee evolution surrounding skills. 

These two terms complement each other and offer two different approaches to helping employees acquire new skills and achieve their career goals. 

So what is upskilling? Simply put, upskilling is the process of teaching an employee new skills within their current role, interests, or expertise. Upskilling focuses on expanding upon existing knowledge that an individual already possesses. 

For example, recommending a course on HR management and leadership to an HR Assistant is a way to upskill and build upon the education they have already received while working in that particular role. 

Related: CHROs Can Nurture Employee Growth By Focusing On Skills. Here’s How.

Overall, upskilling is beneficial for an employee that’s looking for support while advancing in their role or current career path. 

Now that you have a better understanding of upskilling, let’s talk about reskilling. 

What is Reskilling? 

Reskilling is the process of teaching employees new skills that are currently outside of the individuals’ existing skill set that prepares them to take on different roles that can be adjacent to their current work or set them up for a completely new career path. 

Here’s an example of reskilling: a Marketing Specialist wants to become more involved in HR efforts by taking a lateral step toward a Recruitment Marketing Manager. With their existing skills in marketing, this employee could take a course on recruit

Although reskilling helps broaden an employee’s skill set more so than upskilling, they both focus on helping employees develop and acquire new tools that can be applied to existing or future roles. 

Related: Skill Disruption: What Is It and What Does It Mean for HR?

Why is Upskilling and Reskilling Important?

Now that you have a better understanding of how upskilling and reskilling support skills development, let’s dive into why upskilling and reskilling is important. 

Upskilling and reskilling are the key to unlocking untapped potential in your business. They offer two different avenues for existing talent to travel down when they’re ready to take on new challenges. 

Depending on which path they choose, upskilling and reskilling effectively point a spotlight on which employees are interested in staying within their current department and expertise pool while also illuminating individuals that are looking to make

Related: Skills: The Metadata of People

This insight is invaluable for HR leaders when workforce planning and looking to see who is available to fill critical roles in various departments across the enterprise. In addition to offering workforce insights, upskilling and reskilling individua

Shifting toward a skills-based approach encourages organizations to view employees as more than just a role — and it allows employees to evolve to better align with business needs instead of solely being replaced when business goals change.  

Upskilling and reskilling programs also highlight the company’s interest in their employee’s personal and professional growth, which goes a long way when it comes to creating a positive employee culture. 

Take employee upskilling and reskilling to the next level. Check out our Definitive Guide to Internal Mobility and Talent Agility.

Accelerate Upskilling and Reskilling with Phenom

Shifting to a skills-based approach takes time but the results are impactful and empower more data-driven decision making. Within Phenom Talent Marketplace, we offer career pathing, internal mobility, mentoring, gigs or short-term projects, and other

Through AI, machine learning, and automation, employees engage in a personalized experience that helps them identify their skills, highlights skills gaps, and recommends the right course or project to help them acquire new skills that align with thei

Upskilling and reskilling opportunities are woven together throughout the Phenom Talent Marketplace platform to create a seamless experience focused on employee development — while offering critical insights into the workforce for HR leaders and othe

Discover how Phenom Talent Marketplace can accelerate how you upskill and reskill talent by booking a demo here. 

In today's competitive job market, companies are inundated with large numbers of applications for every open role, making it increasingly difficult to identify the right candidates. According to SHRM, the national average across all industries is between 40-60 open requisitions per recruiter at any one time.

Because of this, it's not surprising that recruiters and hiring managers are turning to candidate screening software to help them efficiently and effectively sort through job applications for best-fit candidates.

Here are three ways candidate screening software can help you find and hire top talent quicker than competitors.

1. Boost Recruiter Efficiency

Candidate screening software — especially when powered by artificial intelligence — can significantly boost recruiter efficiency by quickly scanning resumes and applications, automating the initial screening process for recruiters. It can also identi

What kind of technology should you look for?

The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform, for example, features a number of products that can help boost recruiter productivity, like:

• Intelligent Chatbot: With an intelligent chatbot embedded into the career site, recruiters can rely on it to automate sourcing, screening, and scheduling while answering candidate FAQs 24/7.
  

• CRM: Using AI, teams can create actionable insights and rely on fit scoring technology to maximize their recruiting strategy. The CRM also allows them to build, engage, and track talent pipelines while boosting productivity with dynamic lists.
  

• Video Assessments: Through this one-way video interviewing tool, recruiters can accelerate the screening process and evaluate candidates quickly in order to screen and hire best-fit talent at scale.

Related reading: How to Transform Recruiter Efficiency with AI, Automation, and Video

2. Improve the Candidate Experience

Candidate screening software can improve the candidate experience by providing prompt feedback and a quick process for applicants. With automated messaging, for example, candidates can receive updates 24/7, which greatly reduces anxiety and uncertain

Candidate screening software can also reduce bias by ensuring that all candidates are evaluated on the same criteria. Video Assessments can invite pre-screened, best-fit candidates to conduct an assessment within a CRM automatically. It can also deliver tailored invitations, expert advice, and live support to job seekers — leaving candidates confident that they have left a great fir

Screening candidates through technologies like these helps build a positive reputation for your company, provides candidates with a great experience, and attracts top talent.

Related reading: The Definitive Guide to the Candidate Experience

3. Allow Hiring Teams to Make Better Decisions

As mentioned previously, candidate screening software can also allow hiring teams to make better decisions by automatically identifying the best candidates for a particular role based on factors such as experience, education, and skills. Using this A

Phenom Hiring Manager, for example, enables teams to reduce feedback loops and streamline collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers. The dashboard shows recently screened candidates, pending evaluations, upcoming interviews, and other important job metrics. Us

Related reading: Metrics that Matter: How to Leverage Analytics to Make Data-Driven Decisions

By implementing AI-powered candidate screening software like Chabot, Video Assessments, CRM, and Hiring Manager, recruiters are free to focus on higher-level tasks, candidates leave the process with a great impression of your company, and hiring team

Ready for candidate screening software that captures top talent quicker than competitors? Book a personalized demo today.