Inside the Phenom Credential Program: How Customers Turn Learning into Action

Most HR technology training stops at documentation, videos, and the occasional webinar. Getting a team to actually use a platform effectively and keep using it as the technology evolves is a different problem entirely.

The Phenom Credential Program was built for that gap. Stacy Wells, Talent Acquisition Program Advisor of Baylor Scott & White Health, and Jason Effinger, Recruitment Marketing Manager of SASR Workforce Solutions, shared what the program delivered for their organizations — and why the AI maturity model assessment alone reframed how both teams thought about where they stood.

Watch the full session here, or explore the highlights below.

What Challenges Can the Phenom Credential Program Solve?

Wells described the pre-credential state at Baylor Scott & White as “learn as you go,” working through self-directed resources and community forums. That approach created gaps in the depth of platform knowledge, particularly around connecting process design to technology capability. 

“I work alongside of our talent acquisition team to help bridge the gap between what are our processes and efficiencies, and then what technology do we use, and then how can we merge those two components,” Wells said. Without structured learning, that bridge was hard to build.

Effinger’s challenge at SASR was different but equally pressing. A retail workforce company that scales from near-dormancy to hundreds of new hires in a matter of weeks, SASR needed Phenom platform expertise that could keep pace.. “We don’t have time to train new recruiters,” Effinger said. The team was using Phenom effectively but had limited visibility into what was coming outside of attending conferences and catching product updates.

What Does the Phenom Credential Program Include?

The Phenom Credential Program is a multi-month learning experience that helps recruiting and talent teams build deeper platform expertise, learn from peer organizations, and bring new capabilities back to their teams.

The program spans roughly three months. Pre-work includes Learning Management System (LMS) coursework and virtual webinars where cohort members begin building relationships before the in-person summit. The summit brings a curated group of talent leaders to Philadelphia for sessions on AI maturity, platform deep-dives, and structured networking. Participants complete a certification at the end, assessed through an AI coaching platform that tests and reinforces what they've learned.

Three paths are offered: Talent Acquisition, Talent Marketing, and Talent Data Insights. Cohort curation is intentional. The inaugural group was selected from customers already demonstrating platform engagement, with the expectation that they'd bring what they learned back to their organizations and champion it internally.

For both Wells and Effinger, the standout moment was the AI maturity model assessment, a structured evaluation that placed each organization on a 0 to 5 scale from fully manual to autonomously intelligent. Both described it as clarifying, if humbling. "I thought we were further along than what we were," Effinger said. "That paper was a little bit of a shock," Wells added.

Related: Before You Add More AI to HR, You Need to Know Where You Stand

How Does the Phenom Credential Program Drive Impact?

For SASR, the program led directly to a technology decision. Effinger learned about the Phenom Voice Screening Agent during the credential program, not from a product brief but from a Varsity Brands team member sitting next to him who was actively testing it. That conversation made the case. SASR prioritized the voice agent ahead of its high-volume ramp season, and the results were immediate. The voice agent now performs at the capacity equivalent of four additional recruiters.

"Right off the bat, we were seeing dividends. It really did pay off to sit with somebody to learn what it was about, not just hearing it from Phenom, but actually somebody who used it," Effinger said.

The program's impact extended beyond recruiting strategy, too — one team member's career path expanded from recruiter to CMS and social media manager through the platform expertise he built along the way.

Wells and her team were already in active beta for Phenom's Intake Agent during the program, which gave her firsthand experience to share with the broader cohort. Back at Baylor Scott & White, the deeper platform knowledge and peer network she gained made driving internal adoption considerably more straightforward, giving her team a reason to engage with the technology rather than just an instruction to use it.

Both panelists’ advice to anyone on the fence was consistent: “Just do it,” Wells said. “There was not one bad takeaway that I had from this experience.” The value is both in the learning and in the relationships that form when people who are solving similar problems at real organizations sit in a room together. When that connection happens, it pulls the whole community forward.

Explore how the Phenom Credential Program can propel your career forward.