Cboe's Early Talent Investment: Maximizing Impact with Phenom Events

If you've ever worked a high-turnout college career fair, you likely know the feeling: an overwhelming number of candidates, endless lines, and the sinking realization that your best prospects might walk away unnoticed.

Global options exchange company Cboe faced this exact challenge. Like many talent acquisition teams, they were struggling with manual processes, limited resources, and the need to do more with less.

Crystal Stanfield, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition, and Henry Lazo, Talent Acquisition Programs Lead at Cboe, shared how implementing Phenom Recruitment Events empowered them to successfully streamline and scale their university recruiting and niche talent events — and ensure their most valuable prospects didn’t get lost in the crowd.

Watch the entire session here, or read on for the highlights!

Hiring Needs & Objectives

Cboe operates in seven countries with 1,700 employees and has been an industry leader for over 50 years. Each year, the company takes part in 40-60 recruitment events, primarily managed by a small, resourceful team. 

“We had a very small team… I think two contract recruiters and a manager. And we were going through five acquisitions at the time. Our hiring plan that year was three times the amount of hiring that we had ever done in Cboe's history,” revealed Stanfield. 

"We knew that we needed technology. We knew that we needed some marketing levers for our business. And we knew that we had to take the large amount of candidates that we were working with and get that funnel down to narrow in on top talent."

As a specialized financial institution, Cboe faced a unique recruitment challenge when attracting technical talent. "Our mission in talent acquisition is to exchange ordinary for extraordinary," said Stanfield. But "Cboe is not a household name. A lot of people that we're trying to attract and recruit are not in the financial services industry. They're software developers.” While Cboe is well-established in the financial services industry, it wasn’t a familiar name to many of the software developers we were aiming to recruit.

This reality inspired the team to develop innovative approaches to showcase their dynamic workplace culture and technical opportunities to software developers and other specialized professionals who might not initially consider a career in financial exchange.

But to accomplish this, Cboe needed all of its systems to work seamlessly together to manage a high volume of candidates and events while ensuring they identified the best talent through a memorable experience for every candidate.

Addressing 3 Key Challenges

The team faced three main challenges:

1. Overwhelming Candidate Volume at Events: "I'm sure everyone here has been to a career fair... it gets a little chaotic, lots of crowds. Usually you end up thinking they must be giving out free Beyonce tickets," Lazo described. Managing these high-volume interactions efficiently required a more sophisticated approach than paper resumes and spreadsheets.
   

2. Technology That Works Together: "When I started at Cboe, we had a career site that was static, actually a novel if you ask me,” explained Stanfield. But that wasn’t all. “We needed all our systems to sync up — from our career site to our CRM and beyond. The goal was to create a seamless flow from the first interaction to offer. Plus, visibility into event performance and ROI was a must-have.”
   

3. Identifying Quality Candidates: After collecting contact information, the team faced a crucial question: 'How do we identify the top talent among everyone who scans that QR code?' Lazo asked. 

Related Case Study: Aspen Dental’s Early Talent Advantage

A Solution That Works

Phenom Recruitment Events addressed each of Cboe's core challenges through key capabilities that transformed their recruitment process.

Digital Registration and Real-Time Candidate Management

The most transformative element was replacing paper resumes with digital registration. "Instead of dealing with stacks of paper resumes, the QR code allows every candidate to quickly submit their information directly to us," Lazo explained.

The QR code captures essential data like work authorization status and graduation dates, creating an instant early talent pipeline in their Phenom Talent CRM. This eliminates logistical challenges and creates immediate visibility into candidates. 

The solution’s mobile app enables recruiters to see candidates register in real-time and capture resume photos directly, while also allowing on-the-go note taking. This allowed Lazo to flag promising candidates with notes like "needs to talk with Jake on the DPM team" directly during conversations.

"In the last couple of years, you used to leave with a stack of 150 resumes, thinking, 'I gotta review these back in the office.' Just think about how that QR code eliminates that," Lazo said.

Enhanced Candidate Nurturing

The technology's power extends beyond the day of the event. For example, at a career fair with 9,000 attendees, Lazo’s team captured 150 registrations and was immediately able to follow up through a dedicated email campaign.

The hyper-personalized emails included open roles with direct application links, allowing the team to track precisely how many of them applied for jobs after the event. Adding booth photos to emails enhanced recognition.

“It's a great way to work on talent engagement and attraction. Maybe they were on the fence when they visited your booth, thinking, 'They're all right, they're cool.' But once they get that campaign email and see pictures, there's a personalization to that they appreciate," Lazo explained.

Automated Tagging and Filtering

Beyond collecting candidate information, the system needed to help identify the best matches. Cboe leveraged Phenom AI Discovery within the CRM to efficiently match a high volume of candidates from events to the right roles.

They could automatically tag candidates by categories like graduation date, creating distinctions between immediate prospects and those for "summer of next year." 

This capability is particularly valuable for Lazo’s one-person team managing campus recruitment. If another department needs "a local intern for the Kansas City area," they can instantly filter by location or specific skills like "C++, Java, certain coding language" from past event attendees.

Key Results

Implementing recruitment technology transformed Cboe's ability to attract, identify, and engage with top talent while providing valuable analytics to guide future strategy. "It's a game changer," said Stanfield.

In 2024 alone, Cboe: 

• Held 34 talent events

• Generated 2,000+ candidates as potential hires through events

• Achieved a >90% attendance rate through QR code check-in adoption

• Hired 26 candidates directly from events
  

Significant improvements to their recruitment process included: 

Enhanced Recruiter Efficiency: The digital transformation allowed a single person to effectively manage campus recruitment across dozens of events — all streamlined through automation. This efficiency enables the team to focus on meaningful candidate interactions rather than administrative paperwork.

Data-Driven Decision Making: Analytics provided clear metrics on event performance, addressing a fundamental leadership concern. "I want to know what the ROI is," explained Stanfield. Now she can. This data-driven approach ensures recruitment resources are allocated to the most productive campus events.

Long-Term Candidate Relationships: Through the CRM, Cboe can track all candidate interactions over time. When someone applies again, "the tag remains on their profile saying they attended one of our events." The team can also leverage tags like NSBE 2025 to source from diversity-focused talent pools months later. Stanfield noted this helps them identify candidates they've met with before, creating continuity in the recruitment relationship.

Implementation Lessons

Successful recruitment technology adoption requires thoughtful planning beyond an events tool itself. Cboe's implementation offers valuable lessons for organizations looking to transform their talent acquisition approach while managing limited resources effectively. Cboe highlighted key insights from their technology adoption:

1. Training Creates Consistency: The team developed a "campus champions" approach where select hiring managers receive training at the beginning of the year. As Stanfield explained, this timing strategy means “Selecting all the campus champions at the beginning of the year so that we don't have to keep training over and over since they're going to multiple universities”. This strategy helps multiple team members represent the company across numerous events.

2. Human Element Remains Critical: While technology multiplies effectiveness, personal connections remain the foundation of successful recruitment. The champions provide the necessary support, creating a team presence that enhances the candidate experience while sharing the workload at busy events.

3. Continuous Evolution Matters: Cboe views its technology implementation as an ongoing journey rather than a completed project. They're currently exploring interview scheduling and automations to further streamline their processes, demonstrating the importance of continuously evaluating and enhancing recruitment systems.
   

For HR professionals facing similar challenges, Cboe's transformation demonstrates how the right technology partner can turn overwhelming recruitment events into strategic advantages. By implementing comprehensive recruitment technology.

Stop struggling with chaotic career fairs. Book a demo of Phenom Recruitment Events today to:

✅ Digitize candidate registration to efficiently manage high-volume events
✅ Implement automated filtering to quickly identify top talent
✅ Enhance post-event nurturing to convert more prospects into applicants
✅ Enable data-driven decision-making for future recruitment planning