AI in Action: How 5 Major Organizations Are Transforming Recruitment and Talent Management

At a time when artificial intelligence has moved beyond buzz to become a critical business imperative, HR leaders face a pressing question: How do you transform AI's potential into practical, measurable results? As organizations navigate the complexities of AI in talent management and talent acquisition, the gap between promise and practice can feel daunting.

During this year's Phenom AI Day, five industry leaders stepped forward to bridge this divide, sharing candid insights about their journeys from AI adoption to meaningful outcomes.

Among them, healthcare providers struggling with critical staffing shortages and financial institutions managing more efficient sourcing and screening exemplified the unique challenges that required innovative solutions. What emerged is a compelling narrative about AI's role in not just streamlining processes, but in fundamentally transforming how companies connect with, nurture, and ultimately retain talent.

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In This Article

Fox Rehabilitation

Fox Rehabilitation, which provides outpatient services to help older adults live longer, stronger lives in their communities, faces a significant hurdle common in healthcare: "Our biggest challenge is the supply," revealed Christy McCaffrey, Director of Recruitment at Fox. "We are limited in the number of physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech-language pathologists that are available to us, and that demand far out exceeds the supply."

To tackle this challenge head-on, Fox developed a four-pronged strategy leveraging AI:

1. Targeted Messaging: "How do we get in front of the people that we want to work for Fox?" McCaffrey asked, emphasizing the importance of promoting their strong culture and value proposition.

2. Personalized Candidate Experience: Drawing inspiration from consumer platforms like Amazon and Instagram, the team aimed to create a personalized experience that adapts to candidates' interests.

3. Efficient Hiring Process: Fox prioritized making their hiring process as fast and convenient as possible, recognizing that today's candidates expect Amazon-like simplicity.

4. Candidate Rediscovery: The ability to rediscover past candidates and leads was critical so their technology needed to support this goal.

Innovative Solutions Driving Results

Working with Phenom, Fox implemented numerous technological solutions to transform their recruitment process:

AI-powered Chatbot: Their Phenom Chatbot provides personalized guidance based on candidate interests, from professional development opportunities to mentor programs and benefits information.

Video Job Descriptions: Instead of traditional text, Fox showcases their people telling "why they love Fox and what excites them about their job," driving a 4% increase in application rates. A tool like Phenom Video Hub can make the whole process of collecting and publishing employee-generated content seamless. 

Talent CRM: Having a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tool that truly works for them has been a game-changer. "Having spotlights on potential candidates has made a huge impact on our hiring and allows our recruiters to spend time with the candidates we feel we will get the most from," McCaffrey revealed.

High-Value Hiring: With the help of Phenom High-Volume Hiring, which McCaffrey’s team uses for “high-value” hiring, their streamlined application process now takes less than one minute, compared to the previous seven minutes. "It's amazing — you interact with the chatbot, answer a few screening questions, and boom, you're directly scheduled with a recruiter," shared McCaffrey.

The impact of these changes has reached far beyond just improving efficiency. Fox has seen dramatic improvements that directly affect their ability to serve their communities:

• Less than 1-minute application process (down from 7 minutes)

• 295% increase in job applications

• Nearly 800 hours of recruiter time saved in under 5 months

• Enhanced candidate engagement through automated nurture campaigns

• Improved ability to rediscover and engage past candidates

Related: High-Volume Hiring Playbook: Strategy and Action for Modern Workforce Challenges

McCaffrey emphasizes continuous improvement: "We continue to refine and make sure that we have the answers that we know people are asking for." This commitment to creating an engaging, personalized, and efficient recruitment process has positioned Fox to better attract and retain the healthcare professionals they need to fulfill their mission of helping older adults thrive.

Regions Bank

When Tony Howard, Senior Vice President of HR Technology at Regions Bank, looks at the state of modern recruiting, he sees both opportunity and complexity. "In our fast-paced recruiting environment, one of the hardest things to do is go through all of the data in your workflows to identify opportunities for improvement," Howard explained. His team has embraced AI in talent management to transform their recruiting processes and overcome these evolving challenges.

Tackling the Speed vs. Quality Challenge

Their journey began with a fundamental question: How do you effectively screen hundreds of candidates when modern application processes take just minutes to complete? For Regions, the answer lay in leveraging AI across multiple dimensions of their recruiting workflow.

"AI has been a large help in not only analyzing our data, but also finding inconsistencies and highlighting areas for improvement," Howard shared. This data-driven approach has allowed Regions to:

• Efficiently screen high volumes of applicants to identify candidates with the right skills

• Mine historical data to rediscover qualified candidates for hard-to-fill roles

• Compare candidate profiles against job requirements with enhanced accuracy

• Draft personalized responses to candidate inquiries quickly

Learn more about Regions' journey with Phenom

AI-Powered Solutions Driving Results

In particular, the combination of leveraging their Phenom Career Site, Talent CRM, and X+ generative AI has been particularly noteworthy for specialized positions. 

Rather than starting from scratch each time a role opens, Regions can identify previous candidates who progressed far in similar searches. "This gives us a starting point to make those hard-to-fill roles a more efficient recruiting process," Howard explained.

The AI assists in drafting candidate responses while allowing recruiters to add their personal touch. "It gives them a start where they are able to use those tools to speak to candidates in a quick and efficient manner," Howard noted. "In recruiting, that quick turnaround of communication is really important to make sure you're landing the right talent."

Howard, who’s enthusiastic about the AI features they've implemented so far, welcomes more opportunities to embed these technologies in their processes. The goal is twofold: "Making sure we're getting the best talent for Regions Bank, but also making sure our processes are efficient for our recruiters and also a great experience for our candidates."

Franciscan Health

Ellen Page, Director of Talent Acquisition for Franciscan Health, one of the largest Catholic healthcare systems in the Midwest, shared her organization's transformative journey in revamping their recruitment strategy.

Following a new ATS implementation, Franciscan found itself at a critical juncture. "The world was upside down in everything we knew and we were broken," Page candidly admitted. They needed to overhaul their hiring process before attempting any innovative strategies.

Recognizing that "the candidate experience has taken center stage," Franciscan focused on creating a positive journey for applicants with clear communication and engagement throughout the hiring process. Their strategic implementation included:

AI-Driven Career Site: Developed an intuitive career site to meet candidate needs
24/7 Chatbot: Implemented a chatbot to help candidates navigate through 2,700 job openings
Enhanced Communication: Improved engagement with both current applicants and passive candidates through their Talent CRM
One-Way Interviews: Significantly reduced screening time for recruiters, particularly impacting their internal travel program's high-volume hiring

The impact of their efforts? Pretty amazing:

• Net Promoter Score increased from 64 to 78

• Open positions reduced by 44% (from 2,700 to 1,500)

• RN openings decreased by 58% over 90 days

• Time to fill reduced from 72 days to 59 days

• Hiring over 400 new Franciscan coworkers every month in 2024

• 2,000+ new coworkers hired through the chatbot alone

Moving forward, Franciscan is exploring video applications through their chatbot and expanding their successful one-way interviewing tool to other service lines.

Check out Franciscan Health's full case study here

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield

Tim Lippincott, Vice President of People Strategy at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, is transforming how organizations approach AI in talent management through a pioneering focus on internal mobility and development.

Coming out of the pandemic and amid the "Great Resignation," Excellus faced critical challenges:

• A mandate to hire nearly 1,500 people over three years

• The need to retain and develop newly acquired talent

• Growing employee demand for internal career advancement opportunities

Recognizing that effective AI in talent management starts with understanding your existing workforce, Excellus developed a comprehensive strategy focused on making internal mobility a cornerstone of their employee value proposition.

Building a Skills-First Future

Through Phenom's Talent Marketplace, Excellus created detailed talent profiles for their entire workforce. "We now have a sense of the skills that our employees are bringing, whether they've been here 25 years or whether they've been here for five days," Lippincott explained.

Their internal sourcing platform matches employee skills with opportunities, enabling better talent mobility. "We want people to find many jobs," Lippincott shared. "We just want those changes to happen inside these four walls at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield."

The organization is now focused on a comprehensive skills validation process and launching these initiatives to all employees. "What we're seeing is a tremendous leader response," Lippincott noted. "Career growth and development is part of our value proposition, and we're seeing some initial great responses from our work."

Related: The ROI on This Fortune 500 Company’s Skills-Forward, Employee-First Business Model

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

For Sadie Bell, Vice President of Innovation and Deployment of People, Systems, Digital Experience and Intelligence at HPE, implementing AI in talent management requires a delicate balance between innovation and responsibility. "AI is for good. AI is for everyone, but not everything," Bell emphasized.

As industry leaders in AI responsibility, HPE has established comprehensive oversight through their AI Ethics and Responsibility Council, which "starts at the top of the House and permeates throughout the entire organization."

HPE's approach focuses on several key areas:

• Performance Management: AI gathers information "at the edge" to provide managers with better insights for evaluating and enabling high-performing teams

• Employee Engagement: Creating psychologically safe spaces where people can interact with technology that can "think, remember, forget, and process information"

• Learning & Development: Meeting learners exactly where they are and accelerating their growth through AI-enhanced pathways

"Across the hire-to-retire lifecycle, HR is going to be and is one of the greatest beneficiaries of artificial intelligence," Bell shared. "Our focus in human resources is on the human and the people."

Maintaining Human-Centered Innovation

HPE's commitment to ethical AI implementation includes:

• Ensuring human oversight in all AI processes

• Producing trustworthy AI that's vetted and validated

• Actively reducing rather than proliferating bias

• Protecting data privacy and maintaining algorithmic transparency

• Regular audits and stakeholder engagement

"It will challenge, but most importantly, it will change the way people live and work," Bell noted. "We want to make sure it doesn't do so in a way that is harmful to humans or challenges human rights."

Through their partnership with Phenom, HPE continues to demonstrate how organizations can harness AI's power while maintaining the highest ethical standards. "I couldn't be more ecstatic and excited about what AI is doing for HR today," she shared.

To see how other companies are benefitting from AI, check out all of our customer stories!