Highlights From Industry Week 2025: Trends, Challenges & Solutions

From July 28 to August 1, HR professionals across Retail, Hospitality & Travel, Healthcare, Financial Services, and Manufacturing are coming together for a week of powerful conversations, actionable strategies, and real-world solutions designed to solve the most pressing talent challenges in each industry.

Every session delivers bite-sized expertise with big-picture impact — from rethinking seasonal hiring as a strategic advantage to using AI and automation to balance compliance, service, and efficiency at scale.

Below, we’re capturing the most valuable takeaways and trends from each session as they happen. Read on for expert insights and practical strategies you can start applying today to attract, hire, and retain top talent in your industry.

Retail Day

The retail industry has transformed more in the past 5 years than in the previous 50, with e-commerce now making up nearly 25% of all sales. and the industry’s talent challenges only continue to intensify: 

• Turnover rates are averaging 60–70% — with some segments seeing over 100% 

• Increasing competition from gig platforms that hire on the spot

• Hiring surges overwhelm teams during new store openings and seasonal peaks

Hear from Bryan Brazil, Talent Acquisition Manager at Rally House, and Jordan Applegate, VP of Talent Acquisition & HRBP at Sweetwater Sound, to learn how modern retail TA teams are using automation, intelligence, and new workflows to connect with top talent faster, highlight potential career growth paths, and support store managers without losing control at the corporate level.

6 Key Takeaways from Retail Day

• Create consumer-grade candidate experiences. Rally House realized that every hiring interaction is an opportunity to share what sets their brand apart from the competition. They use Phenom Campaigns to automate personalized outreach with team logos and local messaging rather than generic job alerts, ensuring consistent brand messaging across all talent touchpoints. Sweetwater Sound is also focusing on making automated communications feel human-written rather than bot-generated. Think about personalization at scale but back it up with a solid strategy so every candidate interaction matches the quality experience your customers expect.

• Build proactive talent pipelines using intelligent automation. Sweetwater Sound moved from reactive hiring to continuous talent pipeline building by creating automated hiring workflows within their Phenom Talent CRM that trigger based on candidate actions. They tailored each hiring status to align with their recruiters, so that as candidates went through the hiring journey, the personal touch would not be lost. This approach saved them hundreds of hours a month on interview scheduling alone — when someone applies, moves through screening or changes status, the system automatically takes the next step. This allows their teams to engage top talent consistently rather than scramble to build talent pools when positions open.

• Match gig economy speed using self-service hiring tools. Rally House implemented the Phenom Hiring Assistant chatbot, which utilizes automation to qualify talent, and move them along to next steps of the hiring process. The Phenom Hiring Assistant chatbot supported Rally House’s expansion from 140 to 300 stores in just two years while cutting back on the number of emails that their recruiters manage day to day. Their store managers now have pools of qualified candidates that are ready to hire on the spot. Overall, the lesson learned from Rally House is that your hiring speeds need to compete with gig platforms like Uber that offer immediate earning potential.

• Design complete mobile hiring journeys, not just mobile-friendly pages. With over 70% of retail applications now coming from mobile devices, Phenom Talent Companion Agent enables candidates to go from job discovery through interview scheduling in under 8 minutes on mobile — addressing the reality that 68% of candidates abandon career sites within 30 seconds. This requires rethinking your entire process flow for mobile navigation and conversational interactions, not just making your desktop site mobile responsive.

• Use alumni networks and re-engagement campaigns for sustainable hiring. Instead of building your talent pipeline from the ground up each time, successful retailers easily maintain warm relationships with former employees through convenient alumni networks and targeted re-engagement campaigns. These pre-qualified candidates already know your culture and processes, making them faster to onboard and more likely to succeed when they return for seasonal work or new opportunities.

• Transform recruiters into strategic advisors using AI-powered tools. Sweetwater Sound's approach demonstrates how intelligent automation handles repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and hiring status updates, freeing recruiters to focus more of their time on targeted sourcing and relationship building. Rally House uses Phenom Fit Score and campaign tools to help recruiters spend time on the right candidates rather than processing every application manually. The technology doesn't replace recruiters — it makes them more strategic.

Hospitality & Travel Day

The hospitality industry employs over 15 million people in the US and experiences significant HR challenges, such as high employee turnover rates, balancing automation with human connection, and navigating complex workforce tensions. As organizations grapple with competing priorities — from personalization versus standardization to outputs versus outcomes — the opportunity lies in finding strategic balance while leveraging technology to unlock business performance and human potential.

To uncover the most impactful insights, we spoke with Frances Symes, Senior Manager of Workforce Transformation at Deloitte Consulting LLP, who shared insights from their 2025 Global Human Capital Trendsresearch involving over 13,000 global participants, and Rachel McHugh, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Sonesta International Hotels, who demonstrated practical applications of AI-powered hiring transformation across 1,100 properties. Here are the top insights and strategies they recommend to navigate workforce tensions and accelerate hiring without sacrificing the candidate experience.

6 Key Takeaways from Hospitality & Travel Day

• Reclaim capacity by eliminating work that doesn't drive value. Technology promises efficiency, but often creates digital busy work instead, leaving 41% of daily activities contributing no organizational value. Hospitality leaders must collaborate with workers to identify which tasks can be automated, simplified, or eliminated. Smart hotels are implementing AI-powered concierges that handle routine guest inquiries about amenities and local attractions, freeing human staff to focus on complex guest needs and relationship building. The goal is creating "slack" — unscheduled time that workers can use autonomously to think, problem-solve, and add genuine value rather than staying perpetually busy with low-impact activities. 

• Bridge the experience gap through skills-based hiring. With 66% of leaders reporting recent hires weren't fully prepared, and most entry-level roles now requiring 2-5 years of experience, organizations must shift from traditional experience metrics to skills-based assessments. Forward-thinking hospitality companies are implementing apprenticeship models that combine online learning with hands-on training, creating clear advancement pathways based on demonstrated skills rather than tenure. Phenom High-Volume Hiring solutions can help identify transferable capabilities while providing personalized candidate experiences by layering in pre-hire assessments that assess both soft people skills and situational awareness, and qualify the essential skills necessary to perform the role. Today, hiring automations that utilize pre-hire assessments are moving past traditional text-based interaction to agentic voice applications. For example, think of a frontline valet role where a Voice Agent allows you to conversationally layer in conversational knock-out questions like “Do you have a valid driver's licence?” — or even “How would you handle a situation where a customer notices a scratch on their car following you parking it?”

• Personalize motivation strategies to unlock performance. Understanding what drives each worker is as important as knowing your customers, yet only 33% of employees believe leadership understands their motivations. This disconnect often stems from standardized approaches to benefits and top-down control rather than personalized empowerment. Hospitality organizations must think beyond extrinsic motivators like compensation and recognition to tap into intrinsic drivers such as meaningful connections, helping others, and opportunities for innovation. The emotional experience workers have on the job — whether they feel excitement or hope versus fear, stress, or embarrassment facing new challenges — directly impacts their motivation and performance. Large hotel companies are introducing associate well-being programs that offer personalized tools and resources for physical and mental health, building cultures of trust while providing choices that workers can customize to support their individual needs. 

• Automate repetitive tasks to reclaim recruiter capacity. Sonesta's decentralized model means HR directors and general managers handle recruitment alongside countless other responsibilities, from employee relations to compliance. The company built over 500 automations using Phenom Automation Engine, with their most impactful being application drop-off reminders — simple nudges that help candidates complete applications they started but abandoned. Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling capabilities alone saved approximately 1,000 hours by scheduling 4,000 interviews without manual calendar coordination. This tool allows smaller teams to focus on relationship-building rather than administrative tasks, while their chatbot "Toni" engages with 145,000 prospective applicants using pre-programmed responses to 750 common questions.

Related: What is an Automated Interview Scheduling Tool and What Are the Benefits?

• Leverage AI to expand talent pools beyond traditional sourcing. Sonesta generated 85,000 unique leads through leveraging a combination of tools including Phenom Career Site, Talent CRM, and Campaigns — this allowed them to not only continue building passive talent pools, but also gave them an avenue to proactively engage prospective candidates they previously had no way to reach through traditional job board postings or manual sourcing efforts. Phenom Fit Score capabilities help match quality candidates to appropriate roles, resulting in a 27% increase in conversion rates from application to interview. This means hiring managers see better-matched candidates rather than sorting through hundreds of unqualified applicants. Additionally, alumni groups are a great way to maintain relationships with former employees through personalized campaigns that highlight their past contributions and current opportunities, creating a valuable boomerang talent pipeline for roles like front desk staff and flight attendants.

• Build targeted campaigns for high-turnover roles. After analyzing their biggest pain points, Sonesta leveraged Phenom Campaigns to target five critical areas: housekeeping, front of house, sales, hotel management, and maintenance/engineering. These campaigns nearly doubled their talent pool size within six months while maintaining authentic engagement through quarterly newsletters focused on brand storytelling rather than aggressive job pushing. Phenom Talent CRM functionality enables them to access all their data in one place so that they can consistently nurture these talent pools, striking a balance between local hiring needs and centralized support. In addition, their career site traffic increased by 160% after implementation, with visitors spending over three minutes on the site — 52% higher than the industry average.

Healthcare Day

Healthcare is one of the largest and most complex industries in the world, employing over 22 million people in the U.S. alone. With a growing demand for talent across clinical and non-clinical roles, HR teams in healthcare are under immense pressure to fill critical roles quickly, maintain compliance, and reduce burnout — all while delivering a human-first experience. 

On Healthcare Day, we heard from Amy DiMichele-Donsky, Director of Talent Acquisition Operations at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Yvette Hansen, Director, Talent Acquisition & Belonging at Baylor Scott & White Health (BSW), who shared how their teams are leveraging AI and automation to navigate these challenges and scale their mission-driven recruiting strategy.

5 Key Takeaways from Healthcare Day

• Implement scalable processes instead of hiring more recruiters. As demand continues to outpace resources, healthcare systems must build repeatable, tech-enabled workflows instead of simply hiring more recruiters. CHOP, which supports nearly 30,000 employees, leaned into automation and CRM-led sourcing to expand capacity. “We can’t always say, ‘let’s hire five more recruiters.’ We need scalable, repeatable systems,” stated DiMichele-Donsky. Both CHOP and BSW are using a variety of AI-powered tools to reduce manual tasks, freeing up teams to focus on high-value engagement.

• Pilot new AI tools through beta testing programs. BSW is an avid supporter of beta testing new technologies as a mutually beneficial way to implement the newest available solutions while partnering with a tech vendor to provide feedback on areas of improvement. “Fast Track,” BSW’s first pilot program went so well last year that they decided to beta test a Voice Agent this year to support their hiring needs. "I think what we learned was not to take anything for granted…It’s not fully built; we’re testing to see what we can break,” commented Hansen. The results? Real-time software updates, consistent communication with vendor development teams, and 1,800 voice agent invitations to interview sent with an 85% completion rate. 

• Speak to all roles through effective employer branding. Healthcare organizations are increasingly competing for non-clinical talent — from IT to facilities managers. CHOP realized their brand narrative had become too narrowly focused on clinical care, and BSW echoed the need to make employer value clear for every role type. To help do this at scale, both organizations recommend using personalized, segmented campaigns to reach out to each talent audience. Make sure all candidates see themselves in your mission, not just those on the front line. After all, these employees can’t do their jobs effectively without the right people in place behind the scenes. 

• Prioritize digital follow-up for hiring events and early talent. In-person outreach isn’t enough, especially to quickly and sustainably build and engage  nursing and early career pipelines. BSW and CHOP have both shifted to digitally enabled event strategies with automated follow-up, talent pooling, and timely personalized communications post-event. With integrated workflows and intelligent automation, event attendees can automatically get segmented in the CRM for immediate outreach and even use generative AI to get their messages started. By investing in tools that connect events, CRM, and candidate marketing in real time, you can avoid spreadsheet chaos and prevent qualified talent from slipping through your fingers to competitors. 

• Strengthen hiring accountability through data & transparency. Both organizations emphasized the importance of visibility in the talent funnel. By centralizing candidate data and surfacing insights, CHOP holds hiring teams accountable for follow-through and speed. DiMichele-Donsky commented, “we had no control over how quickly managers moved people forward — or even how they moved people forward. That changed with transparency.” Now, teams can readily see potential areas for improvement, ensuring they invest time, energy, and resources into the right places  to solve those specific pain points. Having this vital information will also help you track KPIs like time to fill, drop-off points, and hiring manager responsiveness, then use that data to coach stakeholders and improve.

Financial Services Day

Financial services firms are in a battle for talent — not just with each other, but with fintech and tech companies that hire faster, offer hybrid models, and promise cutting-edge work. Banks and insurers are now under pressure to deliver modern candidate experiences that balance three priorities: speed, security, and compliance. 

Hear from Ryan King, EVP, Head of Talent Acquisition at Regions Bank, and Alicia Garbarino, Global Director, Talent Acquisition Excellence at Manulife, about how their organizations are leveraging AI, automation, and intelligence to secure faster hiring processes, prevent fraud, and build future-ready workforces. 

5 Key Takeaways from Financial Services Day

• Close the time-to-fill gap with accelerated hiring experiences. Regions Bank described how manual scheduling, slow compliance checks, and disconnected tools previously caused top candidates to leave before an offer was made. By automating these repetitive steps with Phenom Automation Engine and Talent CRM, recruiters cut weeks of admin work down to hours and now meet candidate expectations for quick, clear communication. These tools successfully speed up the process while upholding security protocols and company culture, ensuring Regions Bank remains competitive and compliant. 

• Turn skills data into a competitive advantage. Manulife is using Phenom Fit Score (a tool powered by X+ Ontologies’ ability to unify and simplify fragmented HR data) to gain a clearer picture of potential candidate capabilities across regions. But skills data isn’t just for talent acquisition; skills are for the entire organization to manage and develop human capital intelligently. In fact, to show the full power of skills intelligence for your organization and what this could look like in practice, Phenom illustrated how its' skills ontologies mapped 7,000 roles, surfaced 25 skills per role, and revealed career paths for 19,000 employees for one organization. These kinds of insights — which expose hidden talent and make future skills gaps visible — are the foundation for Manulife’s shift from reactive hiring to long-term workforce planning. Without this connected view of skills, qualified talent remains hidden, and teams end up filling gaps only after they appear.

• Protect your hiring process from fraud and impersonation. With AI-enabled tools at everyone’s fingertips, deciphering a candidate’s skills versus their proficiency with AI prompting can be challenging. That’s where Phenom AI Agents come into play. The Integrity Detection Agent helps identify which candidates are using AI-generated responses or switching identities between assessments and interviews. Financial institutions are using these tools to flag inconsistencies, confirm candidate authenticity, and ensure that those who join actually have the skills and integrity needed for open roles — especially those dealing with sensitive information.

• Expand your reach with smarter, faster sourcing. In financial services, top talent moves in days, not weeks. This is where Phenom’s LinkedIn CRM Connect Integration can come in handy — empowering TA teams to manage the entire sourcing and engagement workflow seamlessly between the Phenom Talent CRM and LinkedIn Recruiter. Users can easily pull in past applicants, employee referrals, and even event leads as soon as a position becomes available. This way, recruiters spend less time cold-sourcing and more time engaging the right candidates before competitors reach them.

• Build a global, connected TA engine that plans ahead. Manulife leverages Phenom to unify hiring across North America, Europe, and Asia, breaking free from a reactive, requisition-by-requisition approach. With one system capturing talent pipelines and skills data, their teams can anticipate needs, support expansion into new markets, and ensure the right talent is ready before roles even open — a shift from firefighting to long-range workforce planning.

Manufacturing Day

Manufacturing is one of the most critical industries driving global economic growth, employing millions of people across diverse sectors from aerospace and automotive to food processing and waste management. With increasing competition for skilled talent, uncertainty due to tariffs, complex global operations, and the need to attract workers to specialized roles that often lack widespread recognition, HR teams in manufacturing face unique challenges in building sustainable talent pipelines while managing high-volume hiring demands and multilingual workforces.

On Manufacturing Day, we heard from Laetitia Nacod, EMEA Talent Acquisition Leader at PPG, Alyssa Price, Talent Project Manager at Waste Connections, and Brandon Shepard, Sr. Talent Acquisition Manager from Clemens Food Group, who shared how their teams are leveraging AI and automation to transform reactive hiring processes into proactive talent strategies while maintaining the human connection essential to manufacturing success.

6 Key Takeaways from Manufacturing Day

• Transform reactive hiring into proactive talent pipeline building: Manufacturing companies face unique challenges with niche skill requirements and low brand recognition, making reactive job postings insufficient for attracting qualified candidates. PPG recognized that most qualified manufacturing talent isn't actively job searching, requiring a fundamental shift in strategy. Using Phenom's Career Site and Talent CRM capabilities, PPG created ongoing conversations with potential candidates rather than waiting for immediate hiring needs. "We wanted to be ahead of the need. We wanted to support the business efficiently," explained Nacod. Their talent community became more than a candidate pipeline —  it gave them a way to have a continuous conversation showcasing company evolution and providing an open window for people interested today or in the future. Programmatic advertising also helped reach passive candidates where they spend time, including unexpected channels like Waze for location-specific targeting, while automated campaigns maintained engagement across different regions and specializations without manual intervention.

• Implement step-by-step automation to enable recruiters to focus on high-value activities: Rather than attempting massive transformation overnight, PPG adopted a conservative, pilot-first approach that began with Automated Interview Scheduling. The scheduling solution, initially piloted in the Americas, proved so transformative that the company expanded it worldwide. The automation eliminated time-consuming calendar coordination, allowing recruiters to focus on selection and relationship building, where they add irreplaceable value. Text-to-apply functionality also helped PPG meet frontline workers in their preferred communication style, while AI-powered job descriptions ensured PPG could speak differently to aerospace candidates versus architectural coatings prospects. "The more you automate on non-added-value tasks, the more you can have added value on things where your talent acquisition partners are irreplaceable," noted Nacod. Phenom's workflow automations handled the administrative burden, freeing PPG's teams for strategic candidate engagement and selection decisions.

Related: 5 Examples of Companies that Transformed Hiring With Automated Interview Scheduling Assistants

• Replace fragmented systems with unified AI-powered sourcing: Manufacturing and transportation companies often struggle with cobbled-together technology stacks that create poor candidate experiences and missed opportunities. Waste Connections discovered they had over 30,000 people in their talent community who had never been contacted beyond their initial interest —  a massive missed opportunity that revealed the limitations of their previous ATS. "Those are people who said, 'Hey, I might be interested in you.' But because we didn't have a tool that was citing and putting it in a place that we could then take a second action off of, we didn't know what we were doing," explained Price. Using Phenom X+  Source and fit score capabilities, Waste Connections transformed its approach to pattern matching and predictive candidate identification. Tags in the Talent CRM allowed recruiters to create their search methodologies, giving them the power to organize silver medalists and warm leads for future outreach rather than restarting recruitment processes from scratch every time.

• Automate administrative tasks to maximize human interaction time with hard-to-reach frontline workers: Manufacturing and transportation workers present unique engagement challenges — they're often driving vehicles, operating forklifts, or working in environments where recruiters might only have 45 minutes during lunch breaks to make meaningful connections. Waste Connections prioritized automating repetitive tasks so recruiters could focus on relationship building and market expertise development. “We become subject matter experts by interacting with people,” noted Price. “And if you're spending most of your time clicking buttons, that's time away from what you could be spending putting a great branding message together.” Using Phenom's X+ generative AI eliminated time-consuming notetaking and candidate summaries, while automated scheduling replaced lengthy email chains with 30-second coordination. The automation strategy enabled recruiters to spend more time at events and locations where frontline workers gather.

• Digitize manual processes into intelligent sourcing systems: Organizations stuck in manual workflows discover they’re missing critical talent opportunities and creating unnecessary operational burden. Clemens Food Group successfully transitioned from an entirely paper-based system that required up to 25 pages per candidate — from walk-in sign-ins and handwritten resumes to interview notes stored in filing cabinets. Their previous ATS had functioned merely as a candidate repository where people applied and disappeared, forcing recruiters to start completely new searches for every open position. By implementing intelligent sourcing, the company transformed their approach to surface qualified candidates within 24 hours of opening a requisition. The system identified silver medalists and skill-matched candidates who had been overlooked, enabling strategic talent planning and forecasting for evergreen roles rather than reactive hiring cycles. Nudge campaigns and incomplete application automation captured candidates who had started but didn't finish applications — recovering a previously invisible loss of potential talent.

• Shift from transactional recruiting to strategic business partnership: Traditional recruitment models often position HR teams as order-takers rather than strategic advisors, particularly challenging when managing multilingual workforces and rural locations. Clemens Food Group leveraged multiple AI tools, including Phenom and custom solutions for job advertisements, to enable faster market response and deeper collaboration with hiring managers. This technology-enabled approach recently created additional hiring opportunities when intelligent sourcing surfaced silver medalists who prompted hiring managers to open new positions and hire immediately. The transformation allowed recruiters to sit "beside" hiring managers at the table rather than across from them as vendors. Automation enabled the team to manage multiple conversations simultaneously, handling internal surveys, candidate engagement, and strategic planning while hiring managers focused on their core responsibilities, demonstrating how AI enhanced human communication and decision-making capabilities.

Wrapping Up a Week of Industry Insights

From retail to manufacturing — and every industry in between — Industry Week proved that the future of talent acquisition is here, and it’s powered by the right blend of people, process, and technology. The strategies shared are already transforming hiring teams into strategic partners who can move faster, engage deeper, and deliver measurable business impact.

Catch the full replay on demand to hear every insight, see real-world examples in action, and get inspired to take your own talent strategy to the next level.