Agentic Search in HR: How Phenom Uses AI Agents Across the Talent Lifecycle

This shift does not lead to a single, generic search experience. It leads to distinct search capabilities, each designed around a specific HR role and outcome, supported by Phenom’s broader approach to artificial intelligence across the talent lifecycle.

Let’s look at how this approach shows up across four search experiences within the Phenom Applied AI Platform.

1. Phenom Candidate Concierge Agent: Job Discovery on the Career Site

Most career site search experiences still expect candidates to know the right phrasing before meaningful results appear. When job titles vary across teams or requirements are described differently, relevant roles stay hidden, and results feel noisy. Qualified candidates disengage early, not because the roles are wrong, but because the search experience fails to understand their intent.

The Candidate Concierge Agent addresses this by enabling agentic search for job discovery directly on the Phenom career site. Instead of relying on exact keywords, candidates can describe what they are looking for in natural language, including preferences, constraints, and experience. The system interprets that intent and evaluates it against the full context of open roles.

This understanding is powered by AI and ontologies that model relationships between job titles, skills, locations, and requirements. Rather than treating roles as isolated listings, the search experience recognizes adjacent opportunities and transferable skills, even when phrasing does not align exactly. As candidates interact with results, engagement signals such as clicks, views, and applies continuously refine relevance, allowing rankings to adjust within the session.

This approach improves candidate discovery by:

• Supporting natural language searches that reflect real constraints and preferences

• Reducing dependence on exact job titles and phrasing

• Surfacing relevant and adjacent roles earlier in the journey

• Refining results based on candidate engagement signals

• Improving apply conversion by establishing relevance before the application starts

2. Phenom X+ Bot: A Recruiting Co-pilot for Faster Decisions

Recruiting decisions often stall not because information is missing, but because it is fragmented. Understanding why a role is stalled, which candidates need attention, or how someone has progressed typically requires stopping work to assemble context.

The Phenom X+ Bot is a recruiter-facing assistant within the CRM that helps teams make faster hiring decisions. Through its “Ask Anything” capability, recruiters can ask questions in natural language and receive immediate, contextual answers from their existing talent data.

“Ask Anything” supports recruiters when they need clarity across jobs, candidates, interviews, and pipeline activity. Instead of navigating multiple views or validating data manually, recruiters can quickly understand what is happening directly within the CRM.

The X+ Bot removes that friction by bringing hiring signals together, reasoning across them, and synthesizing insight before presenting a response. It summarizes candidate profiles, highlights pipeline status, and surfaces what matters most in the moment. The focus is decision readiness, not reporting.

Recruiters can see what needs attention and take action while conversations with candidates and hiring managers are still active.

This approach helps recruiters operate with greater speed by:

• Making hiring status visible when decisions are required

• Reducing delays caused by manual validation

• Supporting faster alignment with hiring managers

• Helping recruiters prioritize where to focus

• Keeping recruiting work moving instead of stopping for analysis

3. HR Enterprise Search (X+ Bot): Trusted Workforce Answers

HR data is fragmented and sensitive by necessity. Policies, performance records, learning history, employee profiles, and internal documents live across multiple systems for good reason. When questions span those boundaries, the risk is not just inefficiency, but inconsistency. Incomplete or misapplied answers can erode trust, create compliance issues, or lead to decisions based on partial context.

HR Enterprise Search, delivered through the X+ Bot in Phenom Employee Relationship Management (ERM), is designed to support everyday moments when employees, managers, and HR teams need reliable answers to workforce questions. It is used for scenarios such as preparing for performance reviews, understanding workplace policies, navigating benefits and learning programs, and supporting onboarding or internal transitions.

The X+ Bot addresses these challenges by grounding every response in context and governance. It interprets each question based on who is asking, what they are authorized to see, and how the information will be used. Data is retrieved from the appropriate HR systems, permissions are applied automatically, and sensitive information is protected by design. For complex or high-impact queries, built-in oversight helps maintain accuracy and accountability.

This creates a more dependable HR environment by:

• Delivering role- and permission-aware answers across HR systems

• Reducing the risk of misinformation or inappropriate visibility

• Supporting complex HR questions with accuracy and context

• Reinforcing compliance through built-in oversight

• Strengthening confidence in self-service for employees and managers

4. Phenom Executive Search Agent: High-Stakes Leadership Hiring

Executive hiring presents a distinct challenge. These roles are confidential, highly specialized, and often critical to an organization’s direction. Qualified candidates are rarely active applicants, and traditional sourcing approaches struggle to assess leadership impact, scope, and fit. Titles alone mask major differences in responsibility and influence, forcing recruiters to spend significant time manually researching and validating candidates before they can move forward with confidence.

The Phenom Executive Search Agent, delivered through Phenom Talent CRM, is designed to address this challenge by applying agentic reasoning to leadership hiring. Instead of relying on title-based matching, it helps recruiters evaluate candidates based on context, impact, and trajectory, reducing uncertainty in high-stakes decisions.

Executive search begins with structured role intake and stakeholder calibration to define what success looks like for the role. From there, it maps relevant markets, identifies potential candidates beyond inbound channels, and evaluates profiles using a combination of structured indicators and unstructured insight. Research, enrichment, and prioritization are coordinated within a single capability, allowing recruiters to focus on judgment and engagement rather than manual investigation.

Watch the demo for executive search agent here.

This approach supports executive hiring by:

• Identifying high-fit leaders beyond active applicant pools

• Evaluating context, impact, and trajectory rather than relying on titles alone

• Reducing manual research through automated enrichment and synthesis

• Producing clearer, defensible shortlists aligned to role expectations

• Supporting personalized outreach with visibility into engagement

The Benefits of Intelligent, Purpose-Built Search Across HR

When search is designed around real HR decisions, the value compounds across the talent lifecycle:

• Higher-quality candidate pipelines: Candidates discover roles that reflect their skills and constraints earlier, leading to stronger intent and fewer misaligned applications

• Faster, more confident recruiting decisions: Recruiters spend less time assembling data and more time acting on insight, improving prioritization, collaboration, and time-to-hire

• Reduced friction for employees and managers: Trusted, role-appropriate answers are easier to find, cutting down on system hopping and routine HR support requests

• Stronger executive and leadership hiring outcomes: Leadership search moves beyond title matching to surface candidates aligned on context, impact, and expectations, reducing risk in high-stakes roles

• Consistent experiences across HR touchpoints: Search behaves predictably because it understands intent, permissions, and outcomes, building trust across the organization

• Intelligence that improves over time: As search learns from real behavior and decisions, relevance compounds instead of spreading across systems and workflows

From Searching to Understanding

Search touches every part of the HR lifecycle, yet it has long been treated as a basic utility. As talent work becomes more complex, that approach no longer holds.

Phenom takes a different path by designing search as an intelligence layer that adapts to people, roles, and decisions. Each search experience is purpose-built for its audience, but all are grounded in a shared understanding of context and intent. The result is not just faster access to information, but clearer insight at the moments that matter.

When systems understand how people ask questions and why those questions matter, search stops being a bottleneck. It becomes a way to move forward with confidence, whether someone is exploring their next role, hiring at scale, supporting employees, or making leadership decisions.

That shift from searching to understanding is what defines modern talent experiences, and it is how Phenom helps organizations connect people to the right opportunities, decisions, and outcomes across the entire HR journey.

Request a demo to see how search within Phenom X+ Agents works throughout the talent lifecycle.