Meet Phenom X+ — Generative AI for HR — And 18 Platform Innovations to Transform Hiring, Retention & Development

As businesses shift towards digital transformation, human resource (HR) teams are beginning to look to AI models to aid talent acquisition and talent management. During our Product Innovation Keynote at IAMPHENOM 2023, we announced a new platform-wide generative AI capability: Phenom Experience+ (X+), which boosts HR efficiency by automating tasks for talent stakeholders including candidates, employees, recruiters, managers, HR, and HRIS teams.

During the 2-hour product unveiling, attendees experienced 18 additional platform intelligence and automation innovations that will enhance the way organizations hire, develop, and retain talent today — and for years to come.

Read the official announcement

The Need for Intelligence, Automation, and Experience for HR

The most critical task HR must address is how their companies will empower individuals to transfer their potential into the skills and competencies needed for current and future markets. Every company is on a journey of transformation, and requires intelligence and automation to deliver phenomenal experiences. 

The Role of Generative AI and Automation in Different Jobs

Generative AI and automation are going to have a huge impact on job zones across a wide range of industries well into the future. Job zones are a way to group different types of jobs based on the level of preparation (which can include education, training, and experience) that is typically required to perform them. There are five job zones, ranging from job zone 1, which includes jobs that typically require little to no education or training, to job zone 5, which includes jobs that usually require a high level of education, training, and experience. Job zones help employers and job seekers understand what qualifications are typically required for different types of jobs and can help guide career planning and job training efforts.

Generative AI brings massive upside to improving the way job zones 4 and 5 find their next job, the means through which recruiting teams screen, schedule, interview and hire them — and the role talent management plays in developing and retaining the knowledge workers and information workers within the organization.

For example, it will make it easy for highly personalized, contextually relevant communications to be sent to the right person at the right time without requiring tremendous time or effort. Automation on the other hand brings tremendous advantages to job zones 1 and 2, reducing friction throughout every step of the hiring process to ensure organizations are facilitating a process to attract, engage, and hire for high-volume roles (e.g., hourly and frontline positions) as fast and efficiently as possible. Workflow intelligence enables organizations to fine tune their automations to speed up processes and improve conversion rates.

3 Considerations for AI in the Workplace

AI is transforming the world as we know it — but for us to operate successfully in harmony, AI and humans must coexist. AI-powered technology can solve small, practical, and effective areas, but it needs a human-in-the-loop. To best understand how to leverage this rising technology, organizations must ask themselves a few questions related to three key areas: 

1. Potential: What are the use cases that will make a difference for your organization or industry?

2. People: How will it impact your organizational structure and talent?

3. Policies: What are the guardrails and legal protections you’ll establish?

At Phenom, we’ve also taken these three questions into account when innovating our products. To deliver a better platform, we needed to ensure we had better data, better context, better modeling, better experiences, and better scaling abilities. 

Meet Phenom X+

Phenom X+ is built with the ability to take into account an organization’s specific hiring, retention, and growth needs, leveraging an ensemble of AI models that consists of: a Foundation Model (any Natural Language Understanding [NLU], DeepLearning, or Large Language Model [LLM] such as GPT, Bard, or Cohere), Specialized Model, and Contextual Model. The Specialized and Contextual models draw upon platform data — including vertical, market, job zone, company, team, and user data to personalize, increase precision, and provide a phenomenal experience.

For talent acquisition, Phenom X+ automatically:

• Generates contextually relevant job descriptions based on role requirements, past ideal candidates, and current high-performing employees 

• Auto-generates on-brand content and optimizes discoverability via search (SEO)

• Offers a natural language search experience for candidates

• Highlights best-fit external and internal candidates for any open role

• Writes and personalizes emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages, and campaigns to candidates 

• Schedules, reschedules, and cancels interviews using natural language

• Develops individualized interview questions and guides 

• Publishes comprehensive interview feedback in real time for decision makers 

• Provides hiring teams with interview transcripts, candidate responses, summaries, and actionable insights

• Interprets notes and creates tasks to be completed 

• Analyzes Chatbot questions and generates appropriate responses

• Scales multilingual experiences

• Recommends optimizations to hiring workflows
  
  

(Image: Phenom X+ automatically generates job description)

(Image: Phenom X+ surfaces the latest pipeline for an open role and prompts a recruiter to take action)


For talent management, Phenom X+ automatically:

• Provides performance insights across teams with next steps  

• Identifies succession planning opportunities for high-performing employees 

• Flags employee flight risks and provides prescriptive guidance 

• Detects skills gaps and surfaces upskilling and reskilling opportunities

• Generates personalized emails and campaigns, as well as audience segments to foster development

• Interprets and communicates organizational talent trends and ways to stay on pace

Overall, Phenom X+’s generative AI capability helps HR teams increase productivity and efficiency, while also providing personalized experiences for both candidates and employees. As companies journey through digital transformation, Phenom X+ provides HR teams with the necessary tools to hire, develop, and retain talented employees, making it a must-have for HR teams in any industry.

Register for the Live Event: Experience Phenom X+, Generative AI for Human Resources Demonstration

18 New Intelligent Talent Experience Platform Announcements

In addition to Phenom X+, we also introduced several new intelligence announcements for talent acquisition and talent management. 

Intelligence for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management Teams

Insights for knowledge workers are critical to optimize performance and process. To appropriately address the needs of the modern organization, our latest technology is designed to improve the hiring cycle for candidates, interview process for internal stakeholders, and growth and retention aspirations of talent management and managers:

• Interview Intelligence disrupts the traditional interview process by bringing transparency to hiring teams with recordings, transcriptions, and key takeaways to move the process forward faster and improve decision making. Analysis of interview sentiment, talk speed, talk-to-listen ratio and voice energy are available to inform interview training opportunities and improvements for hiring teams.
  

(Image: Phenom Interview Intelligence serves as a central hub during video interviews, displaying candidate profile details, interview notes, and action items for next steps)

(Image: Phenom Interview Intelligence details specific opportunity areas for improvement and growth among hiring teams, optimizing future interviews and hiring results)

• Candidate Hub is a one-stop-shop that helps candidates understand where they are in the hiring process and prepare for next steps. Taking context into account, it gives exposure to relevant jobs, company information, hiring status, and potential future career pathing opportunities. Candidates can easily schedule and reschedule interviews, and access a digital interview coach that provides them with a preparation checklist.
  
  

• Workforce Intelligence provides talent management teams with context and oversight into talent within their organization to ensure they are appropriately onboarded, retained and developed. A main dashboard provides hiring trends, churn rate, retention risks and high performers. Talent management can further drill down into three key areas: 1) Dynamic role architecture to analyze skills, competencies, and additional contexts to determine which employees are available to upskill or reskill into future roles, and initiate upskilling/reskilling initiatives; 2) Comprehensive employee profiles to identify tenure, performance, growth trajectory, fit for openings and progressions, and options for succession planning; and 3) Skills intelligence to determine where gaps and training needs exist, providing visibility into endorsed skills, self-reported skills, open jobs and roles that require skills, and the learning opportunities, mentors and gig projects available to address gaps. With workforce intelligence at their disposal, Employee Relationship Management enables talent management and people managers to take appropriate action such as initiating an upskilling project to acquire new skills to enhance one’s job performance or career advancements.
  
  

• Succession Planning facilitates growth, development, and movement within the organization, providing a means to plan for the future. It identifies existing employees who are suitable for succession for specific roles, and determines eligibility and readiness based on tenure, performance, skills, competencies, and other relevant signals. This feature makes it easy to add new employees to a succession plan, evaluate which successors have been assigned to specific roles, and move and grow employees in the organization.
  
  

• People Manager provides business leaders with the actionable intelligence they need to build high-performing teams by surfacing an employee’s current sentiment, career growth plans, learning opportunities, recommendations for upskilling/reskilling, and overall talent retention effectiveness. It also simplifies the process of endorsing a direct report’s skills.

Automation for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management Teams
To empower frontline and hourly workers with the ability to reduce friction and connect candidates with jobs faster, foster employee development, and reduce tedious, manual tasks for recruiters, automation is essential. Our latest innovations will support this through:

• Automation Engine, the powerful backend behind phenomenal hiring, growth and retention experiences. It provides the framework and components to identify, build, implement, and monitor automation workflows into new or existing talent lifecycle processes (e.g., hiring, career development, and retention). It includes workflow intelligence for constant monitoring and qualitative analysis of workflow performance and provides recommendations for optimization. Process mining capabilities identify opportunities to optimize further — leading to outcomes such as improved conversion rates and higher volume of hires in less time. 
  

(Image: Phenom Automation Engine highlights all existing automations — designed to eliminate tedious, manual tasks — that can be managed, edited, and updated in a central location)

(Image: Phenom Automation Engine and X+ illuminates opportunities to improve automations and results)

• Talent Companion, which provides an always-on, omnichannel approach to engage candidates throughout the hiring process — facilitating a streamlined application, interview and hiring experience. It provides real-time responses to questions, helps prepare for interviews and shares reminders at the right time to eliminate any guesswork.
  
  

• High-Volume Hiring, which delivers full end-to-end automation of the hiring process, from first interaction to hire. It is designed specifically for industries such as retail, transportation, hospitality, and manufacturing that require a fast and frictionless candidate onboarding experience. Using AI-based workflows, High-Volume Hiring removes redundant processes that can clog the volume hiring pipeline. It also reduces the strain on recruiting teams by automating for high-volume and seasonal staffing surges so they can shift their focus to lengthier knowledge worker hiring cycles.
  
  

• Requisition and Offer Management for High-Volume Hiring, enabling hiring managers to autonomously raise requisitions and extend offers to candidates, accelerating the process of making opportunities available to candidates, while reducing reliance on other stakeholders and decreasing time to hire.
  
  

• Career Pathing for Frontline, which gathers an employee’s experience, tenure and behaviors and surfaces their next best-fit role within their organization. Growth trajectories can be tailored based on an organization’s unique role requirements.
  
  

• Alumni Network, which re-engages former employees to strengthen and maintain positive long-term company relationships. The network can be leveraged from a recruitment perspective to make alumni employees aware of new openings that can bring them back to the company — supporting aspirations to rehire already trained talent and provide potential career advancement opportunities.
  
  

Platform Experience Improvements for HRIS Teams

Phenom designed additional platform enhancements, including: Connector Studio which improves integration with critical third-party applications and technology to improve business performance; Design Studio which provides a no-code framework to easily design high-fidelity career sites; People Analytics that puts data behind every hiring, growth and retention decision; and AI Control Center that enables organizations with controls and configurations to maximize the full potential of intelligence across the platform based on individual preferences and requirements.

(Image: Phenom Connector Studio)

Phenom Service Experience For Improved Global Customer Care

To better support our customers’ evolving needs, we announced a new multi-tiered support model: Phenom Service Experience. By adding more self-service capabilities and a direct line to support, Phenom is accelerating problem resolution and increasing customer satisfaction. Built to provide exceptional support and phenomenal moments, Phenom Service Experience includes: Support Portal, Service Hub, Platform Status Page, Learning Academy, User Community, Global Office Hours, Premium Support Plans, and Managed Services Plans.

For HR, the Time for AI is Now

Now — and for decades ahead — it’s time for intelligence, automation, and experience to rule. When you bring all of this together, the whole HR ecosystem operates much more efficiently and productively so candidates find the right jobs faster, employees grow and evolve, recruiters become wildly productive, managers build stronger-performing teams, HR aligns employee development with company goals, and HRIS creates holistic tech infrastructures.


To learn more about Phenom X+ and the latest innovations, watch our on-demand virtual event: Experience Phenom X+, Generative AI for Human Resources Demonstration.

You're the driver of transformation – Phenom is your co-pilot. Book a demo to see what’s possible.

Disclaimer: This blog post was authored by a hybrid team of generative AI and Phenom Marketing :)