Maximizing Your Talent Tech Ecosystem: How Sleep Number Unifies Workday and Phenom

Having the right talent technology ecosystem has become essential for organizations seeking to attract and convert qualified candidates efficiently. Companies with complex hiring needs are discovering that seamless integration between their core systems can dramatically improve both candidate experience and recruiter effectiveness.

Sleep Number Corporation's recent transformation of their Workday-based recruitment system with Phenom's AI-powered experience offers a compelling case study in tech stack optimization. 

Mick Joneja, Senior Director of Workforce Strategy and Talent Acquisition, and Kylie McSherry, Recruitment Marketing Content Planner, shared how they simplified a dozen disconnected systems, doubled their application conversion rate, and reduced time-to-fill by six days — all by implementing a strategic, phased approach to technology integration.

Understanding Sleep Number's Hiring Landscape

Sleep Number is widely recognized for its smart beds and commitment to improving sleep health. But beyond being a retailer, Sleep Number is a vertically integrated company that designs, manufactures, sells, and services its products. This structure makes hiring more complex, as they must recruit for a broad range of roles across different functions.

Their talent acquisition efforts span multiple areas, including in-store retail associates, manufacturing and logistics teams, corporate professionals, and data scientists in their Bay Area satellite office. This level of diversity in hiring requires a well-structured recruitment system that can handle high-volume roles while also providing a high-touch experience for specialized positions.

Key Challenges

1. Low Candidate Conversion 

Despite Sleep Number's strong employer brand, "We had a hard time attracting candidates. Out of 32 career site visitors, only one would click apply. And then from there, only 58% of them were actually completing the application. That was the gap,” Joneja explained. Candidates would find a job, click apply, and then be sent to a separate login page — an extra step that deterred many and caused drop-off. This meant spending more time and money to fill the funnel. 

2. Outdated Tech 

Beyond the candidate experience, Sleep Number was struggling with outdated recruitment technology, limiting both hiring efficiency and their ability to effectively compete for talent in the market. “Our competition was moving wicked fast. I’d say we were roughly seven years behind from a technology perspective, and they were advancing with a lot more tools and resources than we had at that time,” Joneja recalled.

3. Overcomplicated Tech Stack 

Another critical challenge was the complexity of Sleep Number's HR tech stack. Over time, the company added multiple third-party integrations, bolt-on solutions, and disconnected platforms. While these tools were meant to improve hiring, they actually made the process more fragmented. “We have over a dozen different vendors and add-ons. Our whole purpose was to simplify, make this more advanced, and provide a best-in-class experience for our candidates,” Joneja said.

What They Needed 

Sleep Number took a strategic approach to its talent tech ecosystem transformation, beginning with a foundational integration between Phenom and their Workday ATS.

Seamless Workday Integration

Since Workday was central to Sleep Number's hiring operations, securing a technology partner that integrated well with it was a non-negotiable. "Finding a vendor that could flow seamlessly with Workday was huge for us," McSherry explained. In fact, vendors with questionable integrations were immediately eliminated, while Phenom’s platinum Workday partnership and dedicated HRIT Experience helped seal the selection. 

Like numerous Phenom customers, Sleep Number adopted a phased implementation approach due to their HR ops team's two-week agile sprint structure and competing priorities. The strategy helped them chunk out work appropriately, and the first stage of implementation moved with remarkable speed.

 "Being able to implement on time in 90 days was phenomenal," Joneja shared. "The implementation team not only guided us and knew all the details, but they also educated our HR operations team on the steps throughout the whole project."

This strong foundation set the stage for the more advanced features that would transform the candidate experience and recruiter efficiency.

An AI-Powered Career Site Experience

With Workday integration in place, Sleep Number rolled out their Phenom Career Site with AI-driven job matching, enabling candidates to receive personalized recommendations based on their skills and interests.

"We needed a career site built off of AI and that led candidates to the best matches off of skills," Joneja explained. "We no longer could keep on losing candidates because they weren't matched with jobs. They were searching on their own versus having that work for them."

This approach, coupled with the ability to have Phenom host their apply process, dramatically simplified the candidate journey. "Hosted Apply was fantastic. We got all the way up to over three-fourths of people completing the application from that seamless Hosted Apply," Joneja reinforced.

The implementation of Phenom Chatbot further enhanced the application process. "Our chatbot was taking 88% of people who viewed a job straight to applying. So our chatbot already was bringing about 12 to 15% more applicants in completed applications, which is fantastic."

Enhanced Recruiter Capabilities with a Robust CRM

Before implementing Phenom, Sleep Number's recruiters spent approximately 80% of their time on sourcing activities. With Phenom CRM, they transformed their approach to candidate engagement and relationship management.

"All the research we did showed that having a robust CRM is the most critical for a TA function to mature," Joneja emphasized. And that proved true.

The CRM provided powerful capabilities for more efficient candidate matching and engagement. "In the CRM, there is a tool called ‘Ideal Candidate’ and then ‘Matching Criteria’. For the ideal candidate, you can select all the skills that they would have," McSherry explained. 

This functionality proved immediately valuable to the recruiting team. "The CRM will look at skills matching and tell you people who are the best fits. Because we've been with Phenom now for a little over a year, it will also show somebody who's already been hired. So I'm even able to see employees who could be a good fit for a job internally," Joneja noted.

The team then leveraged the CRM's campaign automation functionality to drive impressive results for their most critical area — sales. "We had almost 800 sales job visits, and over 200 completed applications were through [Phenom] campaigns alone."

Sleep Number also discovered creative ways to leverage Phenom's communication tools to solve specific challenges in their hiring process."We had an issue with delivery drivers,” Joneja admitted. “Once they got the offer, 43% were dropping. Our team utilized [Phenom] SMS and automated messaging to keep engagement, and we improved to 17% post-offer drop."

Related: The Ultimate Guide to a Seamless Talent CRM Migration

Success & Next Steps

The impact of Sleep Number's talent tech ecosystem transformation was swift and substantial:

• Career site conversion improved from 1 in 32 visitors applying to 1 in 16 — a 100% improvement

• Application completion rates jumped from 58% to over 75% with Hosted Apply

• Chatbot-assisted applications increased completed applications by 12-15%

• Time to fill decreased by 6 days across the enterprise

• Post-offer drop-off for delivery drivers plummeted from 43% to 17% with automated SMS engagement

"Overall, we had a six-day decrease in time to fill for the enterprise, and that was through a variety of things," Joneja explained. "We know that we're finding the right candidates and we're also spending less time sourcing."

As Sleep Number continues to evolve its talent acquisition approach, bidirectional integration between Phenom and Workday is the next major milestone. This two-directional hiring status integration ensures changes to a candidate’s status in Workday are reflected in the Phenom CRM, and changes to a candidate’s status in the CRM are reflected in Workday.

"I implemented Phenom before at Life Time. We launched with bi-directional integration, and we were able to see the adoption rate and how people loved it. It's just a better experience," Joneja reflected.

For other TA professionals looking to address similar challenges in their own candidate journeys and hiring processes, McSherry was quick to offer this advice: “Bring your HR ops team along the journey from the beginning. They are the ones that really build and integrate the system, and they play such a huge role in this implementation."

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