Phenom Acquires Be Applied To Power Skills-First Hiring at Enterprise Scale

The shift to skills-based hiring isn't new, but the ability to validate skills at scale? That's been the missing piece.

For years, organizations have talked about moving beyond resumes and credentials to focus on what candidates can actually do. The problem is that most assessment tools weren't built for this moment. They're static, generic, and disconnected from the workflows recruiters actually use. The result: hiring teams fall back on gut feel, critical roles stay open too long, and the wrong candidates make it through.

We acquired Be Applied because skills validation can't be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in the hiring flow — inline, adaptive, and built for the way enterprises actually hire.

Why Skills-Based Hiring Matters Now

The urgency around skills isn't abstract. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that 63% of employers see skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation through 2030. At the same time, AI is rewriting job requirements faster than credentials can keep up. KPMG found that 76% of employers would pay salary premiums up to 15% for candidates with strong AI skills, while 64% have already adjusted their approach to entry-level hiring because of AI capabilities.

Credentials and years of experience don't tell you if someone can do the job. Skills do. But validating those skills across high-volume hiring, specialized roles, and different industries requires technology that can adapt, not a one-size-fits-all test.

What Applied Brings to Phenom

Applied's dynamic cognitive assessment technology has been tested across millions of candidates and roles. It adapts to specific job requirements, ensuring that each role is evaluated on the capabilities that actually matter. The result is accurate, scalable skills validation without turning the candidate experience into a time-consuming obstacle course.

As organizations move faster than ever toward skills-first hiring, they need the infrastructure to support it. Applied brings the assessment intelligence and data quality that turn intent into execution, enabling faster, fairer, and more precise talent decisions.

Applied's technology integrates directly into Phenom's hiring workflows, so assessments happen naturally, right where candidates are already moving through the process. There's no redirect to a separate platform or new login to remember. Instead, skills validation becomes part of the experience, not an extra hoop to jump through.

David Perring, Chief Insights Officer at Fosway Group, sees this as addressing an urgent market void: "The shift to skills-based hiring has created a critical gap in how organisations validate talent at enterprise scale. Phenom's acquisition of Applied is the next logical step in their agentic product roadmap. It directly addresses that gap, and in so doing broadens their customers' talent pool, surfaces real potential, helps remove bias and accelerates the hiring process."

How It Fits Into Hiring Automation

Skills assessment has always been part of hiring, but it's historically lived in a separate system, requiring manual handoffs, eating up recruiter time, and creating drop-off points where candidates disappear. Phenom Hiring Automation eliminates those bottlenecks by orchestrating personalized screening, scheduling, assessments, and engagement into unified workflows.

With Applied's adaptive cognitive assessments now natively embedded into our Applied AI platform, organizations gain another qualification layer that doesn't slow the process down. Candidates encounter assessments as part of their application journey. Results flow automatically to recruiters and hiring managers. Top performers fast-track to scheduling. Borderline candidates receive additional screening. And future-fit candidates land in talent communities for later engagement.

The entire flow from application to skills validation to interview happens without waiting for someone to manually move candidates between systems. That's the difference between talking about skills-based hiring and actually operating that way at scale.

What This Means for Hiring Teams

Applied's industrial-organizational science capabilities ensure assessments are scientifically validated, fair, and defensible. Organizations can design, control, and customize assessments to match specific industries, roles, and enterprise needs. Hiring teams review results in real time, giving every interviewer a centralized view of validated skills for each candidate.

Because the same assessments can validate employee skills, organizations can reuse them for skills mapping and gap analysis, gaining a real-time view of their skills supply across the talent lifecycle. As part of the Phenom ecosystem, the technology meets candidates where they are, enabling assessment completion across email, text, or chatbot without added complexity.

For recruiters, this means fewer hours spent on administrative screening and more time engaging the right talent. For hiring managers, it means better visibility into who can actually do the work. For candidates, it means a process that respects their time and gives them a fair shot to demonstrate what they can do.

Making Skills-First Hiring Operational

Skills-based hiring has been an aspiration for a long time. Now, with Applied's assessment technology natively embedded into our AI infrastructure, organizations can finally move from intent to execution. The combination turns what's been a theoretical shift into a practical reality: skills validation that happens in the flow of work, at enterprise scale, without compromise.

We're excited to welcome Applied's team and customers to Phenom as we make this vision real together.

To learn more or see Phenom Applied AI and agents in action, request a demo today.